It's coming. So You Think You Can Dance Canada is heading into season three with this dieselpunk styled promo that was choreographed by Nico and Wynn Holmes. According to the CTV website, the season premieres on Sunday, August 15th airing auditions that have scoured for talent in Toronto, Calgary, Halifax, Vancouver and Montreal. Nearly every night through to August 24th, it will be an intensive run of shows leading up to the top 20 results.
Host Leah Miller is back and is joined by returning judges and dance experts Jean Marc Genereux, Tré Armstrong, Luther Brown and Blake McGrath. Other guest judges on the audition tour include Stacey Tookey, Mary Murphy, Mia Michaels, Dan Karaty, Rex Harrington and Sean Cheesman.
Earlier this month, July 15-18, the national breakdancing forum Cypher For Change Information took place in Whitehorse, Yukon. According to the website, this gathering and networking of over 40 b-boys an b-girls from around Canada seeks "to inspire youth to make differences in their own community."
Along with the visiting artists were guest speakers Stephen "Buddha" Leafloor (Canadian Floor Masters and Blueprint for Life), Luca "Lazylegz" Patuelli (IllmaticStyles and Illabilities), Michael "Piecez" Prosserman (M.E.C. and Unity). Also among the guest judges and workshop leaders were Wicket (Renegades Crew and Footwork Fanatix), Kid David (Renegades crew, The Squadron and Break Disciples) and Easy Roc (Rocksteady Crew).
While this trailer video offers a glimpse at the 2009 gathering, new YouTube videos are popping up with new footage of the events. Click read more for two recent clips.
The Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur presents the Royal Winnipeg Ballet this week in a triple bill featuring Peter Quanz's In Tandem, Norbert Vesak's Belong and excerpts from Shawn Hounsel's Wonderland.
It is important to note the significance of Vesak's pas de deux, which appeared in the International Ballet Competition in Bulgaria in 1980. From this performance, David Peregrine was awarded bronze and Evelyn Hart received gold. This marked Hart's elevation to the rank of international prima ballerina and brought renown to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet on the world stage. This is an excerpt from award winning documentary 40 Years of One Night Stands: The Story of Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet produced by Merit Motion Pictures and Inside Out Productions.
Be sure to check out the online review of Vesak's piece as performed by Paul Destrooper and Andrea Bayne of the Victoria Ballet last fall.
Based in Toronto, La Belle Danse Baroque Dance Company mounts opera-ballets, prologues and masques based on European ballroom and theatrical styles of the 17th and 18th centuries. Through teaching and performance, the company fosters an appreciation for this historic art form. Their collaborations with musicians, singers and actors also echo the baroque spirit of amalgamating the arts.
This particular group work to George Frideric Handel's O the Pleasure of the Plains! was choreographed by the company's director Daniel Gariépy. According to the video's caption, the piece is based on the 18th century style and "features popular steps and sequences from the era, and also utilizes baroque rhetorical gesture in the middle sequence to accompany and illustrate the sung solos."
The dancers in this video include Jennifer Fell, Melissa Fink, Adrienne Legget and Daniel Gariépy, along with Etienne Lavigne and Patrick Lavoie as special guests from The National Ballet of Canada. Be sure to check out more video clips on their website.
From Old School to New School, the Melbourne Shuffle continues to thunder on dance floor raves around the world. Thanks to the likes of YouTube, this underground Australian club dance of the late 1980s has spread and evolved, yet always rings home with its signature T-Step.
According to Wikipedia, the street style emerged in Melbourne where it was danced to hip hop, disco and rock music of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Shuffle fused elements of stomping and b-boying in its early years, playing off of the Running Man and incorporating more arm gestures. The b-boy influence also accented the focus on keeping time with the bass beat, while the music gradually shifted to trance, breakbeat hardcore, drum and bass, and house. With time, dancers develop their own flares and idiosyncrasies, which can generally be associated with either Softstyle (which shifts and moves around the floor) or Hardstyle (which normally accompanies fast, heavy bass and keeps to a smaller area).
"The Running Man involves a stomp forward followed by a single or double hop backwards with the same foot, the other foot repeats the action leading to a running-on-the-spot motion. The T-Step is a fast sideways heel-toe motion on one foot twisting at the ankle. The dance is embellished by spins, arm pumps, slides, and kicks."
Thanks to Montréal dancers Franco and Anthony for their compilation.
Leading up to an exciting performance of new experimental ballets, Canada's own Peter Quanz is working away with a fresh batch of dancers in southern California at the National Choreographers Initiative. This intensive three-week process has given four choreographers the opportunity to develop new material on sixteen American professional dancers from ballet companies. His peers in the program include Ann Marie deAngelo, Helen Heineman and Viktor Kabaniaev. On July 31st, their work will be showcased at Irvine Barclay Theatre where the choreographers will talk and answer questions about their concepts and ideas.
Be sure to check out the March 2009 issue of The Dance Current print magazine for an article about Quanz's work with the National Ballet of Canada, as well as the online review of Quanz's piece In Tandem presented at the Canada Dance Festival this past June.
Montréal is taking its place as the world's premiere circus destination. Montréal Complètement Cirque is the city's first circus festival, featuring homegrown talent and creating space to stage the world's finest. July is on fire with shows, including iD by Cirque Éloize. Directed by Jeannot Painchaud, this multimedia show blends ten circus disciplines with urban dance styles such as b-boying/b-girling, break dancing and hip hop. Backed by an impressive creative team that has transformed the environment, the performers include Mason Ames, Valérie Benoit-Charbonneau, Stacey Carlson, Leilani Franco, Christian Garmatter, Elon Höglund, Olivier Lemieux, Emmanuelle LePhan, Josianne Levasseur, Hugo Ouellet-Côté, Thibaut Philippe, Fletcher Sanchez, Kone Thong Vongpraseuth and Florian Zumkehr.
In the words of Painchaud from the press kit: "In the middle of this surreal megalopolis exists a public place. A public place, as a spot where one can seek refuge and escape anonymity, to express one's individuality and affirm one's identity, in order to reclaim possession of public space, and to dance the city..."
This Thursday and Saturday, July 15th and 17th, Vancouver's Dancing on the Edge Festival presents Roger Sinha's A Matter of Life and Breath, performed as a duet by Tanya Crowder and Tom Casey. In this video we see the work performed as an ensemble by Crowder, Casey, Ghislaine Doté, Laurence Ramsay, Raul Huaman and Elise Legrand.
The signature style of Sinha Danse is a blend of classical Indian dance with contemporary dance, martial arts and theatre. In recent years, Sinha has been incorporating new media and sensory technologies into his work, which is exemplified here with the use of Wii remotes attached to various body parts. As the dancers move, their remotes trigger sound fragments via interactive software.
This particular work was inspired by Sinha's close call with a critical asthma attack and also the (true?) story of the famous arctic explorer Peter Freuchen. The latter tells of a tiny igloo which Freuchen built to wait out a terrible blizzard in northern Greenland. Sinha's website continues: "His breath was freezing to the walls, with each breath, the walls became thicker and the igloo became smaller until there was no more room for his body. He was breathing himself into a coffin of ice."
This weekend Capoeira Camará performs at Expressions of Brazil, another World Routes festival presented by Harbourfront Centre July 16th through 18th in Toronto.
Created over 400 years ago, Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines martial arts, music and dance. According to the Capoeira Camará website, "Capoeira looks like a choreographed dance between two people because it is played to music and the game is a seamless combination of circular movements. To those who train, Capoeira is a game of questions and answers, call and response. It is a dialogue between two players where movements such as kicks, esquivas, and floreios, represent the words of the language."
Contra Mestre Bola (Marinaldo DaSilva) founded the Capoeira Camará academy in 2005. Now, it has locations in Vancouver, Toronto, Peterborough, Montréal, Calgary, Bermuda, Russia and Brazil. This video features Capoeira Camará Montréal in a DVD preview.
Giving a voice to its neighbourhood residents, Jane-Finch.com offers this interview with choreographer Luther Brown who has deep roots with this Toronto community. Host Sue Chun probes into Brown's history with dance and the turning points in his career, including his journey into resident choreographer and judge on the hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance Canada. Founder and owner of Do Dat Entertainment, Brown has now worked on several major motion pictures and over 100 music videos with the likes of Jully Black, Shawn Desman, Diddy, Janet Jackson, Danity Kane, Alicia Keys, Brandy and Christina Aguilera. Also be sure to check out his demo reel on his website.
