Dance - my/maSCENA

Backbone – Dance that Sends a Shiver Down the Spine

By Susan Gray on 6 December 2018 Dance

Red Sky Performance is a leader in contemporary Indigenous performance across Canada and around the world. The company creates, produces and disseminates shows that shine a light on Indigenous themes, aesthetics and values. Founder Sandra Laronde, who is of the Teme-Augama-Anishinaabe (People of the Deep Water), is executive and artistic Director. Born in Temagami, northern Ontario, she created the company in 2000 as a vehicle for First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists. Indigenous people are at the core of Red Sky, although people from all backgrounds work on the shows. Laronde employs an analogy to explain what for her constitutes…

Finding Light in the Dark – Dance Artist Peggy Baker’s Latest Show

By Susan Gray on 6 December 2018 Dance

When dance artist Peggy Baker creates a new show, people sit up and take notice. Artistic director of Peggy Baker Dance Projects since its inception in 1990, she is an acclaimed creator who thinks way outside the box. Her latest dance piece, who we are in the dark, an ambitious project even by her standards, features live music composed and performed by Sarah Neufeld and Jeremy Gara, both of the Grammy Award-winning and ferociously popular band Arcade Fire, which is based in Montreal. The title of the show comes from the opening lyrics of a song composed by violinist Neufeld…

Crystal Pite, Dance as a Mother Tongue

By Nathalie de Han on 6 December 2018 Dance

Still not familiar with the work of Crystal Pite, the prodigious Canadian choreographer who won the 2018 Grand Prix de la Danse de Montréal? Revisor, a highly anticipated new production by her Kidd Pivot company will soon give you the opportunity to discover the coherence and evocative power of her universe. It was in Victoria, B.C., that young Pite performed her first entrechats. Formerly a member of British Columbia Ballet and William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, the Canadian has become a star of contemporary dance, accumulating prizes and recognitions. Successively named associate choreographer of the Nederlands Dans Theater, associate dance artist…

Michael Hewitt as Lieutenant Horstmayer and Arnold Livingston Geis as Nikolaus Sprink in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2018 production of Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell's "Silent Night." Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

Through the Glimmerglass, 2018 – Reflections of a Turbulent Century

By Charles Geyer on 24 August 2018 Art Song, Choral, Classical, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Dance, Education, Folk, La Scena Online, La Scena Spotlight, Musical Theatre, Opera, Orchestral, Romantic

PROFILE/REVIEW: of the 2018 Glimmerglass Festival Season: Silent Night by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell; West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim; Cunning Little Vixen by Leoš Janáček; and The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini and Cesare Sterbini. “It’s remarkable how many important things happened in 1918,” observes Glimmerglass Festival artistic and managing director Francesca Zambello, speaking at a recent pre-show audience address in Cooperstown. “The end of World War I. The birth of Leonard Bernstein. And the premiere of this piece” – this last a reference to Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which was…

Capital Ukrainian Festival: A Global and Artistic Experience

By Hassan Laghcha on 8 June 2018 Dance, Folk, Multimedia, Popular Music, Theatre, World Music

From July 20 to 22, Ottawa will welcome the fourth edition of the Capital Ukrainian Festival. More than 500 artists from all corners of the country as well as the United States and Ukraine will converge for this three-day weekend event. Jane Kolbe, the organizing committee’s president, wants the event to be a truly global and multicultural experience. There will be traditional music to be heard, songs to be sung and dances to be seen. But the program also offers a wide array of cultural activities for young and old, including a village market, a food court, a beer garden,…

Ondinnok: A theatre in search of healing

By Nathalie de Han on 5 June 2018 Dance, Indigenous

First Nations theatre company Ondinnok was the first in Quebec to offer a new means of dramatic expression to its community. “Ondinnok” is a Huron word referring to a theatrical healing ritual that unveils the secret desire of the soul. Born in the urgent environment of cultural reconstruction, Ondinnok aims to reconquer an imaginary land of dreams as well as to repatriate memories in order to see the future. Since its first production, Le Porteur des peines du monde (1984), Ondinnok has taken us through three great circles of creation; the mythological theater, the healing theater and a theater exploring…

Lara Kramer: Generational Questioning

By Nathalie de Han on 5 June 2018 Dance, Indigenous

A choreographer and multidisciplinary artist of Ojie-Cree and Mennonite origin who has been recognized as a human-rights activist by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, Lara Kramer works with an awareness of the brutal relations between Indigenous people and colonial society. Kramer is a professor at the Indigenous Dance Residency at the Banff Centre. Her work addresses scars resulting from cultural genocide. Fragment (2009) is inspired by her mother’s stories about the Canadian residential schools; Native Girl Syndrome (2013) addresses the internal trauma of Indigenous women. Windigo (FTA-2018 + CNA 2019) is a work in which traumas are externalized through various…

The Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur Offers Unique Programming

By Newswire on 2 May 2018 Classical Music, Dance

MONTRÉAL, May 2, 2018 /CNW/ – Today the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, announced the renewal of the Government of Canada’s support for the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur for the next three years. The Department of Canadian Heritage has allocated $65,000each year to the Festival through the Canada Arts Presentation Fund. This year, the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur will take place from August 2 to 12. This major cultural event offers a highly diverse lineup, and showcases musicians and dancers from around the world. Quotes “For over 25 years, the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur has…

Photo: Sasha Onyshchenko

The most famous scandal in the history of music

By Robert Kilborn on 16 March 2018 Dance

Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets renovates The Rite of Spring and The Firebird. In Honour Of and Presto-Detto charm. All new choreographies. Avert your eyes and cover your ears, Young Lady In Paris, on the evening of 29 May 1913, the Ballets Russes lobbed a jeroboam-sized Molotov cocktail into the plush amaranth of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The offending incendiary device was The Rite of Spring, a new ballet that shocked, baffled and outraged journalists, musos, and pearl-clutchers alike. At this just-opened, decidedly modern theatre, located at 15 avenue Montaigne, top hats, pince-nez, and brocaded gowns elegantly mingled. In the audience:…

Discover Authentic Flamenco!

By O.Delaire on 12 November 2017 Dance, Scena Arts

Flamenco is a fascinating world of melodies and dances full of passion and fire that warms our hearts. Caroline Planté and Fernando Gallego “El Bancalero”, two emblematic figures of flamenco in Montreal, offer us two shows, Un dia cualquiera and Remembranzas. The guitarist Caroline Planté is from Montreal. She began to learn guitar at the age of 7 with her father Marcel Planté “El Rubio » as a teacher, he transmitted her the art of accompanying dance and singing and his passion for flamenco music. It is with him also that she makes her first shows. Winner of several prestigious scholarships,…

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