In 2014/15 Dance Victoria will join with several Canadian partners including the National Arts Centre, and at least one international partner (London’s Sadler’s Wells) to contribute to the commission of a new collaboration between Crystal Pite and Vancouver’s Jonathon Young.
Entitled Betroffenheit, the finished work will premiere during the Pan Am Games cultural festival in July 2015, kicking off an extensive tour in 2016 across Canada and England. Confirmed tour venues and co-producers are: Sadlers’ Wells (London UK), National Arts Centre (Ottawa), L’Agora de la Danse (Montreal), Dance Victoria (Victoria, BC), Citadel Theatre (Edmonton).
Kidd Pivot will join with the Electric Company Theatre to develop, workshop and produce Betroffenheit, a new full-length work merging theatre and dance. This innovative, boundary-stretching project is a creative collaboration by writer/performer Jonathon Young and director/choreographer Crystal Pite.
Also confirmed on the creative team are sound designers Meg Roe, Alessandro Juliani, composer Owen Belton, set designer Jay Taylor, costume designer Nancy Bryant and cinematographer Brian Johnson. In addition, Electric Company core member Kevin Kerr will collaborate in a dramaturgical role – shaping the text and collaborating on theme and content.
The co-production between Kidd Pivot and the Electric Company Theatre has, in many ways, been a long time coming. With her exceptional recent works Dark Matters and The Tempest Replica, Pite has created deliciously theatrical worlds, inspired by narrative and character while retaining all the poetic freedom of modern dance. Electric Company shares Pite’s passion for visually striking performance fusing text, design and physicality. Over the years the two principals of KP and ECT have worked together, shared ideas and been mutual admirers of each other’s work. This multi-disciplinary project will take their shared sensibility further as they build a new piece together for an actor and five Canadian dancers.
The project will be developed in multiple phases in British Columbia, including research, creation and production. In addition to the Betroffenheit script-work, there will be two script/design workshops at SFU Woodward’s Vancouver location during the month of June and September 2014. This will be when the core collaborators begin building the physical world of the stage, generating content and creating a road map for rehearsal. An extended creation/rehearsal period is scheduled for November 17, 2014 – January 18, 2015 at Progress Lab in Vancouver. Strategically, the first presentation of the work will be during the 2015 PuSh Festival “Push – Off” series of new works for industry contacts. The first full public presentation will be the 2015 Toronto premiere.