Gold Winner Alexis Cormier
Silver Winner Véronique MacKenzie
Bronze Winner Sara Coffin
The Woods, currently in residence at Halifax Dance, have had a big, busy seventh year, and artistic director Alexis Cormier, your Best Choreographer, is at the core of it. Though she contains equal amounts of classic and contemporary dance knowledge within her body—as on display in the video for Ben Caplan’s “Birds with Broken Wings”—one of her key challenges is keeping up with hip-hop. “There is a basis of steps from ’90s hip-hop, old school hip-hop—those roots of breakdancing, popping and locking. But hip-hop is such a new art form—ballet is 600 years old, and the steps have names,” says Cormier. “Hip-hop steps, maybe there are 50. Every year, every second there are new steps being created. It’s only 30 years old.” Next up is B-Side in December at the Bus Stop.
