Monday, April 14, 2014

Anna and Caroline's notes from Kitimat

We started Monday with an energetic group of grade 8 students at Mount Elizabeth Secondary School in Kitimat. How lucky for us that we all get to dance in the school's theatre, with a huge stage! Many of the students have prior dance experience, so we're having fun diving into the many facets of contemporary dance and we hope it will give them ideas to bring to their other dance practices. After our warm-up/technique section we're working on things like "movement conversations", shape duets (we are often greeted when we arrive with, "Hi! Can we do negative space?"), generating movement phrases in large groups, and introducing improvisational scores, which is new for many of them but a fun challenge.  We've also watched a few clips from some well-known contemporary dance companies from BC and beyond, and talked about things like gesture, and the many different kinds of styles that artists bring to contemporary work.

Warming up on stage

Exploring negative space in duets

This week we also returned to Kitamaat Village for The Spirit of the Kitlope Dancers, who have an open practice most Mondays at the recreation centre. The Spirit of Kitlope is a traditional singing, drumming and dancing group, who perform locally and around the province.  We were very generously welcomed to participate in the singing and dancing, with leader Shelly Bolton giving some background introduction to each song and dance. There were about 15 drummers and about 12 of us dancing (Shelly told us that the group sometimes swells to 50 or 100 participants), and we were blown away by so many powerful and strong singing voices in the room. It was also exciting for us to dance with some of the kids from our workshop last week, and wonderful to meet people from different generations all taking part, from tots, to teens, to adults and seniors.  We stayed late, chatting and visiting, and heading up to the games room to continue a game of freeze tag (which has been cheerily ongoing since we arrived almost two weeks ago).

Graham, our friendly neighbourhood theatre tech

Time is whipping by surprisingly fast! As the week goes on it's nice to see our grade 8 group getting more comfortable in their skins and with the creative activities we're introducing. We have only 2 more days, and we're looking forward to what they will bring :)


The students choreographing each other

Friday, April 11, 2014

Salt Spring loves Shay Kuebler Dance!

Salt Spring loves Shay Kuebler Dance!

What a great journey we had with them! Last night, April 7, was an amazing performance, I knew it would be very good, but it was beyond my expectations! We had a close to sold out house, several bursts of spontaneous applause during the performance (very uncommon in
my experience), and, when it was over, the audience leapt up for a unanimous standing-ovation with nearly half of them staying for the post-chat. Working with
my community partners, we did a great promo campaign. We got the buzz going on the island.


For outreach, Shay taught a wonderful workshop on Sunday, getting us sliding across the dance studio doing moves we never imagined possible. Last month he had come to the island where he taught workshops at the high school and led “Dance Temple”, a sacred dance ritual.



Here’s an audience member comment that sums it up for everyone:

“What a fantastic show! I am thinking about it and all the questions it left me with. Deep, visually stunning, powerful, awesome!”
A reminder for all the other CEFs in the network who are presenting Karoshi :Shay needs lots of plates, start collecting them now!

Good tip: Steer this very friendly group of dancers towards the Frisbee-Golf park and the best local restaurants, then provide them with an enthusiastic audience, and everyone will be happy!

- Anna Haltrecht

CEF Salt Spring

Made in BC – Dance on Tour

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

A Visit to Kitimat!

Caroline and Anna here, reporting from Kitimat, where we're already halfway through week one of a two week visit!

We're spending our first week with the wonderful s
tudents and teachers of Haisla Community School in Kitamaat Village. Our mornings start with the grade 4-7s, about 20 kids: on the first day, after a group warm-up we asked them to introduce themselves with a name and a movement- and we loved seeing their sense of humour come out right away! We moved right into some contemporary dance skill-building such as tilts, floor chainees, arm patterns and turns, and the group was definitely up for the challenge. Then on to across the floor to get moving through space, and activities in mirroring and shapes including a "crystal" which spanned the entire room and then turned into a gang of superheroes, moving shape by shape from one end of the room to the other.


When the grade 4-7s return to their classroom, we meet with our next group, around 25 excited and energetic K-3s. We're having lots of fun exploring animals, freeze dance, and shape games. Believe it or not by the end of our first day we had already worked with almost all of the kids in the entire school- it is a fantastic group of energetic movers (including the teachers!). 

Today was our third day already, so we got down to business, practising a combo and small group choreography with the older kids (set to the likes of Katy Perry, Skrillex and Capital Cities) which we will present to friends and family on the final day.  The younger group is really starting to settle into our routine and is amassing some practiced moves for Friday's showing too.  We also heard that today is talent show day at the school, and some of the students will present the combo we've been working on! We were thrilled that they wanted to bring some elements of class into their other endeavours. 

We only have two more days at the school, it's gone by so fast- and lots to do before the final presentation on Friday!