my battery is pure love

 Dancemakers/Dance Collection Danse Research project celebrating Dancemakers 50th anniversary Interviews with original cast members of Serge Bennathan's "Chronicles of a Simple Life" (1993) DANCEMAKERS: CHRONICLES OF A SIMPLE LIFE RESEARCH PROJECT JULIA SASSO June 25, 2024  Interviewed by Lucy Rupert at Julia’s apartment LR: I’ll give you my official little spiel about why I proposed this to the dancemakers 50th project. I saw Chronicles of a Simple Life when it came to the University of Waterloo and I was in 2nd year in the dance program there. It had a big impact on me in several ways: one was the subject matter. I’d never seen death and grief dealt with in a way that wasn’t operatic and over the top. My mother had passed away just a little before, and this piece sparked a way through – not finishing the grief, but moving through, not being stuck. Another aspect of it was that I grew up in Sarnia, Ontario and I watched all the Martha Graham videos the library had but th...

 Dancemakers/Dance Collection Danse Research project celebrating Dancemakers 50th anniversary Interviews with original cast members of Serge Bennathan's "Chronicles of a Simple Life" (1993) DANCEMAKERS: CHRONICLES OF A SIMPLE LIFE RESEARCH PROJECT CAROLYN WOODS June 18, 2024 Interviewed by Lucy Rupert via Zoom LR: What are you doing these days? CAROLYN: I’ve been teaching Pilates for a long time. The last time I really danced was in 2012. But once a dancer always a dancer. I don’t go looking for gigs but if something really special came along I wouldn’t say no. When I left Dancemakers a critic said that I was retiring – and it didn’t feel like that for me. I wasn’t retiring, I was moving on from Dancemakers and to something else. I’m turning 59 this year and some life stuff has happened, and I feel like…. well, I love Pilates, but I do this other technique called ELDOA and I teach kundalini yoga as well – there’s something in those two forms that’s very interesting for me...

Dancemakers/Dance Collection Danse Research project celebrating Dancemakers 50th anniversary Interviews with original cast members of Serge Bennathan's "Chronicles of a Simple Life" (1993) DANCEMAKERS: CHRONICLES OF A SIMPLE LIFE RESEARCH PROJECT GARY TAI June 4, 2024  Interviewed by Lucy Rupert via Zoom LR: I’m so glad the community is doing something to celebrate 50 years of Dancemakers, given the current state of flux. I have a few questions about Chronicles, but I’m hoping it can be a free conversation about the piece and your work with Serge in a larger context.  I saw Chronicles of a Simple Life at the University of Waterloo, while I was a student in the dance program there.). Seeing Dancemakers, and this piece in particular, created a little spark in my heart that ignited the feeling that I was seeing my people. The world created on stage and the people and the shoes, and the style of the movement. It felt like maybe I had found someplace in the world where I might...

 Dancemakers/Dance Collection Danse Research project celebrating Dancemakers 50th anniversary Interviews with original cast members of Serge Bennathan's "Chronicles of a Simple Life" (1993) DANCEMAKERS: CHRONICLES OF A SIMPLE LIFE RESEARCH PROJECT JULIA APLIN May 29, 2024  Interviewed by Lucy Rupert in High Park LR: Seeing Chronicles in second year at the University of Waterloo was transformative for me. I don’t think I realized it in the moment, but over time three things really struck me about the piece: death and grief dealt with in this extremely human way. It was a couple of years after my mum passed away. The piece shifted my own grief and my thoughts on what dance can do. The balance of physicality and humanity blew me away. I hadn’t seen anything like that before. The third thing was that I felt like I was seeing my people on stage, people I could be like, that I could fit in with. I thought “I could do that” – the shoes and the attack. It wasn’t pristine. I knew ...

  Dancemakers/Dance Collection Danse Research project celebrating Dancemakers 50th anniversary Interviews with original cast members of Serge Bennathan's "Chronicles of a Simple Life" (1993) DANCEMAKERS: CHRONICLES OF A SIMPLE LIFE RESEARCH PROJECT GERRY TRENTHAM May 2, 2024  Interviewed by Lucy Rupert in Riverdale Park LR: My pitch for this commission from Dance Collection Danse and Dancemakers is based on when I was in 2nd year university and Dancemakers came and performed at the Humanities theatre….and the things that struck me about Chronicles of  Simple Life, when I saw it then, were this contrast of the dancing being extraordinary – hard and rigorous and big and technically sound in how it was performed, and also so incredibly human. I hadn’t seen this before. Most of my experience was ballet and classical modern dance, where it’s still very form- based and symbolic. And also the way Chronicles dealt with grief – again I was used to opera and ballet where grief is t...