Overview
Join us for an opportunity to hear dance artists share their creative processes and how they work. Guest companies Holla Jazz, Rock Bottom Movement, Samantha Sutherland and Tanveer Alam will host interactive conversations that provide a window into their dance forms, sharing excerpts of their specific choreography.
About Holla Jazz
Holla Jazz is an award-winning dance company based in Toronto that explores soulful and funky approaches to jazz dance. The Holla Jazz experience is marked by their cool and contemporary way of producing new dance works while inspiring a lasting love and appreciation for jazz dance and music. The company’s inaugural production, FLOOR’D, garnered a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble. Established in 2016 by Artistic Director Natasha Powell, Holla Jazz was founded as a forum for developing and presenting artists who work and improvise to create harmonious and transformative experiences. The company aims to reinvigorate jazz dance with its sister dances, including hip hop and house, as innovative and important vehicles for expression while showcasing freedom and one’s own identity through the spirit of jazz.
About Rock Bottom Movement
Rock Bottom Movement is a collaborative absurdist dance company founded and led by choreographer Alyssa Martin. Based in Toronto, the group has spent the last decade helping to blur the distinctions of dance and theatre, launching irreverently and joyfully from their shared modern dance training. Initially founded as a busking company in 2012, the group has since grown to share work for stage and film at home and abroad, including their most notable works, hollow mountain, Dolphin, fantasylover, String Quartet No. 14 in G Major and MANICPIXIEDREAMGIRLS. They’ve created many of their works collaboratively in residence at art centres, including The Banff Centre, Canadian Stage and The Stratford Festival Lab. The group has earned multiple Dora Mavor Moore Awards and the Canadian Stage Award for Direction. They approach all that they do with high-energy mischief, functional friendship and deep consideration for the audiences who come to play.
About Samantha Sutherland
Samantha Sutherland is a contemporary dance artist, choreographer and teacher based in Tkaronto. Her ancestry is Ktunaxa and Scottish/British settler. She graduated from the Arts Umbrella Dance Diploma Program in 2018 and has worked as a guest artist with Ballet BC and as an associate artist with Red Sky Performance. Samantha has presented choreographic works in the Matriarchs Uprising Festival by O.Dela Arts and the Indigenous Arts Program at the Paprika Festival. She explores what aspects of her culture, history and traditional knowledge can be pulled into her contemporary dance practice. Samantha questions how she can use a dance practice built with a fairly euro-centric training and still honour Indigenous values and the act of decolonization. She strives to keep what she values and loves about classical training and use it to tell the Indigenous story.
About Tanveer Alam
Born and raised in Montreal, Tanveer Alam started his Kathak training with Sudeshna Maulik and continues to study with guru Sandhya Desai. He is a 2019 graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Tanveer has performed in the works of Lata Pada, Brandy Leary, Sashar Zarif, Peter Chin and Harikishan S. Nair. As an emerging choreographer, he has been presented at SummerWorks Performance Festival, Battery Dance Festival, MAI – Montreal arts interculturels and Tangente, to name a few. Tanveer has been supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council. In 2022, Tanveer premiered his new work, The Tagore Project, co-choreographed by Atri Nundy, at Tangente (Montreal) and Sampradaya Dance Creations (Mississauga) and will be performing in the premiere of international choreographer Padmini Chettur’s Chalking, produced by ĀNANDAṀ.
About The National Ballet of Canada
One of the top international ballet companies, The National Ballet of Canada, was founded in 1951 by Celia Franca. One of the leading international ballet companies, the National Ballet has 70 dancers and its own orchestra.
Renowned for its diverse repertoire, the company performs traditional full-length classics, embraces contemporary work and encourages the creation of new ballets and the development of Canadian choreographers. The company’s repertoire of works includes Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Aszure Barton, Marie Chouinard, John Cranko, William Forsythe, James Kudelka, Wayne McGregor, Kenneth McMillan, John Neumeier, Rudolf Nureyev, Crystal Pite, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon and the company’s Choreographic Associates Robert Binet, Guillaume Côté and Alysa Pires.
For the first time in 2020/21, the company commissioned new work specifically for film, including world premieres by Jennifer Archibald, Vanesa Garcia-Ribala Montoya, Kevin A. Ormsby, Brendan Saye, Jera Wolfe and Mr. Côté and Ms. Pires.
Located in Toronto, Canada’s premiere dance company has performed for over 10 million people. The National Ballet has toured in Canada, the USA and internationally with performances in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Israel, Hong Kong, Japan, Italy and Mexico. Most recently, the company appeared in London, Los Angeles, Paris, Hamburg, Moscow and St. Petersburg, New York City and Washington. D.C.
The National Ballet is committed to education and community engagement for families and youth who may not otherwise have the opportunity to experience the joys of ballet. The company has a wide range of age-appropriate programs designed to engage with schools and children in the GTA and communities across Canada. YOU dance, the National Ballet’s signature program, is designed to introduce students in grades four, five and six to the world of dance through FREE workshops and performances.
The National Ballet is a company with its own orchestra as well as production and administrative staff. All the costumes and sets are built at The Gretchen Ross Production Centre. As a pre-eminent builder of full productions for ballet in North America, the National Ballet regularly rents out sets and costumes to ballet companies around the world.
Dates & Times
August 16
7pm – Tanveer Alam
45 mins
August 17
7pm – Samantha Sutherland
45 mins
August 18
7pm – Meredith Webster (Alonzo King's "The Collective Agreement" Stager)
45 mins
August 19
7pm – Rock Bottom Movement
45 mins
August 20
7pm – Holla Jazz
45 mins