Dance Ontario is delighted to announce that the Creative Partnerships for 2015 will be awarded to Louis Laberge-Côté and Jacob Niedzwiecki.
Selected from a broad field of stellar applications, the Commissioning Committee of Peter Ryan, Jennifer Watkins, James Kendal and Debbie Kapp chose works that fit the mandate of the program. These new pieces will be presented at DanceWeekend’16 next January 15-17 on each of the three performance days.
Acclaimed choreographer LOUIS LABERGE-CÔTÉ will create D’arc, an intimate, visceral, emotionally and physically charged 15-minute solo set on contemporary dancer Jordana Deveau, He will investigate the historical personage of Joan of Arc as a theme and archetype to underlie his work connecting through her story to several pertinent social issues such as women’s rights, rape culture, domestic violence, the legal system, war, religious fanaticism and mental illness. It also provides a lens through which to reflect on ourselves. He will take inspiration from this remarkable female figure, exploring what her story has to offer in a contemporary context.
Louis Laberge-Côté is a Toronto-based dancer, choreographer, teacher, and rehearsal director. An acclaimed performer, he has danced nationally and internationally with over 20 companies, and has been a full-time member of Toronto Dance Theatre (1999-2007) and the Kevin O’Day Ballett Nationaltheater Mannheim (2009-2011). He has created over 60 choreographic works, which have been presented and commissioned in Canada and abroad. His work has garnered him a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Choreography, as well as six other nominations for Performance or Choreography. He has been nominated for the KM Hunter Award in 2014 and 2015. NOW Magazine named him “Dance Most Valuable Player” in 2006 and “Best Male Dancer” in 2014. A sought-after pedagogue, he has taught classes and workshops all across the country and is on faculty at Ryerson University. He currently shares the Vice-Presidency at the Canadian Dance Assembly and is the Chair of the Dance Committee at the Toronto Arts Council.
JACOB NIEDZWIECKI’s proposed work Untitled Bureaucracy Project (UBP) explores several types of participatory performance, through themes of bureaucracy and security. Substantially inspired by Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, the dancers and choreographer experimented with a very versatile set/prop: retractible canvas stanchions used in airports to define lineups. In UBP the four performers and 10-20 audience volunteers will use stanchions to create spatial structures which serve as foundations for the themes of power and control. Performed by Luke Garwood, Linnea Swan, Mateo Galindo Torres and Léa Lavoie-Gauthier, the sound design for the piece will be created by John Gzowski.
Jacob Niedzwiecki is a choreographer, filmmaker, and creative technologist whose work fuses movement, media, and code into inventive new forms. He trained as a classical and contemporary dancer and performed for several years with the National Ballet of Canada. His choreographic works include commissions from the TorQ Percussion Quartet and Chung-Ang Arts University in Seoul as well as his app-based immersive work Jacqueries, Part 1, which received the Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation at the 2014 SummerWorks Performance Festival, and has toured to the FilmGate Interactive Festival in Miami. His dance films have been shown online and at festivals around the world. His installation works have been shown at the dance: made in canada festival in Toronto and Filmgate Interactive in Miami. He recently directed and produced the National Ballet of Canada’s four-hour section of the World Ballet Day livestream, a 20-hour international partnership with YouTube that also featured the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet.
To date choreographers commissioned by Dance Ontario include Nenagh Leigh, Meagan O’Shea, Terrill Maguire, Lucy Rupert, Vivine Scarlett,Jenn Goodwin, Sasha Ivanochko, Marlee Cargill, Malgorzata Nowacka, Nova Bhattacharya & Louis Laberge Cote,Sashar Zarif & Holly Small, William Yong, Lacey Smith, Amy Hampton & Keiko Ninomiya, Jessica Westermann, Lucy Rupert & Barbara Pallamino, Pamela Rasbach, Robert Stephen, Amy Hampton & Keiko Ninomiya, Apolonia Velasquez & Ofilio Portillo, Benjamin Landsberg, Jasmyn Fyffe, Keiko Kitano, Malgorzata Nowacka with James Croker & Jack Langenhuizen, Natasha Powell, Courtnae Bowman and Hanna Kiel.
…creativity to savour and excite at DanceWeekend’16!