DANCE IN VANCOUVER MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCES

COMPANY BIOGRAPHIES

Program One

MovEnt Formed in 2001, MovEnt is devoted to creating and producing new contemporary dance work, supporting new professional dance artists and developing an audience for contemporary dance. Searching out a physicality of strength and urban contemporary style, MovEnt aspires to choreograph and produce dance that encourages high expectations and discovers engaging art. Directed by Julie-anne Saroyan and Day Helesic, MovEnt creates and produces dance that is artful and accessible. MovEnt introduces dance to a new audience through both conventional and unconventional productions, thereby broadening the audience base for dance. MovEnt reaches out to the community by offering workshops, open rehearsals, mentoring activities and dance events that bring an enjoyment of dance to the public. Encouraging and developing a sense of excitement for dance is MovEnt's fundamental aspiration. MovEnt supports the creation of new choreography by Co Artistic Producer Day Helesic, whose choreographies have enjoyed multiple presentations across Canada, as well as in Seattle Washington. Helesic's dance works are bold and kinetic, a combination of technical virtuosity and abandoned physicality. MovEnt is also presents the ever-popular Dances for a Small Stage series, a dance which showcases fantastic contemporary dance on a miniscule stage at an East side Vancouver Legion. The Small Stage series has been a mainstay of theVancouver arts scene for seven years. www.movent.ca

The plastic orchid factory was founded in 2008. The company employs technical design and innovative choreography to build abstract, dislocated work that attempts to reflect a Western 21^st century perspective. Artistic director and choreographer James Gnam trained at the National Ballet School of Canada and danced professionally with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, Joe Ink and Ballet British Columbia. As a choreographer he has been commissioned by the Ballet BC Mentor Program, the Chutzpah Festival, Dances for a Small Stage, and Arts Umbrella Dance Company. The plastic orchid factory was incorporated as a performance company supporting the work James creates with his wife Natalie LeFebvre-Gnam, and has been presented at the Dancing on the Edge  festival, the Vancouver International Dance Festival, Series 8:08 in Toronto, the InFrinGing Dance Festival in Nanaimo and the ROMP! Festival in Victoria. www.plasticorchidfactory.com

Rob Kitsos is an acclaimed dancer, dance instructor, performing artist and choreographer who has appeared with dance companies across the United States, Europe and Asia. He has a strong grounding in classic and contemporary dance techniques, and continues to experiment with new blends of dance that combine movement and text, digital sound and video and more. In addition to choreographing and performing, Rob has been teaching dance in universities for eleven years. He was a full time faculty member at the University of Washington from 1998-2002. In 2002, Rob began a two-year Senior Lecturer position at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. In 2004, Rob joined the faculty of Simon Fraser University as an Assistant Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts. He has performed his own and other works at international festivals on four continents, including the Spoletto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, the World Expo in Lisbon, the Grec Festival in Barcelona, the Palais Royale in Paris, and others in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands and Venezuela. Kitsos has also appeared in well-known theaters including the Cultural Center in Hong Kong, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Joyce Theater and DTW in New York. Rob has been a member of more than fifteen performing companies which cover a broad range of styles from mime to hip hop to ballet, including Doug Elkins Dance Company, Gina Gibney Dance, Pat Graney, the Chamber Dance Company and the Berkshire Ballet.

His work combines a broad range of skills. He has studied Mime at Ecole Jacques Lacoq in Paris and played drums in a rock band in popular clubs like CBGB's in New York City as well as a tour through Spain in 2004. Rob records drums and percussion for the Westport Sunrise Sessions, which just completed its second album. He has also composed and performed many of his own sound scores for his choreography. Rob has recently been experimenting with digital video production and photography. http://www.sfu.ca/~rkitsos/

Program Two

Animals of Distinction Dana Gingras was born in Canada then grew up in Argentina and Scotland. In 1993, Gingras (with Noam Gagnon and Jean Yves Theriault) co-founded The Holy Body Tattoo as a multi-media dance company. Since its inception, the company has received both critical and audience acclaim. The company has been Artist in Residence at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre since 1998 and has captured a number of significant awards and honours for both its stage and film work. In 1997, our brief eternity won The Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Ensemble Performance. The work has been performed over one hundred times in Canada, Europe and the US. Circa, which received the inaugural Alcan Performing Arts Award, has been performed around the world, including at Ein Fest in Wuppertal, Germany at the invitation of Pina Bausch, and at London's Barbican Theatre. Running Wild, a collection of solos and duos, premiered in Vancouver in May 2004, and toured across Canada and to China. monumental, The Holy Body Tattoo's most recent work, involves the company's largest performing ensemble to date.

Dana has collaborated internationally on a number of different projects with a wide range of artists including designer Steven R. Gilmore, filmmaker William Morrison, writer William Gibson, visual artist Jenny Holzer, musicians The Tiger Lillies, Iva Bittova, Warren Ellis (The Dirty Three), Steven Severin (Siouxie & the Banshees), Roger Tellier-Craig (Fly Pan Am) and The Tindersticks. Her most recent collaboration is with animator and programmer James Paterson with whom she is currently creating a full evening of work entitled Smash Up, through her solo project Animals of Distinction. www.animalsofdistinction.org www.holybodytattoo.org

The 605 Collective is Shay Kuebler, Lisa Gelley, Josh Martin, Sasha Kozak and Maiko Miyauchi, five Vancouver-based dance artists committed to the creation and performance of new work inspired by both urban and contemporary dance. In various combinations, these uniquely talented individuals craft dances that satisfy their passion for many disciplines, resulting in highly athletic and visually stirring creations. The freedom found in this cohesion has been the driving force for The 605 Collective and has inspired further exploration of this movement and its place in Canadian arts. With the group's extreme versatility, 605 creates by using one another as the canvas for their ideas and visions. By collaborating and pulling from their diverse movement vocabularies, the artists of 605 are pushing past their individual limitations towards new possibilities.                                                                                         

The 605 Collective began in a small live/work studio, apartment #605, located in East Vancouver. With a built-in 450sqft dance floor and mirrors, these five artists trained each other, sharing their experience and colliding ideas and information from their various dance backgrounds to create a unified voice and establish a unique aesthetic that represented them all. Throughout 2008 and 2009, the collective will be working on various projects including a commission from Dana Gingras (Animals of Distinction, Holy Body Tattoo) and 605's first full-length production to be premiered at Dancing On The Edge Festival, in July 2009. The collective was chosen as The Dance Centre's Artist-In-Residence for the 2008/09 Season and also recently traveled to Quebec for a residency at Usine C Creation Centre in Montreal. The collective's work has been presented numerous times throughout British Columbia including ROMP Contemporary Dance Festival (Victoria), at five separate New Works performances, Art On The Street Festival (Granville Island), The Dance Centre's International Dance Day, Dancing on the Edge Festival (Firehall Arts Centre), and by MovEnt's Dances for A Small Stage 19 and 20. 605 has been invited to perform throughout the upcoming months at Dancing on the Edge Festival, and in Ottawa at Canada Dance Festival's Hip Hop 360. www.605collective.com

Program Three

MOVE: the company

Founded in 2005, by its present Artistic Director, Josh Beamish, MOVE: the company is a contemporary jazz dance company committed to the creation and performance of original choreographic works by both emerging and established artists. Consisting of twenty well-rounded dancers, the company's principal focus is the development of the contemporary and jazz dance industry in Vancouver and beyond. The company also aims to include collaborators from other arts forms, such as video, music, spoken word and theatre, through involvement in the creative process. MOVE: the company is dedicated to the presentation of new, challenging and exciting works and promises to provide a performance experience the audience won't soon forget. www.movethecompany.com

Sara Coffin Born in Nova Scotia, Sara Coffin is a Vancouver-based dancer and choreographer. She completed her BFA in dance at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts and her Kinesiology degree (BScK) at Dalhousie University. Notable artists she has worked with include The Holy Body Tattoo in monumental, Daelik, Mascall Dance, Susan Elliott, Susan Lee and Lesandra Dodson, Deborah Dunn, and Peter Chin, with the TILT: sound + motion dance company. Her own choreography has been presented in Nova Scotia, Toronto and Vancouver; including the Dancing on The Edge Festival, ROMP! (Victoria), Dances for a Small Stage, 12 Minutes Max, Pulse (at Scotiabank Dance Centre), Video-In, Toronto's 808 series, and at TILT's Choreographic Workshop (Toronto). Coffin studied at the Impulstanz International Dance Festival in Vienna, supported by the Canada Council in 2005. She received the 2005 BC Emerging Dance Artist Award, awarded by the Holy Body Tattoo Dance Company; the BC Arts Council Senior Scholarship Award for choreography (2002), and The Pat Richards Choreographic Award (1999,1998); and is Dance Centre Artist-in-Residence during the 2009-2010 season. Most recently she received the biennial Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award. She is a co-founder of SINS Dance (Sometimes In Nova Scotia), a collective based in Nova Scotia that traverses Canada. She also currently teaches contemporary dance at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and is an assistant programmer for the dance program. www.saracoffin.com

MACHiNENOiSY is a contemporary dance company based in Vancouver under the artistic direction of Delia Brett and Daelik. The company's mandate is to foster the research and creation of innovative performances that transcend the traditional notions of dance and theatre. Delia and Daelik are dedicated to the investigation of movement as an expressive art form and to the creative exchange of ideas. To these ends they actively strive to collaborate with other artistic mediums and interact with the international dance community. Both began their careers as actors, trained at Main Dance Training Program and worked with EDAM Dance. Delia has danced with Battery opera, Trial And Eros, Kinesis, Lola Dance, Co Erasga, and countless others. Daelik has danced with, among others, Kinesis Dance, DanStaBat, Par B.L. eux, Movent, Co. Erasga, and in the works of: Julia Sasso, Serge Bennathan, and Roger Sinha, and in Europe with Earthfall, Tanzcompagnie Rubato, Angela Guierrero, and Be van Vark. The works of MACHiNENOiSY have been presented in Canada as well as internationally, including being commissioned by Festival Danse en Vol to create a full evening of dance presented in Brussels and Delia's solo Twister, commissioned to be performed in Innsbruck Austria. Most recently the company performed Vancouver VS Vancouver in Quebec City, France and Greece. www.machinenoisy.com

Program Four

Kinesis Dance somatheatro Founded in 1986, the company seeks to explore the human condition through contemporary dance and physical theatre. Under the artistic direction of Greek-Canadian Paraskevas Terezakis, the company creates highly visual and emotional works which combine live performance with multimedia, text, design, and original musical composition. Often inspired by classical Greek theatre, Terezakis explores the visceral and emotional landscape of the human condition. Terezakis began his professional training in his native Greece, where his professional career started in theatre and dance with Experimental Ballet Athens. After moving to Canada in 1979, he studied at Toronto Dance Theatre, York University, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 1986, he started Kinesis Dance somatheatro and since then the company has performed world-wide over forty original dance works for solo, duet, and groups. Terezakis' work is strongly influenced by two identities: his contemporary Canadian experience and his Greek heritage. His work focuses on the volume and intensity of the body and its movement in relation to space - the space around the dancer, the space between the dancers, and how the body expresses movement from the inside outwards. His focus is on the relations between the body, time, and space. www.kinesisdance.org

Co. ERASGA was founded by Alvin Erasga Tolentino, whose solo and ensemble work spans global audiences. An unpredictable contemporary performing artist renowned for combining sublime Asian minimalism with abstract and startling kinetic expression, Tolentino expresses a unique language that is cross cultural, multi-media and hybrid. In 2000 he founded Co.ERASGA, which promotes the art of dance by collaborating with dancers and choreographers and working with diverse art forms such as music, film/video, theatre, and the visual arts. To date, Tolentino has created multiple full-length creations for the company that includes SOLA 2000, BATO/Stone 2001, FIELD 2003, SHE SAID 2004, OrienTik/Portrait 2005, and BODYGlass in 2006/07 with Peter Chin. The company has presented work across Canada and in festivals and venues as far as Scotland, France, Italy, Belgium, the Philippines, Singapore and Venezuela. www.companyerasgadance.ca

Program Five

Karen Jamieson Dance (KJD), under the artistic direction of Karen Jamieson, was formed in 1983. Since that time, the work of this company has been challenging the boundaries of contemporary dance in Canada. KJD creates dance as a mythic, poetic language that explores the tension between form and energy, discovers the tipping point between structure and raw emotion and develops dancers to speak that language. Concerns of the company are: to develop a post-colonial dance, dance as a significant force in building contemporary culture, dance to engage cultures and communities through a medium of "physical poetry" that connects us all. The dance practice of KJD includes staged choreography, community engaged dance, site-specific dance and cultural dialogue through dance with First Nations artists and thinkers. The current focus of KJD augers a new direction that goes both forward, to new work emerging and backward to a few signature works from the past, while simultaneously connecting the different arenas of the company's creative practice. www.kjdance.ca