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

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