Preview
MAINSTAGE DANCE ’04
University of Calgary
Runs March 18 to 20
University Theatre
The choreographic creations of four noted dance artists will be featured at the University of Calgary’s upcoming Mainstage Dance ’04.
This year the annual Mainstage program, performed by students from the university’s dance program, is showcasing work by Poland’s Wojciech Mochniej, American Jonathan Kane, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks co-founder Hannah Stilwell and U of C associate dance professor Davida Monk. Audiences can expect performances of modern dance, jazz and contemporary ballet.
Monk is presenting a new work for Mainstage called Criaturas. Partially inspired by her reading of Women Who Run with the Wolves, the popular 1992 book about the wild-woman archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the piece is a dance in three movements for nine women.
"This piece is in the context of the dance program. I’m doing it for the students," says Monk. "This group (I’m working with) is a terrific cast with a strong work ethic. They bring a certain dance ethic – a spirit of the love of dance – into the work. They are quite free in the work, which is very demanding."
Criaturas’s cast, comprised of both third- and fourth-year dance students, rehearsed both with Monk and on their own.
I felt that I could give something to these young dancers of what I was learning myself as I read Estes's work," says Monk of the creation of the piece. I opened myself to them, encouraged them to think of their own wild natures, hoping somehow that both the dance and the dancers would be infused with this power. I trusted them to the extent that I let them know what is in my heart. Estes writes about the gulf between generations of women, and I was inspired to try to cross it in a way that was meaningful to our creative process."
Monk says that Criaturas is about using the body and being in the body to discover oneself.
"(In society today) the body has been reduced to a cell – to its sexual, sportive value, as a machine and as a seduction," she says. "The beauty of the body… that’s not news, that’s not sexy – that’s not something you can sell because you already have it. Everything is taken away from you and sold back."
Criaturas has been choreographed to music by the late composer Gérard Grisey and by U of C graduate student Carrie Alain. "Carrie is an electro-acoustic composer, and a graduate student working with Dr. David Eagle (at the university)," says Monk. "She is also a bow hunter and records things in the wild… the creaking of trees, deer snorts – anything she encounters in the wilderness."
Like Alain’s music, Monk’s choreography borrows from the natural world, which is nothing new, says Monk. "Associations from animals in dance is prehistoric," she says. "To take from the animal the things it does so well – to imitate it and find a sense of harmony – that has been done as long as there have been humans and animals."
Monk, a respected contemporary dancer and choreographer who began her training in Ottawa with Le Groupe Dance Lab, has a strong sense of environment. She chose to work in Calgary because of her personal connection to the land.
"I came here, not because it was a dance Mecca, but because I was in love with the Prairies," she says. "I’m not in the centre of the dance world – I am in the world that I love." |
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