We continue our countdown with Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre! CCDT performs Sunday Jnuary 27th at 2:30pm.
53 days until #DanceWeekend19
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/CanadianContemporaryDanceTheatre/
INSTAGRAM: @ccdtcompany
WEBSITE: ccdt.org
Can you tell us little bit about your company/collective/school?
Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre is a repertory company of exceptional young artists under nineteen years of age, founded in 1980 by Artistic Director Deborah Lundmark and Managing Director Michael deConinck Smith. Today the Company tailors programs for a diversity of audiences and venues, selecting repertoire from more than one hundred international commissions. Presentation highlights include appearances at Toronto’s Princess of Wales and Royal Alexandra Theatres and five invitations to the Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa. As a pioneering dance touring company, CCDT has introduced 300,000 young people to dance through its Ontario Arts Access program and undertaken extensive national tours spanning Vancouver to Quebec City. Farther afield, the Company has performed in Singapore, Malaysia, China and Scotland. Culminating a three-decade relationship with the José Limón Dance Company, CCDT performed to standing ovations at New York City’s storied Joyce Theater as part of its sister company’s historic 70th anniversary International Dance Festival. Most recently CCDT was featured in the launches of Fall For Dance North School Show and Harbourfront’s Junior International Festival.
What are showing at DanceWeekend’19? Hanna Kiel’s A Day of Light, premiered December 12, 2018 at Fleck Dance Theatre in CCDT’s WINTERSONG – dances for a sacred season
Of the work, Kiel writes: Thinking of the winter solstice, I was inspired to celebrate the arrival of the first lengthening day. Though it goes by so quickly, it is like our innocent time and we cherish those moments in the sun forever.
Who are the performers/collaborators in this piece(s)? Greg Harrison and Frances Miller composed and recorded the score; Arun Srinivasan designed the lighting and Krista Dowsen designed the costumes. Dancers: Hana Bogacz, Alexander Faraday, Paris Forbes, Lola Jenkins, Jeffrey Lapira, Kaiya Lee, Makenna Martinez, Jaedyn Richards, Sydney Runions, Daniel Santokie, Melodie Yeung
Can you talk about your creative process? What inspires you?
Hanna Kiel: I began by giving each dancer different tasks to generate movement material. These tasks could be to create the shapes of the movements, gestures, footsteps, or poses. This is the most important part in my process because I get to learn about the dancers and also start to make decisions about which material can be used where in the piece, and by which dancers. Then I developed these materials into more ‘dance movement’ and used them to create solos, duets, small groups, and full cast sections.
Once the materials were developed enough I put compositional structure to the phrases. In this process, I try many different ways until it gets closer to my vision. After the work is structured, I continue to reshuffle the phrases until everything makes sense to both me and the dancers. After that, we clean the work, polish it, and continue to reshuffle if we have to.
The dancers at CCDT are some of the most hard working professional dancers I know. It’s always inspiring to being in the studio with these young, open, and highly dedicated dancers. Especially with my process I need dancers who can collaborate in the choreography and their openness and generosity always helps my vision come alive.
Please share your experience performing in a previous DanceWeekend and/or tell us what you are looking forward to at DanceWeekend’19?
We have performed many times at DanceWeekend and always love the generosity of spirit shared by our peers.
What is one surprising or interesting fact about your company/collective/school?
A surprizing fact about CCDT is that even after 38 years, with all the myriad distractions of modern life, twelve extraordinary young artists show up every fall and passionately throw themselves into the art of dance.
Do you have any up-coming performances/events you would like to share?
Burlington Performing Arts Centre, Teasing Gravity (TG) – April 5
London Palace Theatre, TG – April 15-17
Kitchener Registry Theatre, TG – April 22-26
Orillia Opera House, TG – May 6-8
Teasing Gravity School Matinees, FDT TO – May 21-23
Light Years, Fleck Dance Theatre, TO- May 24-25
Comments by Hanna Kiel
What is your take on WinterSong’s winter solstice theme for this piece?
My take on the winter solstice theme is about how precious the daylight can seem when we have only few hours of it. Rather than focusing on how long the darkness we are experiencing is, I wanted to focus on how we can celebrate the brightness in this theme.
Tell us about your relationship with composer Greg Harrison, and what you asked of him (and his musical partner Frances Miller) in creating the music for the piece.
This is my fifth collaboration with Greg Harrison. As a choreographer I always like to challenge myself to create something very different every time and I know that Greg enjoys the same kind of challenge in music. We also have very similar ideas of how the relationship between music and dance should work. When I decided to create a folk dance inspired piece I knew he would be up for this challenge. We both wanted a singing voice in this work and he brought Frances Miller, a wonderful singer and collaborator, to the project.
Were there any standout moments in this creative process that inspired or affected you? Did anything surprise you in the evolution of this piece, versus what you had first planned or envisioned it would be?
It’s always the dancers. It’s so inspiring and satisfying to see when dancers surprise you in a positive way and to watch them grow so quickly in the process. My creativity gets stronger when these things happen.
What’s next for you? (Upcoming projects, commissions, tours, etc.)
I will create a new work for The School of Toronto Dance Theatre in Spring 2019. Additionally, my company Human Body Expression will perform our most recent full-length work Chasing The Path again in May 2019 at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, followed by a tour of the piece to Korea in June 2019. HBE also will present a new full-length work called Resonance in September 2019 with 12 dancers and 3 musicians performing live.