my battery is pure love

Liz Peterson speaks about Express Yourself playing at Hub 14 as part of this years SummerWorks Festiva l. LR: What was the creative process like for Express Yourself — can you describe a bit how this work came to be? LP: Well, it began really as an exploration of the process itself. Sean O’Neill (my collaborator and director of the show) approached me with this idea to create a show that was about “gestures of communication”. We decided to develop a play without a script that was about performance. So we started with a couple of ideas, some shared influences, such as Pina Bausch, Marina Abramovic and we began to rehearse, without knowing what it was going to be. Although there were a couple of elements that Sean knew had to be in the show, specific songs or stories or images, we didn’t have a structure. We worked like that for about 6 months, and then we decided that we had something that we were ready to show, but first we invited a couple of people to rehearsals, Ame Henderson bei...

Susanna Hood Susanna Hood, creator of Shudder and artistic director of hum dansoundart , speaks about remounting a work, replacing herself and finding her voice. LR: Susanna, you are dealing with an injury — how have you adapted the rehearsal process for Shudder to accommodate this? SH: The main adjustment has been to replace myself with a performer who I really trust. Linnea Swan has performed the role once before, and I’m happy to have the chance to deepen my work with her in this piece. I am actually looking forward to re-approaching the piece from the outside, where, in fact, I spent a good percentage of the time over its three-year creation process. I have some new perspective on the work as a whole, and liberating myself of the role of performer may allow me make more impactful changes to the piece. I’ve also done something I’ve never done before, which is to give the performers two full days just to recover the material without me in the room. I did this to ensure that I woul...

Allison Cummings on Combat: 2011 SummerWorks Dance Interviews By Lucy Rupert Allison Cummings, co-director of a joint production by tiny bird theatre and Sore for Punching You, reveals a bit about Combat , premiering at SummerWorks Festival. LR: What is Combat all about? AC: Combat takes us into a mundane office in what might be Toronto where a young woman, returning from working in a conflict-zone overseas, attempts to re-enter society. Here she finds the tiny conflicts and bids for power amplified. Removed from the sensory experience of war she watches as her office becomes a battleground. The piece explores scale and distance and how our relationship to conflict embodies itself into our everyday lives, whether it is happening far away on a mass scale, or within the confines of our interpersonal dynamics. LR: How did you find or decide on your collaborators? AC: Claire Calnan (co-director of Combat ) and I began talking about collaborating together about two years ago, as we were ...

photo by Danielle Donn It’s Lucy again (Blue Ceiling dance director, dancer, choreographer, multi-disciplinary performer and person very curious about how artists make their work) with some interviews involving members of Summerworks Festival productions with a dance or physical focus. Hope you enjoy them! First up: an interview with Director Kevin Michael Shea of Common Descent’s production Hero and Leander . LR: What inspired you to work on the Hero and Leander story? KMS: It’s a really gorgeous story, but it hasn’t been interpreted too much throughout history, which means we can kind of make it whatever we want without having to worry about most people’s expectations of it. The actual myth, revolving around Hero and Leander, is really only about half of the play – the other half concerns a second relationship, inspired by the myth but with different characters, which means that even if people do know the myth, there will be a bunch of surprises in our version of it. The story also j...

photo of Krista Posyniak. Photo by Omer Yukseker Interview By Lucy Rupert Pocket Alchemy presents three dances inspired by organs, the Mayfly and dialectical theory in Scienceography. I talked to the three collaborators about theory and artistry coming together. (Interview participants Brittany Duggan, Susan Kendal and Krista Posyniak are all referred to by first name for easier reading. I shall remain good old LR.) LR: The three of you discovered you were all inspired by science in different ways. How did each of you come to find inspiration from science? Brittany: Dance often deals with the social sciences. What I have loved about making this show is, as a choreographer, I got to make a piece that gets into human behavior while inspired by the natural sciences. The balance has made my head less chaotic somehow. Susan: When we decided to do a show together some of the works were already in progress. We felt strongly that we needed to find a common element for the show to be cohesive. ...

Kate Nankervis of Bonne Compagnie: 2011 Toronto Fringe Dance Interviews By Lucy Rupert I’m Lucy Rupert, I’m the artistic director and dancer for Blue Ceiling dance, based in Toronto. I have a passion speaking with other dance artists about how and why they make their work. This interview is with Kate Nankervis, one of three women who have come together as Bonne Compagnie for this year’s Fringe Festival. Their work, Ab Intra, is an integration of three solos on the theme of privacy versus spectacle. LR: What drew you to participate in the Toronto Fringe Festival? KN: The fringe has a real spirit of performance, taking chances to do whatever you can think up and you get what is considered a LONG RUN in the dance world…. 7 shows! With tickets prices being cheap, people who might never see dance have no excuse not to at least take a chance on us. We are looking forward being in a theatre festival where fresh eyes from outside the dance scene can give comment on the show. LR: I am intrigued...

An Interview with Alaine Handa of A.H. Dance Company By Lucy Rupert Chameleon by A.H. Dance Company info: http://tckcckahdanceproject.blogspot.com/2011/06/toronto-were-headed-your-way.html LR: First could you tell me a bit about your path in the dance field? AH: I started dancing at 4 in Indonesia. I remember when I was 8 I played the part of a rice grain. I carried a grain of rice and we swayed from one side of the stage to the other whenever a magical bird passed us. When we moved to Singapore I became interested in tap and jazz and took up figure skating, training long hours until I broke my ankle and it was recommended that I take ballet again to strengthen my ankle. The following year I started choreographing for the dance shows at school and by the end of high school, I knew that I wanted to major in dance at college, to pursue choreography and start my own dance company. I graduated from UCLA with a degree in World Arts & Cultures with a Dance Studies Concentration. We appro...