Dancing down creative pathways
Popular arts festival Fall for Dance North is leveraging potential of virtual programming
For the second year in a row, Toronto’s popular — and populist — Fall for Dance North is navigating the constantly shifting currents of a global pandemic and, for this seventh annual event, the festival is charting the safest course it can while still offering enticing and original programs.
Once live performing arts organizations accepted the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a frenzied pivot to virtual. For a lot of folk that might seem a poor substitute for in person, yet going online has its positives.
If you’re putting your work on the web, you have a potentially global audience. The film/video medium opens up creative pathways impossible to follow onstage. Additionally, it has fostered a spirit of co-operation and partnership among artists and organizations that previously did not always exist.
With this in mind, Fall for Dance North artistic director Ilter Ibrahimof and his team are leveraging the global potential of virtual programming and deploying the latest technology to ensure festival audiences will still get the kind of exposure to international dance artists that’s always been its major feature. The artistic scope, quantity of offerings and geographical expanse of the 2021 festival, which includes the premieres of 10 commissions, are unprecedented.
Instead of a pre-pandemic, early October festival centred on five days of multivenue live performances in Toronto, this year’s event has already begun with live outdoor performances in Peterborough, Lakefield, Hamilton and St. Catharines. Fall for Dance North will not officially end until Oct. 29 and even then, depending on the type of ticket you’ve bought, livestream offerings will be available until Nov. 5, an almost eight-week span. The time frame encompasses a diverse range of offerings.
The new “Heirloom” outdoor events, produced in partnership with local presenters, are the lead-in to a smorgasbord of livestreamed performances, pre-recorded “Signature” series commissioned films, podcasts, a film installation at Yonge-Dundas Square featuring a new work by iconic Canadian contemporary dance artist Peggy Baker, and an interactive, augmented reality, photographic installation at Union Station focusing on the jazz expressions of festival artists-in-residence Natasha Powell and
Kimberley Cooper.
Additionally, Powell, artistic director of Toronto’s Holla Jazz, has been working in isolation at the Orillia Centre for Arts and Culture with 11 students from Ryerson University’s Creative School to choreograph “Together Again,” a new work to an original score by Swedish-Canadian singersongwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist Sabine Ndalamba. A documentary short by Jeremy Mimnagh about the making of “Together Again” can be viewed online throughout the festival and there will be live outdoor performances of the work at various Toronto locations.
The first among a number of livestream events opens this week with the adapted-for-thescreen version of “+(DIX),” a work that National Ballet of Canada star Guillaume Côté made earlier this year for the summer arts festival he directs in St-Sauveur, Que.
The title echoes the 10-year homecoming journey of mythical hero Odysseus after the Trojan War, although the roughly hour-long work’s content is more a meditation on the idea of home. “What if the journey was above all a quest to find self?” Côté asks.
The work, directed for this week’s livestream premiere by award-winning Toronto-based filmmaker Vikram Dasgupta, is produced by Côté Danse, a project-based company recently launched by the 40-year-old dancer. “+(DIX)” features Côté and a cast of four versatile young dancers.
For the second festival in a row, in partnership with Toronto’s Citadel + Compagnie, Fall for Dance North presents a four-night livestream series directed for the screen by Oscarnominated Canadian filmmaker Barbara Willis Sweete. “Night Shift,” programmed by Indigenous dance artists Penny Couchie, Christine Friday and Tekaronhiáhkhwa Santee Smith, explores current issues of race, identity and ancestral heritage.
In a festival co-presentation with DanceWorks, the multitalented dancer/choreographer William Yong directs a double bill opening Oct. 7 of Danah Rosales and Sara Porter, stylistically different works but both rooted in queer identity.
Porter presents the film version of her 2018 solo “Getting to know your fruit.” Rosales, (a.k.a. Maldita Siriano 007, mother of the Kiki House of Siriano’s Toronto chapter) offers a new contemporary group work based on the traditional ballroom custom of the grand march that occurs at the start of a house ball.
Versatile American hoofer — tap, jazz, step-dance, clogging, Lindy Hop — Caleb Teicher already shared the stage with Nic Gareiss in each of Fall for Dance North’s outdoor shows but returns Oct. 20 to Harbourfront Centre with his own ensemble for the live-to-air premiere of “More Forever.”
The evening-length show is a visual-aural conversation between Teicher’s choreography and music composed and performed by maverick young American pianist Conrad Tao.
If the festival has a single “big event” it must surely be the ambitious Signature program that opens Oct. 13. Dasgupta directs filmed performances from India, Cuba and Britain featuring respectively the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble — a hit at the first Fall for Dance North in 2015 — Havana’s Malpaso Dance Company in a commissioned work by Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton and, in a real coup for the festival, the union onstage of National Ballet of Canada principal dancer Siphesihle November and his older brother Mthuthuzeli, a dancer and choreographer with London’s Ballet Black.
When Ibrahimof saw “Beyond Moving,” Dasgupta’s 2020 debut feature documentary about Siphe November, his immediate goal was to bring the brothers together for a live stage performance at this year’s festival. While that proved impracticable because of the pandemic, Ibrahimof opted for a digital alternative and flew Siphe to London where he and Mthuthuzeli performed the latter’s “My Mother’s Son.” Dasgupta, locked down in India after filming in the idyllic Nrityagram dance village near Bangalore, was forced to direct the performance remotely.
“Fortunately, I know both of them well,” Dasgupta said. “That made things a lot easier.”
While some Fall for Dance North offerings, such as the podcasts, the Union Station installation and Baker’s “her body as words” are free, many are ticketed at $15. With so much to watch, the festival has introduced a heavily discounted allin livestream pass. For $46 plus HST you get complete access to virtual programming through Nov. 5.