New Event, Big Ideas

Co-artistic directors Catrina von Radecki and Janet Johnson invite you to participate in the next Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival!

Catrina: This year is a significant year for the GCDF as it marks our 15th anniversary!  Over the years, the local dance scene has grown significantly, as have our partnerships with the Guelph Fab 5 (GCDF, Hillside Festival, Guelph Jazz Festival, Festival of Moving Media, Eden Mills Writers’ Festival) and other local arts organizations. We’re being asked now to curate dance events with local artists for more events than ever. 

In turn, local dancers are requesting more opportunities and asking for more ways to become involved. This is incredibly encouraging as it was our dream from the first year that dancers could live, train and perform in Guelph as professional artists. Now that we’ve achieved this goal, we’re looking at how our organization can support the current needs of local dance artists. 

As this is our 15^th anniversary year, we want to shake up the festival format to include community celebration and engagement in a whole new way. As a contemporary dance festival, we want to always stay current and exciting. As a Guelph-based festival, we want to support our local dance artists and engage our audiences.

This year we’re offering a new community-based initiative: a chance for local, professional dance artists to create their own Festival event! 

Artists are encouraged to dream, scheme, and create innovative and cutting-edge ways to perform dance in Guelph. 

This new program will be presented during the 15^th Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival, May 30^th-June 2^nd.

Call for submission deadline is November 1^st!

Artists have complete freedom to present site-specific dance ideas in any way they choose—the only limitation is your imagination. Ideas might include presenting dance in a bar, a storefront, a church, in Market Square, etc., etc.

We want to bring dance to a new and possibly unsuspecting public in a variety of settings in the downtown core. We want our regular dance patrons to view dance in surprising, sometimes intimate, sometimes shocking ways.  We’re looking for vision, integrity, skill, and passion.  We want you to freely explore audacious perspectives, like presenting dance to one audience member at a time, or presenting dance on the side of a building, and so on. 

Janet: I look forward to honouring, celebrating and nudging forward some of the committed, skilled and passionate dance artists of Guelph. It excites me greatly to be able to help facilitate more dance creation in Guelph. The time is ripe as there are many different Guelph-based dance voices, all propelling themselves forward, all deserving of more opportunities to engage in their dance forms. This new event will be a great made-in-Guelph dance event for our community to observe and celebrate!

FYI:

The GCDF will provide our Festival infrastructure, staffing, and promotion to support your ideas, along with an artist fee and production costs.

Please note that although performing artists do not have to be local, local contemporary dance artists will be given preference.

You will find the call for submissions form here.

A huge thank-you to the Guelph Community Foundation for partially funding this new initiative.

We can’t wait to see what you dance up!

Robert Kingsbury at the CSA Nooner

On Wednesday, November 23, Robert Kingsbury performed as part of the CSA Nooner at the University of Guelph. We asked him to describe his experience.

Robert: My first piece of choreography as an adult was site-specific. I was studying music at York University and in an attempt at taking dance classes again, I found myself in site-specific choreography. The class culminated in a showing that toured the concrete jungle campus, stopping in places that the students had chosen for choreography. In studying this type of work before entering the realm of formal dance & technical training, I immediately began to see human movement as part of a larger context and environment. In site-specific work, the choreographer seeks out places where they think that they can make moments happen. For the CSA Nooner, the location is predetermined and so it's more of a case of bringing dance to an environment where it may be surprising.

Some people feel that to present dance in a public space tells people that they can look at art the same way that they look at a water bottle or shoelace. I think that the journey towards embodiment is accessible in every place, every moment and through any kind of interaction so this kind of work excites me. I feel as a choreographer a lot of my time & skill goes into sensing my environment. Through site-specific work I feel that my sense of being can be useful in having an affect on the space. For the Nooner I picked the flight of 6 steps facing away from the audience's seats. To make choices that go against audience expectations is one of the first rules.

The piece that I remounted was originally presented in a parquette just north of Queen & Yonge, in Toronto. This was a place that reeked of urine and was not maintained. I took photos of all of the litter, printed them and put them throughout the space during our performance. As a trio, we did a half hour meditation that moved along the surfaces of the space in an attempt at bringing some gravity and thoughtfulness to the environment. People who frequented the space interacted by joining us in climbing the structures of the parquette as though it were a playground. A man peed in the direction of the performance, but did it in a way that said 'this is what I do here'. We did not take offence, in fact a viewer cried at their perception of what seemed ironic and beautiful.

Needless to say the performance at the University Centre was less interactive. The students that I observed seem shy and in a rush. A little bit of this energy made its way into my performance too. I had set a strong intention to interact with the other dancers and be open to the audience, but felt a little less present than I like to be. Being raised above the audience disconnected me from them. In a theatre, they are usually raised above you. That day I was reminded of the frantic sense of disembodiment I experienced during University. This was for me, the major reason I started dancing again. Full circle.