Dances From A Distance

BACKGROUND
With funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, Dance Ontario has been working in centres across the province since 2001 taking various forms of dance to professional venues in Belleville, Orangeville, Huntsville, Ottawa, Orillia, Guelph, Kingston, Kitchener, Parry Sound and Manitoulin Island. 3 x 3 x 3 Dance took culture specific styles to various centres. Dance For Youth Forums explored the needs of specific communities, drawing information from school boards, artists, venues and regional arts councils. These were followed by Community Dance Partnerships, a project that worked to develop partners within those communities in order to decrease financial risk and enable dance activity, specifically dance presentation in professional venues. The centres we are currently working with are Hamilton, London, Sault Ste Marie and North Bay. New presenters have been established in Hamilton (Public Utility Performance) and London (London Community Players/The Palace Theatre).

The natural progression of these activities is to develop an initiative that will focus on building longer term relationships between artists and schools that draws on students' enthusiasm for social networks, utilizing their internet skills to hone their creativity.

PROJECT
Dance Ontario is currently designing a new arts education project, culminating in a performance that would take diverse forms of dance into schools and venues in Ontario's less served regions. Intended to deepen contact between schools and dance artists, the project will use the Internet and DVD format to allow both a local and a Toronto-based choreographer to work with a school over a 10-month period to create a dance piece incorporating participating students' storyline and movement interpretations of a specific choreographic style. The project would draw from other school departments such as Media, Technology, Theatre, English etc.

The initiative would incorporate:
(i) On-line instruction through blogging and videography;
(ii) A residency program; and
(iii) Culminate in a performance at a professional venue.

It would involve professional dance artists from Toronto and the participating municipality, as well as local schools and venues. Students would develop their own storyline and, with their teacher, select a professional choreographer to create the movement language, preferably with the involvement of a local dance artist acting as an outside eye/liaison/rehearsal director. Web-based videography would be a key component in developing the choreography, allowing the students to interact with the off-site Toronto-based choreographer and vice versa. The latter would refine the piece over a week-long residency followed by a performance at the local professional venue on a shared program with the choreographer's company. This would deepen the students understanding of the creative process and allow them to explore new styles. It would also link to other curriculum modules such as literacy and numeracy.

Dance Ontario would draw on contacts made through the Forums and Community Dance Partnerships.