Neighbourhood Dance Works Turns 40

The company has become Newfoundland and Labrador’s primary source of professional contemporary dance

The company has become Newfoundland and Labrador’s primary source of professional contemporary dance

This fall, Neighbourhood Dance Works turns 40, a major milestone the company is proud to be celebrating.

As Newfoundland and Labrador’s primary source of professional contemporary dance, Neighbourhood Dance Works and the Festival of New Dance (an annual festival produced by the company) have been key facilitators in the exchange of skills and knowledge between local, national and international communities. The company fosters the advancement of both emerging and mature choreographers and showcases, as Calla Lachance, the artistic director, says, “the power of the human body to express really amazing things.”

Despite their expansion over the past four decades, their ethos remains the same: supporting artists, first and foremost. “We only exist because artists exist,” says Lachance.

This focus on the dance community has been the foundation of the company since its inception. “Neighbourhood Dance Works grew out of a powerful place, a lot of free-minded people who were so willing to dive in and work together … [with] an immense drive for making space for dance to happen,” says Cathy Ferri, one of the company’s founders.

As it turns out, Newfoundland was hungry for what Neighbourhood Dance Works had to offer. Ferri says the reception from the community has been great, so great that the company quickly became a leader in the cultural sector of the region and their many initiatives have placed Newfoundland on the national stage.

While they are players at the national level, Lachance notes, “It’s not our job to follow everyone else’s lead. … We need to be uniquely ourselves.” She feels that because they have dealt with deficits in infrastructure due to their location, they have had to be creative in how they build community, which has led to “a unique unfolding.”

This uniqueness is something that is felt by artists that have been supported by the company. Ten years after its inception, Neighbourhood Dance Works presented their first annual Festival of New Dance, which turns 30 this year. Denise Fujiwara’s work has been presented at the festival many times.

“Newfoundland artists have been doing interdisciplinary work since forever. The rest of the world is just catching up,” Fujiwara says. “The Festival of New Dance and Neighbourhood Dance Works are crucial to the development of an important and diverse part of the Canadian dance landscape.”

This year, the hope is that an in-person festival will be possible, complete with a birthday cake raffle in a nod to their annual pie auction. For audiences new and returning, Lachance hopes their presentations help make sense of things that are “hard to process,” an especially poignant sentiment given the challenges of the last year.

“We have an amazing foundation to do what we’re doing and to continue. … [But] we want to be part of the care work as well,” says Lachance. With this in mind, the direction of the company and the festival will be informed by questions she has always asked: “What do people need to see right now? What are the works that really speak to this moment? We want to bring meaning to the community and expand the view of dance as a discipline.”

On Sept. 19, Dance Collection Danse will present its third annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony, honouring a diverse group of dance artists from across Canada. Usually held at The Globe and Mail Centre, the event will have a more intimate feeling this year with a smaller group gathered at the gorgeous Toronto Botanical Garden. While the affair will be petite compared to its usual scale, the number of people celebrating this important moment in dance history will be much larger than ever before; it will be filmed and made available online on Sept. 26.

Some of the best ideas take time to fully bloom and the same is true with the Hall of Fame. While the inaugural event was held in 1986 following the Encore! Encore! reconstruction project, the Hall of Fame wasn’t reignited until 2018, in an event that Vickie Fagan, the event producer and Dance Collection Danse’s director of development, describes as “quite electric.”

“I felt like I died and went to dance heaven,” says Fagan. “The energy in the room was incredible.” Fagan attributes some of this electricity to the importance of the event; it honours incredible members of Canadian dance communities in a way that has not happened in the past. She says attendees often comment on having “a real awakening about how deep our history is.”

As a unique organization that straddles the performing arts, museum and archival communities, Dance Collection Danse is particularly suited to hosting this event, which doubles as their yearly fundraiser. It’s the perfect way, as Fagan says, to “put a face on what DCD does.”

Dance icon Margie Gillis, one of this year’s inductees, feels honoured to receive this award and sees the Hall of Fame as an important way to “help us be seen and help us see each other too,” she says. “The awards highlight who we are.” She says she often looks or relooks at the work of inductees as it’s an opportunity to “see what has been accomplished, what can be accomplished and hope for us generationally to move this art form forward.”

The Sandra Faire Next Generation Award, sponsored by Ivan Fecan, is new this year and will go to Ilter Ibrahimof, artistic director of Fall for Dance North. Created because Dance Collection Danse “wanted a way to recognize people who are working today and have made a significant impact already,” it’s a meaningful way to connect past generations to the next while remembering the late Sandra Faire, who was an avid supporter of dance.

Another way the organization is making this connection is by showcasing artists in short performances, something that will happen again at this year’s event.

With so much to celebrate and look forward to, the 2021 Hall of Fame ceremony promises to be a night to remember for dance lovers across the country, an exciting opportunity to gather during a challenging year while learning something new about Canadian dance history.

For tickets, head to dcd.ca, and follow @dancecollectiondanse on Instagram for the latest from this seminal Canadian organization.