Arts Umbrella Dance Company - An Excercise in Excellence
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
On Sunday my Rosemary and I went to the Roundhouse Community
Centre for a varied performance of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company. This local
institution has been having these performances, always on Sunday (Sunday
Performance Series) where one is able to see works in progress.
These performances may be not as well known as they should.
When you have the likes of James Kudelka (my opinion is that he is the best
Canadian choreographer) or Aszure Barton and Crystal Pite testing their works
with the dancers of Arts Umbrella you know that something here is out of the
ordinary.
February's Sunday Series with Noam Gagnon
February's Sunday Series with Noam Gagnon
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| Lauren Stewart |
One of the reasons is that the Arts Umbrella Dance Company’s
goal is not to get your kids out of the streets. Their goal (perhaps mission
would be a more appropriate and fanatical word) is to graduate dancers.
Routinely their graduates go to such places as the Netherland Dance Theatre
(perhaps the best dance company in the world) and others in Europe and New
York.
For $10 dollars I saw a show that would run way over $100 in
bigger cities with a higher dance profile community.
But the fact is that Ballet BC just came back from a
European tour.They are well know around the world and many of their dancers
graduated from Granville Island.
And there is another thing I must mention here. There is a choreographer;
she is quiet and almost unassuming. She is Lesley Telford (a little bird has
told me that Telford has gone bonkers over Argentine Tango). Below is her
considerable bio:
Lesley Telford is
presently based in Vancouver, Canada as a choreographer and director of Inverso
Productions as well as directing the Performance Research Project (PReP) at
Arts Umbrella’s Professional Dance Program.
She finished her
studies in Montreal at L’École Supérieur de Danse du Québec before joining the
company Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. She went on to dance with Nacho Duato’s
Compañia Nacional de Danza in Madrid, Spain. Most recently she danced with
Netherlands Dans Theater 1 where she worked with choreographers such as Jiri
Kylian, Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon, William Forsythe, Ohad Naharin, Johan
Inger, Crystal Pite and others and performed in major theatres worldwide. She
has set and staged the work of Jiri Kylian as well as Lightfoot/Leon.
As a choreographer,
she has created for Ballet BC, Netherlands Dans Theater 1, Hubbard Street Dance
Company 2 (US), Compañia Nacional de Danza 2 (Spain), Ballet Vorpommern
(Germany), International Project for Dance in Rome- DAF (Italy), Butler Ballet
(US), University of Utah (US) and Arts Umbrella Dance Company. She won the
Pretty Creatives choreographic competition at Northwest Dance Project in 2014.
Her work has been presented in the CaDance Festival and Korzo Theatre in the
Netherlands, International Festival Madrid en Danza and the Reina Sophia Museum
in Spain, Chutzpah Festival, the Banff Festival of the Arts, The Gothenburg
Dance and Theatre Festival and the Schmiede Festival. She is the founder of
Inverso Productions, a platform for interdisciplinary performance, through
which she produced and choreographed a full-length work: Brittle Failure which
has been a part of tours and festivals in Spain, the Netherlands and Canada.
As a teacher, she has
given workshops and classes internationally in many companies and schools such
as Ballet BC, Spring Seminar Vancouver, Prague International Contemporary Dance
Intensive, Danscentrum Gothenburg, Madrid Conservatory of Dance, NDT Summer
Intensive and NDT educational projects. She teaches classes of repertoire,
ballet, contemporary, movement exploration and improvisation/composition.
Interested in
furthering her artistic research and exploration into the field, she has a
Master of Arts in Cultural Production from the joint program of the University
of Salzburg and the Mozarteum. Her thesis examined the use of the museum as a
performance space for dance. She was also a fellow in a joint research project
with the Zurich University of the Arts in 2013.
She was recently
selected by Crystal Pite for the Vancouver
Mayor’s Arts Award 2015 as emerging artist in dance.
Some of the performances featured Arts Umbrella Dance
Company instructors. Such was the case of the performance that had my granddaughter
Lauren Stewart. This was Penelope Boyse’s Full Bloom. In the pictures below the
dancers wearing white are from Sunshine. The other choreographed work by Penelope Boyse, Sunshine featured the lovely girls dressed in yellow.
A special treat was the participation in the afternoon’s
program of The Historical Performance Ensemble. We learned all about this dance
the preceded just by a bit the rise of ballet. It was promoted by that great
dancer that was Louis IV. They came with three musicians Pat Unruh, Anne
Duranceau (both played violi da gamba) and Edgar Bridwell on baroque violin.
I must explain that as an obsolete, redundant &
retired magazine photographer I have no assignment and no artistic intentions
in taking the pictures that the Arts Umbrella Dance Company allows me to take.
The photographs do not have to be sharp and I can do as I please. And this I
do.
