Happy New Year everyone! Our countdown to DanceWeekend’20 continues with Alysa Pires Dance Projects. We are 33 days away from Dance Ontario’s DanceWeekend’20 happening January 25 & 26 at the Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre.
Connect with Alysa Pires Dance Projects:
INSTAGRAM – @alysapiresdanceprojects or @alysapires
TWITTER – @alysapiresdance or @alysapires
FACEBOOK – www.facebook.com/alysapiresdance
WEBSITE – www.alysapires.com
Can you tell us little bit about your company/collective/school?
Alysa Pires Dance Projects is a Toronto based contemporary dance company. Founded in 2015 as a home for choreographer Alysa Pires, APDP creates contemporary dance works that aim to transcend their abstraction and connect to all audiences, regardless of their prior experience with dance. Through highly dynamic physicality and quiet tenderness, APDP explores humanity at its most intimate and its most extreme. APDP made its critically acclaimed full-length debut at Toronto Fringe 2016 with Exterminating Angel and appeared in last year’s DanceWeekend’19 with both/and. For more information, visit www.alysapires.com or follow us on Instagram @alysapiresdanceprojects.
What are showing at DanceWeekend’20?
For DanceWeekend’20 we are showing a brand new work featuring Kelly Shaw and Jake Poloz. These two are incredible athletes and artists. You can expect big, bold, dynamic physicality performed by two of Toronto’s most exciting dancers.
Who are the performers/collaborators in this piece(s)?
This new work is created by Alysa Pires in collaboration with performers Kelly Shaw and Jake Poloz.
Can you talk about your creative process? What inspires you?
With each piece, my goal is to create a heightened but relatable movement language. I want the audience to be able to reference their own experiences with their bodies and their understanding of physical communication to connect to the abstract movement in a visceral way. Through a combination of athletic physicality and tender intimacy, I aim to make work that speaks to the human experience in a way that is accessible to all audiences.
I often start by creating the gestural motif for the work. These gestures become the compositional foundation, often appearing both in a manipulated or abstracted way as well as in their most basic form.
I am most inspired by my collaborators. The work exists in the bodies that perform it, so I am deeply interested in creating it in collaboration with the dancers. As they grow, change, settle, or unsettle, the work morphs alongside them. Their embodiment of the movement is, in my mind, the most interesting and important part of the process.
Please share your experience performing in a previous DanceWeekend and/or tell us what you are looking forward to at DanceWeekend’20?
I performed in DanceWeekend as a student with Ryerson University and then had my work presented for the first time last year. I always look forward to attending DanceWeekend and seeing so many Toronto artists come together under one roof. Toronto has such a rich and diverse dance community and DanceWeekend is a rare opportunity for us all to share the same space.
Do you have any up-coming performances/events you would like to share?
Alongside my work for Alysa Pires Dance Projects, I am Choreographic Associate at the National Ballet of Canada and work as a freelance choreographer. Ace Dance Theatre will present a new work of mine at the Winchester Street Theatre January 24-26 (come after checking out DanceWeekend!) and Ballet Kelowna will premiere by first full-length commission, a contemporary adaptation of Macbeth, May 1+2 in Kelowna, BC.
Photo Credit: Kelly Shaw and Jake Poloz by Alysa Pires