Emerging 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.
Since the mid-1980s, swing dance has witnessed an important revival, becoming a popular social dance for amateurs from coast to coast. In this photo essay we pay tribute to the history as well as the many and varied perspectives on swing from contemporary companies and groups across the nation.
Feisty, avid and daring, Grant Strate’s professional dance career began in 1951 at the National Ballet of Canada and he has been a positive juggernaut in the field ever since. One of the country’s foremost dance educators, Strate also developed some of the most important and lasting institutions for choreography in Canada. Strate’s former student and colleague Carol Anderson writes about the man and his legacy.
Working together on a new ballet commissioned by Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet as part of the company’s seventy-fifth anniversary season, Godden and Hatzis talk about Going Home Star – Truth and Reconciliation. Based on the novels of Joseph Boyden, who writes on historical and contemporary issues faced by Aboriginal Peoples, the work poses special challenges for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Kallee Lins reports from the biennial Canadian Society for Dance Studies conference in Vancouver. Writing about a range of presentations, Lins describes how “Embodied Artful Practice” considered the intersection of body and cognition, as well as movement-based approaches to language, gesture, constraint, improvisation and phenomenology.
Halifax-born Bridget Lappin returns to the London Contemporary Dance School to pursue a master’s degree.
Calgary-born and internationally recognized Malena chose flamenco as her artistic medium at the age of eighteen. She manages the Calgary International Flamenco Festival, which runs in September, where her company Fiona Malena Flamenco Ensemble premieres .
Live Art Dance Productions’ executive producer Paul Caskey has been bringing dynamic contemporary dance to Halifax audiences since joining the not-for-profit organization in 2005. A former dancer and choreographer, Caskey came to Nova Scotia after eleven years as co-artistic director of Montréal’s Studio 303. Caskey’s wife, Elise Vanderborght, is a contemporary dancer, and their daughters – Clara, nine, and Camille, three – have inherited their parents’ love of creative movement.
Kelly Slate and Rebecca Ho founded the not-for-profit company and training program for non-professional adult dancers in Toronto out of a desire to keep dance part of their lives outside of their professional careers.
Born and raised on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Johnson is a Dora Award-winning freelance dance artist who listed balls and potions as some of her dancebag essentials.
Studies show that dance training in older age can slow the effects of aging and help with degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Learning choreography stimulates the brain to integrate information from music and movement and improves spatial awareness, motor control and memory. Dance has even been shown to stimulate new nerve and brain-cell growth. These findings have positive implications for aging adults, but what does it mean for those of us who dance throughout our lives? As dancers, we tend to be preoccupied with our bodies, but what if dance provides hidden benefits for our minds, relating movement to thought processes that ensure cognitive longevity?
A look at the Spring 2014 issue of the Canadian Theatre Review on burlesque.
American choreographer, director and dancer Bill T. Jones releases a book in three parts about the making of his new stage work, Story/Time.
Toronto’s Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke on thinking as dancing.
Tracey Norman interviews artist-mothers about how the pandemic has magnified the lack of support for artist-caregivers.
Dancers from across the country have been hard at work learning this year’s Sharing Dance Day routine, and they’re just about ready to share the choreography with the masses.
Saskatoon
SK
March 19, 2020-19 mars 2021
The Free Flow Dance Theatre Company collaborated with Saskatoon-based musician and composer Cassandra Stinn and Photographer Ken Greenhorn to produce their feature work of
Advertisement