Our DanceWeekend’24 Artist Feature is Nova Dance as apart of our online film screenings!
Friday, January 26th, 2024 at 7pm VIRTUALLY.
About Nova Dance:
Nova Bhattacharya is an award-winning, barrier-breaking, artist and cultural leader based in Tkaronto. Her inspiration is found in identities, hybridities and diversities, manifesting creations that resonate with technical virtuosity and lush, vivid imagery. She’s always been a rebel reinterpreting traditions and reinventing rituals. In 2008, embracing the principle that if you build for the margins then everyone is included, she founded Nova Dance. Gaining increasing recognition as a vibrant cultural hub and a space for vital conversations the company serves community with kindness, compassion and generosity. Nova’s most recent choreography Svāhā! features a cast of 22 performers proficient in more than 29 dance forms currently practiced on Turtle Island. The epic work embodies her vision of a diversiform company where the perceived boundaries of culture and technique are dissolved and bodies from the margins are centered.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself/your company?
When a Canadian born dancer, trained entirely in Canada and making work in collaboration with Canadian artists, could not find a place for her work in the most multi-cultural city in the world, she imagined what could be and set about to make it happen.
Nova Bhattacharya founded the company in 2008 determined that there should be a place where artists working with a rich diversity of dance forms could converge, create and collaborate.
We are continually evolving to meet the needs of our artists and our communities. We create in conversation. Conversation with artists, conversations with audiences, conversations that connect the arts to civic life.
We are instigating change, nurturing and supporting a creative community and making it possible for Canada’s multi-faceted identity to dance with sparkling brilliance.
What will you be sharing at DanceWeekend’24?
Ritual Traces
Ritual Traces is a Bharatnatyam, tabla, rock‘n’roll mash-up investigating the body as a filter for our emotions. Created by long-time collaborating artists Nova Bhattacharya and Ed Hanley, Ritual Traces is their first film collaboration and continues their shared practice of integrating multiple disciplines and cultural influences.
What interests you about film as a medium and how does if differ from a live performance?
What interests you about film as a medium and how does if differ from a live performance?
I love that the medium of film insists on consideration of the viewer first and foremost. There is also the ability to share far more intimacy and close connection. I love the amount of control that is possible in directing the eye of the viewer to what one wants them to see.
What does dance mean to you?
Dance is life, dance is joy and sorrow, love and loss, laughter and tears. Dance is the the utmost expression of our humanity.
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Stay Up to Date with Nova Dance at their social media links below: