The next logical step would of course be: aerial! In fact, you can still catch Femmes du Feu performing their "Best of the Fringe" aerial show Head First tonight and tomorrow in Toronto. Integrating suspended bungee cords with contemporary dance, choreographers Sabrina Pringle and Holly Treddenick take their dancing to new heights in Impossibility.
For more information on the show, check out their Event Listing.
Here's your final chance to get a sneak peek of what's going down at the Toronto Fringe Festival. This rehearsal video from Alias Dance Project shows some work-in-progress snippets of Lauren Cook's work The Hidden Truth. This piece appears on a mixed programme with other works by choreographers Meghan Cafferky and Geordan Coupland, with guest artists Valerie Calam and Gadfly’s Apolonia Velasquez and Ofilio Portillo.
Be sure to check out their Event Listing for more info.
SHOW TALK by MERGE
How to Make a Mix Tape
by Emma Letki
Fringe is a chance to explore, discover and present new works. Five short pieces come together in How to Make a Mix Tape. Three of the works; The Hidden Truth, Coming Through in Waves, and I Hate Yellow are an interesting fusion of hip hop and contemporary dance. The spatial awareness, structure and repetition in I hate Yellow made this last piece the most enjoyable. Gotta Go Church, performed by Valerie Calam, was a complete break in style from the rest of the show. Combining rock music and church hymns, with dancing to match, it proved to be visually stimulating. How to Make a Mix Tape is true to the Fringe atmosphere of experimentation and discovery.
So we caught a bit more of the scoop on The Accident by Jonno Katz of Epicworlds, which is running through to Sunday at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Jonno blends his talents in dance, theatre and comedy to create a Fringe show with both narrative plot and the abstract expression of dance. Here he discusses his work, his interest in dance, and his disappointment with coffee in Toronto.
For more information about The Accident, check out the Event Listing.
SHOW TALK by MERGE
Toys
by Amelia Ehrhardt
Toys, presented at the Factory Theatre, is under the Fringe category of Dance but perhaps is closer to physical theatre than to straight dance. Conceived and created by comedian Winston Spear, it is a movement based piece of theatre involving heavy prop and light use. The show involves a vast number of dollar-store style toys, all of which feature bright and colourful lights. The three performers, Andrew Chapman, Freddie Rivas and Winston Spear, move around the stage with the props, causing planes to collide, aliens to land and icebergs to float downstage. Use of light was extremely important and was the most effective element of the show. Tiny fingerlights transformed into insect like creatures, black light tubes became musical instruments and floating UFOs were quite mesmerizing in a space as large and cavernous as the Factory. The show is entertaining and borders on completely absurd, and while it could have benefitted from some sort of narrative, it was not necessarily needed and remained engaging without any discernable plot.
The Toronto Fringe Festival has graced us with another dance/theatre/comedy show! Added to the roster from the touring lottery is The Accident with Jonno Katz of Epicworlds. This show was recently run through the Montreal Fringe Festival, where he also performed this quirky improv: Stand-up comedy meets contact improvisation and contemporary dance!
"The Accident is laugh-out-loud funny and wonderfully well-put together. Katz’s tour-de-force performance makes The Accident without a doubt the best thing I’ve seen at this year’s fringe so far. Stunning." - Iceman, Indyish.com
For more information about The Accident, check out the Event Listing.
SHOW TALK by MERGE
Dancing In My Unbirthday Suit
by Emma Letki
Taking place in a party, Dancing in my Unbirthday Suit looks at five of the early stages of life; infancy, childhood, adolescence, early adulthood and three stages of pregnancy. Allison Elizabeth Burns, Joannie Pharand and Vanessa Kneale have humorously compiled a short study of each of these milestones. They have captured the essence of each stage clearly, giving them full access to pick apart the situation and haphazardly sew it back together, showing the audience a true and comical side of life. The dancing is perfectly timed, squeezed between pillow fights and pregnancy work-outs. The sound track, like the dance, is cute and fun, consistently matching the mood of the scene. What looks like just a bit of fun is actually a well-thought out and articulated study of life’s events. The hosts of the party have even been so considerate as to assemble loot bags for the guests.
Here is the continuation of our interview with Tanya Crowder about the Fringe show The ascension/The Chronicles of descent. Here is a little insight about the inspiration for Tanya's creation Charlie, performed in this rehearsal by Alana Elmer. Dance has such a wonderful way of fleshing out character through subtle and the exaggerated embodiment. There needn't be a linear storyline or plot. We can empathize, appreciate and relate to the character's impulses and attitudes, on a journey that explores the topography of an inner landscape. Meet Charlie!
For more info about the show, check out their Event Listing.
SHOW TALK by MERGE
The Millennial Generation Embrace Their Twenties
by Brittany Duggan
The term “twentysomething” describes a person of this age-specific decade. Today, people aged 20 to 29 are more tellingly part of Generation Y; a categorization revealing, not what these young adults are experiencing, but rather how they are choosing to express these experiences. Kate Nankervis – as part of this generation – explores, through her choreography, a broad range of emotions that young adults currently sort through on a daily basis.
What is refreshing in this particular danced quartet is the keen awareness each dancer has of one another. Even during solo moments, this piece clearly speaks about the individual within the collective. This necessity for constant communication might reflect the group’s coming of age during the Digital Revolution. These four certainly appear very peer oriented, smiling at one another throughout to initiate the next playful phrase. Near the end of the piece a movement idea is repeated; in the beginning, one dancer is nearly launched from the end of a carousel configuration; she later learns to harness that momentum and take the ride. This is an example of perspective within any given situation, and is but one idea these intelligent dancers tackle, with an unmistakable twenties flare, in their collective’s – AX-S Dance – latest work, twentysomethings.
We snapped up an interview with Tanya Crowder about the Fringe show The ascension/The Chronicles of descent, which continues to run this week through to Saturday. Thistle Dance Works and HOWDARESHE Productions have collaborated to present three contemporary dance works, which also includes a solo from Random Acts of Dance. Here she describes an overview of the show, with more details about her own creative process and rehearsal footage to follow. Stay tuned for Part 2.
For more info about the show, check out their Event Listing.
SHOW TALK by MERGE
The Ascension/The Chronicles of Descent
by Amelia Ehrhardt
An anomaly of the Fringe Dance Initiative, The Ascension/The Chronicles of Descent is presented not as one large work but instead by two separate entities. The first, Thistle Dance Works under the Artistic Direction of Emma-Kate Millar, presented a piece by Millar entitled Birds, a short choreography described as being about ‘two wayward birds that did not survive the trip south’, While the gestures of dancers Julie Grant and Hannah-Greyson-Gaito were very birdlike and focused, the idea that these birds had been lost in flight could have been more clear. The second piece, an excerpt from [shift], choreographed by Laura Bolender, Liisa Murray and Julie Grant of rad and performed again by Grant, did not quite stand alone as a solo but made sense as an excerpt. Grant possesses beautiful lines and uses them much to her advantage, indeed evoking beautiful imagery in a silent section at the beginning. The final piece, Charlie, choreographed and performed by Tanya Crowder of HowDareShe Productions, was a very complete solo. Crowder has a very finely honed stage presence that was at full strength in this solo, and while the depth of the choreography dipped slightly in the middle, her energy did not and it picked back up compositionally and ended on an extremely poignant and moving note.
In this interview with Holly Treddenick and Sabrina Pringle, we are pleased to share a bit more about Femmes du Feu and their show Head First. This wild aerial dance show opens tonight at the Fringe Festival, and continues on to next Saturday. Think you'd like to give it a try? The dancers would love for you to join them in the park prior to their Sunday show to try out the silks with them! For more info about the show, check out their website.
SHOW TALK by MERGE
Head First and Beyond
by Brittany Duggan
If the title Head First lends itself to more than just the countless number of times these extraordinary aerialists physically propel themselves, head first, it might be to explain what this collective is capable of achieving that other contemporary collectives can only strive for. That being, the ability to realize whole embodiment of personal expression, without having to modify because of the natural phenomenon we call gravity. In these two electric pieces, Femme du Feu’s six rocker aerialists seamlessly integrate themselves within the dangling, grid to stage, elasticized pieces of fabric. Interspersing air-bound stunts with phrases of grounded contemporary/jazz, they perform with a serious dose of rebellious flare and fearless commitment.
The opening duet, by choreographers and performers Sabrina Pringle and Holly Treddenick, as well as the final group number, are pieced together by a ranging compilation of popular music - Feist, Lily Allen, The Ting Tings; all of which support the fun, playful, while also tender and protective atmosphere created by these young women.
All in all, a very exciting way to spend fifty-five minutes of Toronto Fringe Festival time.
Elizabeth Dawn Snell of Artists' Play Dance Theatre gave us some further insights to her revisited work HeartSurge, which is currently running at the Toronto Fringe Festival for the next two weeks. From the Viennese Waltz to contemporary dance, this work takes inspiration from one man's personal journey through heart surgery. The dance performance then takes you through an emotional journey that many people (adults and children alike) can relate to in the trails and tribulations of their own lives. For details and performance schedules, check out their Event Listing.
SHOW TALK by MERGE
Elizabeth Dawn Snell is Probing for a Pulse
by Brittany Duggan
Title and program notes aside, Elizabeth Dawn Snell’s latest choreography for HeartSurge speaks for itself. With only brief reference to the romantic matters of the heart, both at the beginning and the end, when Snell and Jason Vanstone – a core member of Snell’s Artists’ Play Dance Theatre - waltz almost nonchalantly around the George Ignatieff Theatre’s hexagonal stage. The remainder of the work pertains to ideas of the literal human heart, with its un-oxygenated veins in the form of a blue piece of fabric, its steady pulse coming in and out of the recorded sound score as well as its almost electric power, translated as a current of energy that is passed between the three dancers costumed in white (Tanya Crowder, Sarah McQueston and Tyler Webb), a motif repeated multiple times throughout the piece.
Vanstone interprets the lived experience of a friend’s own heart surgery, highlighting the complexity of the cardiac organ as well as the phases of recovery in overcoming such a delicate surgery, bringing his journey full circle and back to Snell, and to their waltzing duet. This theatrical piece of choreography hints at the fragility of life mixed with its unavoidable continuance, possibly also considering the brief nanosecond of non-life that hovers between each heart’s beat.
Among the dance companies featured at the Toronto Fringe Festival this year, the aerial dancers of Femmes du Feu risk their necks (with grace) in Head First. These clips are from the works of choreographers Sabrina Pringle and Holly Treddenick, who also perform in this alternative indie rock program. "Head First reflects pop culture from this decade, inspired by fashion media and the aesthetics of Generation Why Not." Check out their Event Listing for more info and schedules.
DANCE TIP #14
Dance @ the Fringe welcomes audiences to reflect on dance in their tagline: Dance made me _________. After a quick Google search for this phrase, here are some of the top entries:
Dance made me cry
Dance made me mad
Dance made me think
Dance made me blush
Dance made me realize
Dance made me see hope
Dance made me laugh out loud
Dance made me quite emotional
Dance made me want to know more
Dance made me want to learn how to be a better person
Do these resonate with any of your experiences watching dance? What other reactions has dance given you?
