Reviews
Call of the Wild
By Philip Szporer PourDaina Ashbee, a Montréal-based dance artist with Cree Métis and Dutch heritage, shifts her compass northward, beyond the treeline, to awaken an essential part of her emotional fabric, embodiment and essence with Pour.
Posted October 11, 2016
The Leap: Bold Moments in Time
35th Annual Alberta Dance Festival By Marie France Forcier The 35th Annual Alberta Dance Festival | The Leap: Bold Moments in TimeStrong Albertan ties was the common denominator for the ten choreographers selected by Dancers’ Studio West to present work as part of the Annual Alberta Dance Festival. Bold moments in time was the broad thematic glue binding their works into a couple of distinct programs.
Posted October 3, 2016
Dance for All the People
By Lucy Fandel Quartiers Danses FestivalThe fourteenth annual Festival Quartiers Danses strung together themes of accessibility, originality, history and joy in contemporary dance today.
Posted September 29, 2016
The Dance Deck Trois is Rich, Intimate and Authentic
By Rachel Silver Maddock The Dance Deck TroisGrassroots performance series pairs dancers’ personal explorations with live classical music in a garden setting.
Posted September 6, 2016
Performing Performances
By Kathleen Smith SummerWorks FestivalDance was front and centre at SummerWorks this year, building on some serious bonds forged during past editions of this annual contemporary performance festival in Toronto.
Posted August 27, 2016
Why Love What You Will Lose?
By Don Rieder Lighted Rooms Company of AngelsLighted Rooms is a hybrid performance that defies categorization. It is a series of poems, story monologues, dance, song and bawdy limericks, an hour-long string of pearls whose thread is the energy and commitment of an extraordinary group of performers.
Posted August 24, 2016
The Range at ROMP!
From experimental solos to Le Jazz Hot By Robin J. Miller ROMP! Festival of DanceJoshua Beamish opened the nineteenth annual ROMP! Festival of Dance, presented by Victoria’s Suddenly Dance Theatre, with a solo show called Lone Wolf.
Posted July 26, 2016
Edge 2 and 3
Dancing on the Edge 2016 By Rachel Silver Maddock Dancing on the Edge Festival 2016Kaleido by Tentacle Tribe for OURU Collective, Dialogue by Wen Wei Wang, the neck to fall by Ziyian Kwan and more in this series of capsule reviews.
Posted July 20, 2016
A Wild Way Home in Le Petit Prince
Choreography by Guillaume Côté By Mark Mann Le Petit PrinceLe Petit Prince is both a perfect and a problematic choice. Perfect because the story is already furnished with all the necessary components for a conventional ballet, and problematic because Le Petit Prince is actually a dark and confusing book.
Posted June 20, 2016
Memory, Music and Dance
EDAM presents Induction By Rachel Silver Maddock InductionInduction presented three new works by local choreographers Amber Funk Barton, Anne Cooper, Tom Shroud and Peter Bingham. As the audience gathered at the warm, intimate EDAM space near the intersection of Main and Broadway, I noticed the casual coziness of the place, worn in by years of dancing and performance.
Posted June 15, 2016
Haunted by the Real in Dana Michel's Mercurial George
Festival TransAmériques 2016 By Philip Szporer, Mark Mann Mercurial GeorgePhilip Szporer and Mark Mann review Dana Michel’s Mercurial George in conversation.
Posted June 8, 2016
Mille batailles
Festival TransAmériques 2016 By Mark Mann, Philip Szporer Milles batailles“Dance is physical combat most of the time,” wrote Louise Lecavalier in the notes for Mille batailles, a ferocious new work by the legendary Montréal choreographer and dancer at Festival TransAmériques.
Posted June 7, 2016
Never Stop!
Festival TransAmériques 2016 By Philip Szporer Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure) Trajal HarrellThe premise for Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure) centres around what might happen if the Judson Church postmodern artists (Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and the lot) had gone uptown to Harlem to perform alongside the vogue ballroom performers. (His previous works saw the voguers going downtown.)
Posted June 6, 2016
The Black Piece by Ann Van den Broek
Festival TransAmériques 2016 By Mark MannWhen the lights go down at the beginning of The Black Piece by Ann Van den Broek, they stay down. True to the title, the Dutch choreographer plunges both the audience and the performers into obscurity and leaves us there. The darkness isn’t perfect – exit signs and stair lighting reduce pitch-blackness to deep shadows – but it is enveloping, and surprisingly electric.
Posted May 31, 2016
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