Dancers’ Studio West explores personal change through Metamorphosis

For all Calgary ballet and movement fans, July is the month to take in the best contemporary dance in the city. Dancers’ Studio West will present three new workshopped performances of Metamorphosis, at the DJD Dance Centre running Thursday through Saturday evenings.

Each summer, the company offers a rare opportunity for a small group of choreographers and dancers to enter DSW’s Dance Action Lab, an eight-week program dedicated to the cultivation of the creative choreographic process collectively culminating in a substantial production.

It is the ideal artistic crucible for three choreographers and seven dancers who work together on a variety of pieces cast in differing contemporary dance styles. And, it is the perfect setting for local audiences to view these results first hand. The Dance Action Lab has a lot to teach us in the community and it is an opportunity we shouldn’t miss.

The company choreographs new works around a central theme and has chosen Metamorphosis — an ideal topic exploring personal and relational change. With choreographies by dancers Shayne Johnson, Catherine Hayward and artistic director Davida Monk, who has led Dancers’ Studio West since 2008 through considerable development, the new works will explore the nature of the many irrevocable changes in our lives that we must inevitably experience, good and bad.

Also joining them will be lighting designer Steve Isom, who is returning for a second year, along with dancers Linn ea Swan, Brandon Maturino and Nicole Charlton- Good brand .( Mat uri no and Charlton-Good brand are supported by the RBC Emerging Artist Project.)

The project also offers company guest dance artists Jared Ebell and Su Lin Tseng opportunities through intensive rehearsal and development to undergo some creative change of their own.

But above all, Metamorphosis describes the nature of dance itself which is constantly evolving into a new form. In this way, dance deals with the largest issues of our lives, holding a mirror up to nature as the perfect descriptive art ideally suited for explaining our continually changing selves amid the cycles of nature.

“Each choreographer brings their own approach to change.” Monk says, contextualizing the show in light of Japanese butoh, or transformative theatre, a kind of “metamorphic dance par excellence.”

Monk explains butoh perfectly when she declares “it is on the verge of becoming but never completing,” a statement that readily applies to each individual dance, to each of us, of simply life itself, as being a unique work of art.