Dances for the Meanwhile
in
March 12th - 15th, 2009
March 12th - 8pm
March 13th - 8pm
March 14th - 8pm
March 15th - 2:30pm
Location: Dancemakers Studio, Distillery Historic District, 55 Mill Street, Toronto
Tickets: $20 (regular), $14 (CADA, students, & seniors)
416-504-6429 ext. 21
Senior dance artist Tom Brouillette presents Dances for the Meanwhile, an evening of dance-theatre with guest choreographers Claudia Moore and Kathleen Rea. Through evocative stories and characters, this series of rural-themed dances draws upon textured memories, and journeys through campfire tales from the Muskokas.
The evening’s earthy, Canadian flavour is ripe with nostalgia and impressions of northern country life. Dance artists Tom Brouillette, Karen Kaeja, Jennifer lynn Dick, Diana Groenendijk and Lee Walder theatrically enliven the mundane and the whimsical, with live music composed by Rick Hyslop.
Dances for the Meanwhile is the first stage of choreographer Tom Brouillette’s long-term project, Split Rail, which explores the changing landscapes around a split-cedar rail fence, and plays around the sentiment of Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s song un Canadien errant ("a wandering Canadian"). The fence – good for sitting on – also suggests borders and crossing those borders, as well as the relationships and tensions between neighbours. In other words, it is a celebration of eternal Canadian pre-occupations, which the dancers evoke with both passion and humour.
Tom Brouillette started dancing at the age of thirty in intensive training with Mary Wigman disciple Til Thiele. He was a lead dancer with both the Desrosiers Dance Theatre and the Randy Glynn Dance Theatre, and has performed regularly with independent choreographers such as Claudia Moore, Kathleen Rea, Karen and Allen Kaeja, Peter Chin, Marie-Josée Chartier, and Holly Small. Tom began choreographing and showing his own works in 1982. He is a retired member of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, with whom he collaborated on two performance pieces: Boilermakers in Concert, and The Rite of Steam. He continues to work with a core group of dancers, and recently spent three months in Manhattan in intensive study with Douglas Dunn.
