FFWD Weekly
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| Dance by Lori Montgomery Three Nights of Choreography by Danielle McCulloch Danielle McCulloch admits that she tends to go about things a bit backwards. The young choreographer, featured in a new full-length show at Dancers’ Studio West, certainly didn’t follow the traditional dance career path. Not for her did the classes in ballet, tap, jazz and modern, begin almost before she could walk. True, she could probably skate before she could walk, but an early career in figure skating led not directly to dance, but to the Alberta College of Art & Design, where she studied the basics and tried to incorporate performance into visual art. "Being a former figure skater, I was really into movement and active, and I found the college really restrictive toward my growth as a mover," she says. "So I started taking dance classes." She left the college three and a half years into a four-year program, and moved on. "I’d gotten what I needed there and then went on to train as a dancer, and then eventually tried to go back and put things together," she explains. "I need to adapt things as I learn them, so it became important to me to be involved in the community and figure out where I could fit in and what was possible, to build up my credibility so that I felt purposeful as an artist." Part of that journey involved DSW’s annual Dance Explosions, where she came to the attention of artistic director Elaine Bowman, who then offered her the rare opportunity to test her skills with a full-length show. McCulloch realizes that she doesn’t come close to fitting the mold of the typical dancer-turned-choreographer. "I always go about things backwards, for some reason," she laughs. "If you break it down, yes, it’s choreography, but it’s just my way of creating. I’ve always been an artist. When I was skating and competing, I didn’t really care that much about technique.... It was all about creation. "In the college, I took that into drawing and painting and sculpture and performance – choreography is just another medium.... At first it was frustrating, because I didn’t have the tools to choreograph dance. So I had to hurry up and catch up and learn technique and basic principles in order to express myself in that medium." The end result is a performance style that blends all of the genres that the young artist has been exposed to during her studies. "Allegro Molto Con Brio King Kong" is choreographed to a 40-minute "digital opera" by Kenneth Doren – based on Beethoven’s The Creatures of Prometheus. "(Doren) put it into his computer and reworked it the way a DJ would mix his songs," McCulloch says. Lyrics for the opera have been written that revolve around TV, film, and other areas of popular culture, and the performance incorporates video and slides as well as dance and live musical performance. It’s a multidisciplinary approach – a trend in contemporary dance – but not the only aspect of her eclectic background that McCulloch says she brings to her choreography. A more unpredictable influence might be her fascination with imperfection. "I love it when my dancers are going so full-out that they trip and fall, and have to catch themselves," she says gleefully. "I think that’s really exciting. They don’t like that so much. There’s this idea of perfection, that everything has to be perfect, and I think it’s more exciting when it’s not perfect. "There’s a thread that I see from when I started painting and drawing – I exaggerate the mistakes.... If a (dancer) falls, they think it’s wrong; I would want them to go with it. It’s real, it happened. Why deny it? Maybe that goes back to figure skating, too, where you’re not supposed to fall and you have to pretend that you didn’t.... Why does it have to be that way? Impulse is important." Her choreography takes advantage of the creative things that happen in concert with the unexpected. "There’s a certain structure, but within that, every moment is different, and in order to be honest about it, you have to leave room for stuff to happen." |
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