Jun. 23, 2010 - Issue #766: G8

Prevue

Feats of footwork

The eighth annual dance festival breaks down barriers

It may be easy—perhaps too easy—to pigeonhole dance into a certain set of expectations about style, performance and audience: you're either into ballet, or tap, or contemporary or East Indian, and too often these categories seem mutually exclusive from each other. However, the Alberta Dance Alliance (ADA) aims to break down these barriers with its eighth annual Feats Festival.

"The festival has always been about a celebration of dance for as many communities as we can have," states Bobbi Westman, Executive Director of ADA. "We try very hard to bridge the professional community with the public, and stage a place for the public to try dance." Indeed, this festival isn't just about gathering people together to watch traditional dance performances (though some events cater to this as well); the Feats Festival also provides the general public, people of all ages and levels of dance experience, with a chance to see dance as well as learn some moves for themselves.

In the festival's youth component, a few young people will join the performance and take classes with various instructors. The Feats Festival also teamed up with the International Jazz Festival to host some dance shows in-between performances of jazz artists at Jazz in the Park, an annual Jazz Festival event held at Louise McKinney Park. The dancers will both perform and teach people some steps. "The audience can get up and move around and have an open time to play with their kids," says Westman.

There will also be a flash mob at some point during the festival, and anyone can visit the ADA website, learn the choreography from an instructor and participate. The festival will also feature an online living room dance party: "People can come online and show us their best dance, and then that will be showcased in public," explains Westman—this could prove rather interesting, especially given the sort of dancing I've seen happen in various living rooms. Let's hope some participants bring a web cam to their Canada Day parties.

Though the festival is mainly local, largely featuring Edmonton-based artists, it also has a broader pull—many of these dancers have moved elsewhere looking for work and are only now returning home, so they may be more well-known abroad than they are here.

"The program is also diverse in terms of its showcasing," Westman notes. "There's Indian work in there, some southeast Asian, contemporary ballet, modern contemporary dance, tap—it gives a sampling for an audience to take a look at, as well as celebrate, the real diversity that we have within dance."

Westman goes on to state that this year's festival focused particularly on finding ways to partner with new audiences and potential dance enthusiasts, as well as provide more opportunities for families to come together and dance. "But at the end of the day, it's really just about celebrating what we do as a dance community." V

Fri, Jun 25 – Sun, Jul 4
Feats festival
Various locations
$15 for main stage performances
Full schedule available at abdancealliance.ab.ca vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus