Category: Dance

Canada Dance Festival July 2 to 16th. Ottawa

Canada Dance Festival July 2 to 16th. Ottawa

Le jardin des délices
Cie de Marie Chouinard
Photo: Sylvie-Anne Paré

Welcome to the 2017 Canada Dance Festival
New Dance from Canada’s best

The Canada Dance Festival in partnership with the National Arts Centre’s Canada Scene celebrates 2017 with a diverse program of new Canadian Dance. Following the successful CDF 2016 and building toward our next full festival in 2018, this year’s edition will showcase powerful movement and beautiful movers – all telling uniquely Canadian stories through dance.

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Minus One. Ohad Naharin’s high powered entertainment unites dance theatre with multiple voices and musical styles!

Minus One. Ohad Naharin’s high powered entertainment unites dance theatre with multiple voices and musical styles!


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With its 35 dancers out in full force on the stage of Southam Hall, les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal under the spell of choreographer Ohad Naharin has created a synthesis of some of his past work bringing together the musics and dancers of many origins. Almost the way Peter Brook integrated the Hindu epic with actors from all the continents, Naharin’s company Batsheva Dance, actually founded by Martha Graham, has become a meeting place for dancers from around the world, and now, Naharin’s recent creation sends us into a spiral of hybrid creativity that sets one’s head spinning.

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Encount3rs/ Rencontr3s : World Premiere of three commissioned works at the National ArtsCentre.

Encount3rs/ Rencontr3s : World Premiere of three commissioned works at the National ArtsCentre.

Photo. Barb Gray
Alberta Ballet Caelestis

In view of an exceptional arts  event to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Canada,  three choreographers and three composers were chosen from across Canada,  to create  specially commissioned works by the NAC. This was an exceptional opportunity  for audiences across the country but also for the artists to meet other companies and other dancers from other parts of Canada. They were invited to  develop their own work freely and to have the rare chance to work with a complete orchestra .Each event lasted 30 minutes in Southam Hall and the whole evening which opened last night and lasted just over two hours, left much to ponder about the future of dance in Canada.

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Canada Dance Festival /Festival Danse Canada

Canada Dance Festival /Festival Danse Canada

Welcome to the 2017 Canada Dance Festival

New Dance from Canada’s best

The Canada Dance Festival in partnership with the National Arts Centre’s Canada Scene celebrates 2017 with a diverse program of new Canadian Dance. Following the successful CDF 2016 and building toward our next full festival in 2018, this year’s edition will showcase powerful movement and beautiful movers – all telling uniquely Canadian stories through dance.

From July 2nd to 16th, the CDF, with Canada Scene, will present a series of contemporary dance works in unique spaces and non-traditional venues. Our 2017 activities will once again be taking dance off of the stage and into the outpouring of arts activities throughout our nation’s capital during this summer’s Canada 150 celebrations.

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The Associates/Les Associés : Fine evening of dance performance!

The Associates/Les Associés : Fine evening of dance performance!

Echo by Christopher House
(The Associates)

It is easy to understand how dance is at the forefront of all performance because it is constantly pushing the boundaries of the human body, investigating the relationship between the human body and the possibilities offered by all technologies involved in spacial creation, transforming the relationship between the text and the body. We are so lucky that the Director of Dance at the NAC has the courage to bring us programmes that may not always be easily understood but that help and have always contributed to forming a demanding dance public in Ottawa.

Marie Chouinard has always been synonymous with extreme originality on the Quebec dance scene and her work seems to be a constant investigation into the anthropological sources of the human being. Emerging from the green greasy Uhrschleim of creation, ritualized movements that take us back to pre-western civilization,(not unlike Romeo Castellucci!) her dancers now propel us into new relations between the human animal and our current technological revolution.

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NAC DANCE UNVEILS A NEW SEASON OF DYNAMIC PERFORMANCES THAT CELEBRATE DANCE AND LIFE IN MOTION

NAC DANCE UNVEILS A NEW SEASON OF DYNAMIC PERFORMANCES THAT CELEBRATE DANCE AND LIFE IN MOTION

March 6, 2017 – OTTAWA (Canada) – NAC Dance is proud to unveil one of its most spectacular and expansive seasons to date. Featuring 48 performances by 20 companies, it includes 3 Canadian exclusives, 2 co-productions, 11 artists and companies making their NAC debuts, and many great Canadian artists from home and abroad.  

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Onegin: Magnificent ensemble work by the National Ballet of Canada brings to life this highly dramatic piece based on Pushkin’s verse novel

Onegin: Magnificent ensemble work by the National Ballet of Canada brings to life this highly dramatic piece based on Pushkin’s verse novel

ONEG2 2014 21 (300) photo cred Aleksandar Antonijevic-1

Photo.  Aleksandar  Antonijevic,  with Xiao Nan Yu and McGee Maddox.

Spectacular narrative ballets are the forte of the National Ballet of Canada and Tchaikovsky’s work based on stories and fairy tales have become the mainstay of their production, not to discount that exquisite Romeo and Juliet set to the music of Prokofiev which brought Karen Kain to my attention many years ago. This was just after seeing her dance Nana (based on the novel by Emile Zola) with the Company of Roland Petit in Paris, Now, thanks to the choreography of John Cranko the Company has added to its repertoire, another exquisite production of storytelling on point, this one inspired by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Evgeni Onegin written in 1823.

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Batsheva Dance Company’s “Last Work”: Ohad Naharin researches the performing body.

Batsheva Dance Company’s “Last Work”: Ohad Naharin researches the performing body.

bat89C_0727 Batsheva photographer Gadi Dagon

Photo: Gadi  Dagon

At first, we are intrigued by the evolution of these young bodies in space:  disarticulated, disjointed, straining muscles in unusual directions, in opposition to what happens to bodies executing existing dance steps. Dance has repossessed the human body in a way that makes  unhuman demands on the living human creature and opens a new world.

Choreographed at first as  individuals, each dancer  crawls, lopes, twists, leaps, floats in from the wings,  opposing  the  rhythms and movements of the preceding dancer, just to give us the feeling of the enormous possibilities of the human body in this investigation of what can take place in a performance space.  Then groups form and reform,  as all around them the fluttering and twisting of slim, elongated and  finely muscular creatures jerking in and out, up and down, below and above,  create a parallel dialogue with the  electronic sound effects and highly dramatic music.   There is so much excitement, so much activity that  our gaze  keeps  shifting around the stage, picking up individual movements, noticing  other bodies  regrouping, almost as though we were  watching the trembling of some  nervous cellular activity under an intense microscope.

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Cinderella: A child’s delight with a musical montage that brings joy to all hearts.

Cinderella: A child’s delight with a musical montage that brings joy to all hearts.

Cinderella

This lighthearted version of Cinderella is a  delightful evening  of classical ballet  for young people. Les Petits Ballets has included  two very proficient professional dancers.  Prince Charming (Evgeni Dokoukine,) whose leaps and acting talent brought much excitement to his performance as the Prince. The ball room in the palace that fateful night when little Cinderella appears in her dazzling blue magic robe (Haruka Kyoguch) with the stars twinkling on the top of her head, gave the prince the chance to show his acting talents as he tries to avoid the  terrible two sisters who  were so cruel to Cinderella. But the Prince and Mlle Kyoguch also a professional dancer kept the tension high and the pas de deux breathtaking as they whirled around the floor together dancing the night away in the prince’s palace.  Also excellent was the step mother (Jasmine van Schouwen ) who  brought strong acting  as well as very good dancing to her character role as the pushy mother.

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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago: A judicious choice of choreographers that creates a revealing evening.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago: A judicious choice of choreographers that creates a revealing evening.

hubbard-street-dance-falling-angels2-c-todd-rosenberg__large

Photo. Tod   Rosenburg . Falling Angels by Jiri Kylian, music by Steve Reich.

There is no doubt that Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is focusing on an extremely contemporary realm of performing bodies that is having important consequences on the way we see “dance” and on the way we speak of an activity called “dance”” but which definitely needs a new designation . Let’s just say, last night we saw and heard “life in movement” as the Company prefers to name what it does.

In keeping with this orientation towards corporeal research, the Hubbard Street Dance has brought together some of the most important names in contemporary dance whose works were already created earlier in Europe. However, presented together in this special evening, the connections and the links between all these choreographers become all the more obvious and extremely revealing: the way their perception of the moving body and its relationship to sound and choreographed movement, appears to be even more closely tied to recent technology, to the way bodies are exposed and defined through contemporary images, videos, tablets, iPhone, all the means currently at our disposal to project and redefine the human creature, without necessarily showing the audience these sources directly. Whizzing throughout the internet, human consciousness becomes the expression of disarticulated body parts that almost appear to disengage themselves from the human brain and become involuntary reactions , provoked by the physicality of sound around them.

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