Always on their toes, last week Live Art Productions ended their season with Tedd Robinson’s final performance; presented this year’s Diane Moore Scholarship Award to Halifax choreographer and dance teacher Veronique MacKenzie and announced next season’s line-up. Dance fans can look forward to performances by Martin Belanger, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, Nova Bhattacharya, Ballet Jorgen Canada, Suzanne Miller and Allan Paivio, plus the return of the formidable Compagnie Marie Chouinard and new work by hometown favourites Mocean Dance.
Mocean Dance’s own final performance of the season, Given the Circumstances, is on this weekend (May 22-24, 8pm) at the Sir James Dunn Theatre. Look for new solos by company members Sara Harrigan and Carolle Crooks, plus pieces by Lisa Phinney and New Brunswick’s Lesandra Dodson.
According to Crooks, who is Mocean’s co-artistic director, these works came from a common inspiration: a left/right brain personality test that Harrigan brought to the studio, when she was choreographing a solo for Crooks.
“Our results revealed some strong left-brain personalities—logical, orderly and rational, despite our current career choice,” says Crooks. “Sara created a solo exploring these left-brain traits. In response, I worked with right-brain traits to create a solo based on creativity, emotion, instinct and holism. These solo works were given as inspiration to Lesandra Dodson to create a new trio for the company, resulting in ‘You Tackle a Staircase Face On.’”
Dodson was inspired by the left-brain trait of creating instructions and lists, referencing Spanish writer Julio Cortazar’s The Instruction Manual, “an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction manual format.” Phinney, a co-founder and former Mocean member, “took several emerging themes from these works as the impetus for her duet, including the dichotomy of instinct and reason,” says Crooks. “The process of creating the works in sequence in a choreographic chain reaction, and the dichotomy of the left and right brain hemispheres as the original seed of inspiration, has resulted in interesting and clever connections in all four works.”
Because all works were created in sequence, expect to find themes, ideas and movement that still reflect each choreographer’s and Mocean’s signature style—“highly physical and movement-based and also rich in emotive qualities.”
Tickets for Given the Circumstances are $17/$22, call 494-3820.
This article appears in May 15-21, 2008.