12 days left until DanceWeekend!
Our countdown to DanceWeekend’22 continues with Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre who will be presenting a film Friday July 15 at 7pm. Register for the event HERE.
www.ccdt.org
FB: @CanadianContemporaryDanceTheatre
IG: @ccdtcompany
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself/your company?
Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre is a repertory company for emerging artists under 19 years of age founded in 1980 by Artistic Director Deborah Lundmark, and Managing Director Michael deConinck Smith. Company members and audiences alike enjoy one of Canada’s largest and most diverse repertoires including creations by such dance luminaries as David Earle, Carol Anderson, Danny Grossman, Margie Gillis, and Peggy Baker and, more recently, Colin Connor, Jennifer Archibald, Apolonia Velasquez, Hanna Kiel, Jera Wolfe, and Gioconda Barbuto, among many others. Presentation highlights include appearances at Toronto’s Princess of Wales and Royal Alexandra Theatres for the Creative Trust and Dancers for Life Galas and five invitations to the Canada Dance Festival. A leading touring company, CCDT has introduced over 300,000 young people to dance through its Ontario Arts Access program, and won the Toronto Arts Foundation’s prestigious Arts for Youth Award for its development of young artists and young audiences.
What will you be sharing at DanceWeekend’22?
In 1990, celebrating Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre’s 10th Anniversary, I was inspired by William Blake’s playful “Echoing Green” to create a sunlit dance in Blake’s imagined meadow. The poem, though, concludes with his image of “the darkening green”.
In the spring of 2021, with the dance community still restricted by the pandemic in so many ways, I reflected on the changes in our world over the past thirty years. I felt moved to a more melancholy sense of Nature’s beauty and to the need for a less innocent response to the changes we are witnessing.
Those inspirations led to the creation this dance film, “the darkening green”, choreographed in collaboration with an inspiring cast of six CCDT dancers to an original score written and performed by Greg Harrison and Frances Miller, with cinematography and editing by multidisciplinary artist Drew Berry.
-Deborah Lundmark, Choreographer & Director
Please share what you are most looking forward to at Dance Ontario’s return to live performances at DanceWeekend?
It will be invigorating to return to Fleck Dance Theatre with the buzzing, uplifting energy of a live audience once again. In particular, CCDT is proud of our current Company Dancer Zachary Seto, who will share a world premiere (performed by himself alongside two other CCDT alumni) as one of DanceOntario’s Creative Partnership Commissions 2022!
Do you have any up-coming performances/workshops/events you would like to share?
CCDT will present its 34th annual production of ‘WinterSong – dances for a sacred season’ from December 9-10, 2022 at Fleck Dance Theatre featuring a world premiere by Colin Connor alongside repertoire favourites by Carol Anderson, Rodney Diverlus, Alyssa Martin, and more.