>>PREVIEW
STREAMING
The Urban Dance Company
Runs January 9 and 10
Vertigo Studio (Tower Centre)
The newest dance ensemble in town, Urban Dance Company, will do much more than entertain the crowds. Born out of the University of Calgary’s Urban Campus Initiative to create meaningful synergies between the university and the downtown community, the Urban Dance Project aims to teach and engage the community to move.
"Moving is a way of knowing, it’s a form of knowledge. We are committed to giving ordinary people embodied experiences, artistic experiences, and in helping them to be aware of the inherent mind-body connection," says Anne Flynn, co-ordinator for the U of C’s dance program.
The nine dancers at Urban Dance Company are there in various capacities. Five of the members are enrolled in a master’s program in dance with a focus in choreography and performance, while two recent graduates are working as pre-professional dancers, and the other two members are undergraduate students in their last year of the dance program.
"We wanted to put these students in a company atmosphere. We did that by moving them downtown, right beside the Epcor Centre – amidst other arts groups – as well as have them do all of their course work right there," says Flynn.
Part of the program involves working alongside four choreographers during the first year, for a period of six weeks each. Last fall, the dancers worked with Toronto choreographer Sharon Moore and Polish choreographer Wojciech Mochniej.
"The Urban Dance Company is a wonderful opportunity for dancers to deepen their understanding of contemporary dance and to shape their artistic values to choreographic work," says Mochniej, who recently created Porcelain Thoughts for the company.
Although the première performances of Porcelain Thoughts and Grand Land by Moore, under the umbrella title Streaming, are set for this coming week at the Vertigo Studio, the company has performed these pieces informally at places such as the Art Gallery of Calgary and the Salvation Army Centre for Hope.
Through powerful and "organic" movements, Porcelain Thoughts combines themes of aggression and tenderness, of pushing out and pulling in, and of losing and finding oneself. "Although I’ve taken these themes from recent personal experiences, I’ve transformed the subject into something that is universal to all of us. I’ve created many duets in this piece which explore human physicality between people," says Mochniej.
Moore’s Grand Land is a place of sweeping motion. The work creates a game based on the nature of our forgotten powers and abilities.
"The piece is concerned with how we anchor off of each other in a turbulent and highly motioned universe," says the choreographer. "We continually carve out relationships and communications, and if we are smart, offer up confessions in an effort to move forward into a more truthful and expansive field of play."
Mochniej is looking forward to the company’s debut performances. "It will be interesting to see how the dancers have managed all of the information," he says. Unlike the traditional distant relationship between choreographer and dancer, Mochniej and Moore shared as much as possible about their creative approach by involving the dancers in an experiential learning process.
"When working with Mochniej, I became aware of his approach to empower the process itself, which was great for the dancers," says 28-year-old Kirsten Wiren, who joined the company as one of the graduate students last fall. "We were able to get into his head and then work that into our own understanding. Because he is theatre-based, I felt challenged in that area. At first, it was difficult to find emotional responses in our movements and react genuinely to one another and stay sincere in the expression of the emotion."
As well as studying, training, choreographing and performing, company members enrolled in the master’s program, and other dance majors at the U of C, are involved in teaching dance and movement to downtown populations. Specific community programs have been developed under the umbrella of a course plan called Urban Motion. For instance, some of the dancers will teach Movement and Music for Health to senior citizens living in highrises in the East Village, while others will teach Women Moving Forward for residents living at the Mary Dover House at the YWCA. |
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