Travis Knights, a Brampton-based tap star, collaborated on the short tap film How To Feel.Handout
Struggling to find the right words to express how you feel one year on from George Floyd’s murder?
Some Black artists are using the language of dance to mark the passage of 12 months since that act of violence in Minneapolis that led to a renewed world-wide movement against anti-Black racism.
How To Feel, released on YouTube today, is a video commissioned by Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Co. that features performances by Black tap dancers from Brampton, Chicago, Boston, Tel Aviv, New York and Calgary.
Travis Knights, a Brampton-based tap star who performed at the Vancouver Olympics and has worked with Cirque du Soleil, collaborated with Donna Michelle St. Bernard (currently nominated for the Governor-General’s Award for drama for the third time) on the short tap film.
If that particular dance form seems a strange fit with the occasion, it stems from the fact that May 25 is known as International Tap Dance Day in parts of the world. And, in fact, the unique combination of restraint and rhythm found in tap lends itself well to expressing conflicted feelings.
Next week, TESSEL, a digital short film co-commissioned from the Fall for Dance North festival and Harbourfront Centre, premieres to mark the first anniversary of Blackout Tuesday, a collective action against police brutality and racism that originated in the music industry.
It’s a project led by Toronto choreographer and dancer Esie Mensah that brought together 14 Black dancemakers from across Canada. The resulting film is described as “kaleidoscopic,” and interweaves movement styles from ballet to street dance, from circus to vogue. It will stream for free starting on June 1.
Festival TransAmériques (FTA), Montreal’s always fabulous three-week festival of theatre and dance, opens on Wednesday with a mixture of indoor, outdoor and online work.
This feels like the first major live performance event in Canada to go ahead in almost-normal fashion since the start of the pandemic – with work by the likes of Marie Brassard, Louise Lecavalier and Jordan Tannahill on the bill.
Québec’s plan for déconfinement – a much better word than “re-opening,” no? – officially begins on Friday, but theatres in the province have been open to live audiences since the end of March with distancing and other safety measures in place.)
The 2021 FTA is the final edition with artistic director Martin Faucher at the helm – and the director has a show of his own in the line-up, an adaptation of Réjean Ducharme’s free-verse novel La fille de Christophe Colomb performed by Markita Boies.
It’s one of six shows that will be viewable as webcasts for those who don’t live in or around Montreal - or those who do but aren’t quite ready to emerge from the pandemic cocoon. Three of them will be at least partly accessible to English speakers.
- Je suis une maudite sauvagesse is an adaptation of Innu author An Antane Kapesh’s 1976 autobiographical book of the same title by director Charles Bender; Natasha Kanapé Fontaine is set to perform in Innu, in French and in English (in-person performances June 5, 9 and 10; webcast available June 4 to 21).
- Un temps pour tout is an all-ages dance show created by Sovann Rochon-Prom Tep in which “the hip-hop dancers Pax, Jigsaw and Sangwn express themselves in a spirit of sharing” (in-person performances June 4 to 7; webcast available May 28 to June 14).
- The door opened west is an autobiographical solo show starring the dancer Marc Boivin, which he co-created with Toronto-born, B.C.-based choreographer Sarah Chase. It will be performed in both English and French versions from June 1 to 3, with webcasts available in both languages from June 12 to 29.
Bon spectacle! Wish I could be there in person.
What else to watch this week: The pandemic has been pretty good for one guy at least: George Frideric Handel.
First came Against the Grain’s Messiah/Complex, which got a ton of press, and now Opera Atelier is getting in on the action with a production of the Baroque composer’s The Resurrection, filmed in March and streaming online from May 27 to June 10.
This is the Canadian premiere of Handel’s “first operatic masterpiece”- and it features some of the country’s finest interpreters of his music, such as soprano Carla Huhtanen, soprano Meghan Lindsay, mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy, tenor Colin Ainsworth and bass-baritone Douglas Williams.
You can watch a behind-the-scenes making-of video and buy tickets.
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J. Kelly Nestruck