PROVOCATIVE, SCARY AND SOMETIMES FUNNY
Good Women Dance Collective debuts work from Montreal artist
Mayday. Mayday. Sound the alarm.
Edmonton’s Good Women Dance Collective’s Convergence kicks off their first full-length season with the debut of a work by Montreal choreographer Melanie Demers of Mayday Danse, Thursday, Nov. 26 through Saturday, Nov. 28.
Demers’ company, named after distress calls, uses dance to shine the light on the darker elements of human behaviour and invite audiences to become agents of social change.
The fact that this small group of Edmonton dancers — known for dynamic, highly physical and emotionally driven dance — was able to draw this high-calibre Montreal collaborator signals the rise and maturation of the GWDC on the greater Canadian dance scene.
“We are trying to exist as a hub for dance in Edmonton, but Montreal very much is an established hub for dance in Canada. To be able to work with someone from a hub like Montreal is a feat in itself,” says Good Women dancer Alison Kause.
“Melanie’s work is revered for being super provocative in an intelligent way. It is an intelligent spectacle and something entirely new for us. This is the ultimate in professional development for us. We want to create work that provokes people to think. And partnering with new people with different ideas benefits our season, our audiences, and the city of Edmonton because we don’t always get to see the work coming out of Montreal. But here it is. On Edmonton bodies.”
Kause, fellow GWDC artists Ainsley Hillyard, Alida Nyquist-Schultz and Kate Stashko, and longtime collaborator Richard Lee, look forward to the challenges of delivering the new 30-minute piece, entitled We’ll be Fine.
“It is really out there," says Kause. “She’s having us do things we’ve never done before. It is quite provocative. Sometimes terrifying. Sometimes funny.”
The group headed to Montreal in August for three weeks of gruelling rehearsals with Demers, says Kause. “Our bodies got completely destroyed. My knees were total hamburger. Physically it was a major challenge and it was awesome.”
Demers began with a basic list of movement commands such as “drop to the floor,” “disappear,” “stand up slowly,” or “get lazy,” and built the dance around those instructions by calling them out and having each of the dancers respond as individuals to those prompts.
“Each of us created our own movement series but there was a kind of unison, or group intelligence that emerged, because we all had the same starting point,” explains Kause. “The whole piece is about hooking on to other people. You want to do what you want to do but it is also about moving together or choosing to move apart.
“We are kind of like a giant brain with synapses that work with and against each other. ... She includes vocals, body movements and character and makes it all happen instantly without a lot of buildup and easing into it. That’s really challenging and different for us. We want to emulate that kind of energy and find that kind of performance deep within ourselves.”
Also debuting at Convergence is A Necessary Fable by Kayla Henry. Henry is a Calgary-based choreographer who previously trained alongside GWDC artists Ainsley Hillyard and Alida Nyquist- Schultz at the School of Contemporary Dancers in Winnipeg. She presented an initial version of this work at GWDC’s 2015 What’s Cooking? event.
Our bodies got completely destroyed. My knees were total hamburger. Physically it was a major challenge and it was awesome.