Thursday, June 03, 2010

"Know where you are going and go there."
Artemis Gordon, Artistic Director - Arts Umbrella Dance Company

Vancouver holds many special secrets. Some should not be so. I am going to share one of them right now. Any performance of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company is such a secret. And the most special is the Company Season Finale of the Arts Umbrella Senior Dance Company (the “Rolls Royces”) and the Arts Umbrella Apprentice Dance Company (the “Bentleys”) at the Vancouver Playhouse. The first show is Friday night at 8:00pm and the second one is on Saturday night.


These extremely fast dance performances (one dance number follows the next with almost no interval and the two hour show always seems shorter) feature works by well known international and local choreographers. These are:

James Kudelka, Gioconda Barbuto, Cherice Barton, Serge Benna than, Roberto Campanella, Amber Funk Barton, Shawn Hounsell, Rob Kitsos, Josh Martin and Donald Sales.

These performances are a fine blend of modern ballet, modern dance with bits of avant-garde thrown here and there. At any given point in time you can find at least four Arts Umbrella alumni dancing with Ballet BC. The dancers make the transition seamlessly. To many who may have had their first and usually last eperience of dance in a high school show or in some lesser dance academy, watching Arts Umbrella dancers is a completely different deal. They are budding professionals. Consider that most of the dances that will be performed were personally directed by the choreographers listed below. Arts grants to bring these people to Vancouver are becoming nonexistent but I am sure that if there is anybody who will know where to get the necessary money to bring that talent to Granville Island it is Artemis Gordon.

It is not important to understand dance. Consider that Arts Umbrella Artistic Director, Artemis (Arty) Gordon once told me, “Alex, where else can you sit down to see attractive, beautiful, young men and women move gracefully and who at any given moment are not wearing much?”

When Arty invited me to come to the rehearsals to shoot whatever I wanted I came up with the idea of taking snaps of every dancer using my new iPhone. I shot them all in about an hour on Thursday afternoon. My assistant was the able and flexible Nina Davies. She rounded them up for me. You can see here in one of the pictures below hiding behind Senior Dance Company male dancer, Jed Duifhuis.

I will be the first to admit that I have yet to get down pat the technique for using the iPhone in conjunction with a my soft box light. The phone is all over the place with colour and exposure. There are a few stinkers (and in particular the one of the extremely tired and burned out Arty Gordon) but, all in all I like the spontaneous look of many of them. All certainly portray the passion and enthusiasm of the Arts Umbrella Dancers. The last picture (and the little one above, right) is of Julie-anne Saroyan who is the stage manager. She is holding a red bulb because she positioned one at the end of the theatre so that should the dancers lose their bearings (a most unlikely situation) the will know they are facing the audience when they see the red bulb. A stage manager has to deal with the dancers, with a sound man (Tim Brecht) a lighting designer (Rob Sondergaard) while facing at least two laptops.

Watching these professionals direct the rehearsals was a treat. I was amazed at the gentle corrections of the rehearsal directors Lina Fitzner and Andrea Hodge. They never shouted and they never got angry. It was during one of these rehearsals that I heard Arty direct her dancers, “Know where you are going and go there.”

I would entreat any who might not know what to do Friday or Saturday night to treat Arty’s statement as both a challenge and an invitation for adventure. You will not be disappointed.

The pictures appear in the order that we took them. Some tried to avoid but Nina Davies cajoled them and brought them to the rehearsal room by the Green Room to face my light. We managed to get Julie-anne Saroyan one minute before 7 when the dress rehearsal started. Again I must apologize that there is a lack of uniformity and some of the portraits are below my standards. But it is the unpredictability of my iPhone (until I can figure out its haphazard independence) that attracted me to today's experiment.





Kate Burrows - Costume designer
Gioconda Barbuto - Choreographer



Alex Burton - Senior Dance Company
Lynn Sheppard - Senior Company Rehearsal Mistress





Zoe Nichele - Senior Dance Company
Daniel Alwell - Senior Dance Company







Maya Klassen - Senior Dance Company
Jessica Atkinson - Senior Dance Company




Brandy Ostrosser - Senior Dance Company
Clare Bassett - Senior Dance Company




Clea Owens - Senior Dance Company
Livone Ellis - Senior Dance Company




Layla Trummer - Senior Dance Company
Kiera Hill - Senior Dance Company




Amee Chan - Senior Dance Company
Alicia Chan - Senior Dance Company




Kaitlyn Ramsden -Senior Dance Company
Ali Thatcher - Senior Dance Company




Amy Josh - Senior Dance Company
Chris Hoyte - Senior Dance Company




Violeta Nunez - Senior Dance Company
Paxton Ricketts - Apprentice Dance Company




Christoph von Riedemann -Apprentice Dance Company
Lina Fitzner - Apprentice Company Rehearsal Mistress





Sabine Raskin - Apprentice Dance Company
Kate Shepard - Apprentice Dance Company




Rachel Wong - Apprentice Dance Company
Maya Doytchinova - Apprentice Dance Company




Oksana Wengreniuk - Apprentice Dance Company
Madison Smart - Apprentice Dance Company




Alex Poole - Apprentice Dance Company
Selby Wilkinson - Apprentice Dance Company





Misa Lucyshyn - Apprentice Dance Company
Claudia Nicholls - Apprentice Dance Company




Stephanie Lebedies - Senior Dance Company




Agata Chrzastowska - Apprentice Dance Company
Lucy Huang - Apprentice Dance Company




Sophie Belic - Apprentice Dance Company
Hailee Mah - Apprentice Dance Company




Alex Tam - Apprentice Dance Company
Sam Neville - Apprentice Dance Company




Matt Clarke - Apprentice Dance Company
Jed Duifhuis - Senior Dance Company & N.Davies




Nigel Underhill -Apprentice Dance Company
Jan Lee - Apprentice Dance Company




Scott Fowler - Senior Dance Company
Scott Fidzarko - Apprentice Dance Company




Chisato Ide - Senior Dance Company
Diego Romero - Apprentice Dance Company




Alex Andison - Apprentice Dance Company
Artemis Gordon - Artistic Director & Kiera Hill




Emile Teichroeb - Apprentice Dance Company
Noa Salamon - Apprentice Dance Company




Julie-anne Saroyan - Stage Manager