Features
Is Everyone a Critic?
Changing Paradigms in Dance Criticism By Kathleen SmithThis past spring, tensions simmered in the Toronto dance community between artists and critics in the mainstream media. In this feature article from the July/August 2015 issue, Kathleen Smith has undertaken to investigate the issues that arose – exploring the history, the central issues, the problems and the questions that characterize the discourse today.
Posted September 9, 2015
Emerging with Resilience
Eking Out a Life in Dance By Kate MorrisEmerging dancers, like their peers in other arts sectors, require determination, ingenuity and discipline. Graduates today seem better equipped to deal with the realities of a career in dance, but they require a strong professional network and community in order to persist. Easing the transition has become a goal for a number of service organizations, while grassroots initiatives and collectives provide spaces of creation and exploration, as well as mentorship opportunities, that keep them dancing.
Posted August 21, 2015
SummerWorks Performance Festival Turns Twenty-Five and Formally Invites Dance Out
Interview with Amelia Ehrhardt – SummerWorks Dance Curator By Marie France ForcierSince the winter of 2014, Toronto-based dance artist Amelia Ehrhardt has been exponentially developing her curatorial profile through the umbrella of Flowchart, a self-founded, small-scale multidisciplinary performance series. Garnering recognition for the quality of her work, Ehrhardt is now SummerWorks’ first dance curator, right in time for the performance festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
Posted August 3, 2015
A Meeting of Minds
Merce Cunningham archivist David Vaughan and Pepper Fajans at Montréal’s Fringe Festival By Philip SzporerFringe festival-going can be a distinctly hit-or-miss experience. It was my great surprise to happen upon Co. Venture, a beauty of a show produced and developed by the fledgling Brooklyn Touring Outfit in its world premiere. The piece, performed by the duo, is about their cross-age friendship.
Posted July 7, 2015
Dance and Objecthood
By Ben PortisIn dance training, personality routinely gets tamped down. The dancer’s discipline begins with conditioned sublimation of his or her individual identity and experience, let alone spontaneity and expression. This leaves dance in a curiously anachronistic position with respect to a new generational trend in the arts – interdisciplinarity.
Posted June 10, 2015
Staging Sustainability with William Yong in vox:lumen
By Brittany DugganChoreographer William Yong premiered his new work vox:lumen at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre Theatre from March 4 to 7, 2015. The work is powered by kinetic and renewable energy and asks: what does a show that is powered by sustainability look like?
Posted April 6, 2015
Odysseo with Darren Charles
By Armando BiasiBefore starting hip hop classes at the age of fourteen, Darren Charles trained as a decathlete and high-board diver. He is now the choreographer and resident director for Odysseo the wildly popular equine extravaganza produced by Cavalia.
Posted April 2, 2015
Beyond the ephemerality of dance
The positive impact artists can have in the fight against climate change By Eric BeauchesneEric Beauchesne talks about the positive impact dance artists can have in the fight against climate change.
Posted January 13, 2015
Dancemakers: Between Promise and Peril
Part III: What Happened to Me By Michael TrentIn April, our former editor, Kathleen Smith, commissioned Michael Trent to write about the new creation/production model at Dancemakers. In this final piece of writing, Trent speaks about his early departure from the company and where he left this new model after the board of directors decided to not renew his contract as artistic director.
Posted September 26, 2014
Dancemakers: Between Promise and Peril
Part II: The Incubation/Production House Model By Michael TrentIn April, our former editor, Kathleen Smith, commissioned Michael Trent to write about the new creation/production model at Dancemakers. In Part II of this writing series, Trent speaks about that model and the context from which it was born.
Posted September 24, 2014
Dancemakers: Between Promise and Peril
Part I: Context By Michael TrentIn April, our former editor, Kathleen Smith, commissioned Michael Trent to write about the new creation/production model at Dancemakers. Here, Trent speaks about that model, but also about the context from which it was born and the personal effects it has had. This is a three-part series.
Posted September 22, 2014
Zouk Alors! A Look at the Popular Brazilian Social Dance
By Naushad Ali HuseinIn early August, Toronto played host to the Zouk Exchange, welcoming dance participants and aspirants from all over the world. The Exchange featured social dance events, historical seminars on the form and a competition, but internal pressures within the community have led the organizers to announce the end of the formal event. We stop to ask: what is zouk and where did it come from?
Posted August 29, 2014
In Conversation: Brazilian Dance in a Canadian Context
Adrianna Yanuziello and Newton Moraes By Kate MorrisIn the lead-up to the FIFA World Cup of soccer in Brazil, our editor, Kate Morris, sat down with two Toronto-based dancer-choreographers to discuss Brazilian dance – what they discovered was just how polyvalent and multifaceted Brazil and its dance can be.
Posted July 15, 2014
Canada Dance Festival Roundup
By Lys StevensIn June, as festival season takes flight across Canada, the Canada Dance Festival (CDF) kicks off in Ottawa. I took on the CDF by bike, for the ease of speed when moving from one venue to another.
Posted July 1, 2014
