This October, Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre has been invited to perform alongside a stellar cast of international companies celebrating the José Limón Dance Company’s 70th Anniversary.  Canada’s only representative at the two-week Festival, CCDT will be taking fourteen dancers to perform excerpts from one of Limón’s iconic works, The Winged (1966), on the stage of the storied Joyce Theater in Manhattan.

Hosted by the world’s oldest modern dance company, the Festival is the dream opportunity for CCDT’s emerging artists who, with an average age of 16, are the youngest group invited. It also will mark the company’s first time performing in New York City. In addition to the José Limón Dance Company, CCDT will be sharing the stage with sjDANCEco (California), Royal Danish Ballet (Denmark), CoreoArte (Venezuela), and Bayerische Staatsballett (Germany), among many others.

This momentous opportunity grew from CCDT’s long history with the Limón Company and its Artistic Director, Carla Maxwell, who has nurtured two former company members, Kristen Foote and Belinda McGuire. Foote, now among the Limón Company’s most senior artists, will return to mount The Winged on CCDT dancers.

The company’s relationship with the Limón legacy stretches back to 1988 when Canada’s leading proponent of the Limón technique, Donna Krasnow, introduced CCDT to José’s timeless movement qualities that inform his choreography. After years of experimenting, company members were suddenly immersed in a fluidly expressive language so suited to young artists as to seem made for them. Now led by the company’s third generation of Limón teachers, CCDT’s training program, beginning at six years of age and balanced with Royal Academy of Dance ballet, is unique worldwide.

Over the following decade, several Limón Company dancers led CCDT summer intensives, bringing a taste of José’s seminal repertoire. This growing kinship reached a new level in 2000 when Foote, still in her teens, was accepted into the renowned company. José Limón has profoundly shaped CCDT and generations of its dancers. It is an honour to be given the opportunity to pay tribute to his artistic genius as part of this historic event.

I saw a company of young artists, challenged artistically to their maximum, who understood and demonstrated the highest standards of professionalism. …I was overwhelmed by what I saw and experienced.  – Carla Maxwell, Artistic Director of the Limón Dance Company, upon her first visit to CCDT