The Board of Directors of Dancemakers officially welcomes Amelia Ehrhardt as Curator as of September 18, 2015.  She will be working with current Curator Benjamin Kamino during a transition period until December 2015 when she will take on the position full-time.

Ehrhardt says: “I am thrilled to be coming on board at Dancemakers, an organization I have had a close relationship with for several years. I have regularly attended performances, workshops, and ancillary programming at Dancemakers and have benefited greatly from what the organization has contributed to the discourse on dance in Toronto.  I have faith that the Incubation Performance House (IPH) model is responsive to the needs of the field and will allow the resources of the institution to be split broadly within the community, reflecting and supporting the reality of how artists are working today.” 

 

Ehrhardt is a Curator and Choreographer based in Toronto who has previously acted as the Curating Producer of the inaugural dance series at SummerWorks and the Administrative Director at CADA-ON, and is the Curator of her self-produced multidisciplinary performance series Flowchart, among many other initiatives. 

 

The Board of Directors congratulates Emi Forster and Benjamin Kamino for their outstanding job in initiating, as a team, the IPH model and asserting the principles of Dancemakers as a hub for new artistic ideas and a test bed for innovation. With the return of Forster to her native Australia, the original single Curator model has been reinstated for the position. Kamino will continue with his personal artistic practice as a dancer and choreographer, proud and honoured by the work he was able to undertake at Dancemakers.

 

“I see the role of the Curator as reframing as well as mediating contemporary dance and movement practices for the general public, while taking an active role in the artistic and political conversations that exist in the dance community. Dancemakers is in the midst of a large transition to a radically different model, one that is no small task for an organization with a forty-year history.  I look forward to assisting in this transition and serving the community as best I can,” continued Ehrhardt.

 

As a centre for creation, Dancemakers’ main program will be supporting Resident Artists over staggered three year tenures, thus at any given moment there will be three artists making work at Dancemakers, offering a multi-voiced and continuously shifting artistic frame. The Curator will select a new Resident Artist each year, looking to rotate through local, national and international dance ecologies respectively.

 

Benjamin Kamino says, “Ehrhardt is an artist with a sharp mind and keen questions.  Her self-regulation and no shortage of gumption brought forth one of Toronto’s most exciting sites for performance, Flowchart, which brought together the commonalities of some fairly disparate groups of artists.  Finding excitement and compassion in difference, this may be Ehrhardt’s most venerable quality and the reason I so strongly believe in her tenure as Dancemakers’ Curator.”

 

Arsinee Khanjian, Co-Chair of the Board says, “Amelia’s creative flair is fierce and her passion to provide dance artists in Canada a place to search, explore and thrive in is a fitting direction for Dancemakers.”

 

Next up for Dancemakers is ROSÉ PORN, an avant-garde dance piece by Resident Artist Zoja Smutny where together the performers and the audience take part in the ongoing creation of the work, November 5-7 at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation. To purchase tickets or for more information visit www.dancemakers.org