FIVE REASONS
Here’s why you should check out Dancing on the Edge Festival,
1. Beijing Modern Dance Company
This year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival features over 80 of the country’s finest dance artists and choreographers. This year’s festival is also showcasing a piece from China’s leading professional modern dance company, BMDC. The company performs OathMidnight Rain, a work which explores Samsara, the Buddhist cycle of continuous birth, life and death.
2. Helen Simard
Calling all Iggy Pop fans: this Montreal-based choreographer/company closes the festival with No Fun, a performance based on the music and movement of the godfather of punk himself.
3. Cori Caulfield
The Vancouver choreographer and her company presents The Poets. The work is part of the mixed program Edge 4, and features dancers interpreting the Tragically Hip song, a solo tap dance piece by Hailley Caulfield Postle to an original remix of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, and a solo piece for Caulfield to words and music by Leonard Cohen.
4. Chick Snipper
Former Vancouverite Snipper returns with the world premiere of Phasmida & Scorpiones, a piece that shows us what happens when two predators, the stick insect and the scorpion (as interpreted by non-insects Jess Ames and Julianne Chapple), meet.
5. Aeriosa Dance Society
Now in its 29th year, the festival continues its tradition of placing dance in unusual outdoor settings. This year’s by-donation site-specific works includes Thunderbird Sharing Ceremony: A Community Celebration of Coast Salish Culture, a collaboration between Aeriosa Dance Society and the Spakwus Slulem Eagle Song Dancers that takes place in Stanley Park.