JOHN 

Choreography: Helen Walkley
Performers: Josh Martin and Billy Marchenski

Time/Date:
Show#1: Wednesday, April 27th at 7:30PM
Show#2: Thursday April 28th at 7:30PM

Duration: 45 minutes

Location: Shu-Box, University of Regina 
​(3737 Wascana Parkway, Regina)

Price: $30 for adults; $20 for children and seniors

NOTE: Masks are required at all NDH events

Artists​

Since 1980 Helen Walkley has, as a contemporary dance artist, certified Laban Movement Analyst and somatic movement educator, lived in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands and Canada - choreographing, performing and teaching. She completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies in the School for Contemporary Arts /Simon Fraser University in 1996 and have since been based in Vancouver. In 2020 she received the Dance Centre’s Isadora award, peer recognition of an artist’s lifetime achievement. http://helenwalkley.com/artist.html
 
Originally from Alberta, Josh Martin is a diversely trained dance artist now residing in Vancouver. He has worked with many creators such as Justine A. Chambers, Out Innerspace, Dana Gingras, Serge Bennathan, Vanessa Goodman, Wen Wei Wang, Helen Walkley and as a member of Le Groupe Dance Lab (Ottawa). For over ten years, Josh Martin has been an Artistic Co-­Director of Company 605, a Vancouver-based organization producing various dance projects, regularly creating and touring new collaborative works throughout Canada, and internationally in the USA, Central America, Europe, Japan and Australia.   www.company605.ca
 
Billy Marchenski completed a BFA in Theatre in the School for Contemporary
Arts/SFU in 2000. He was a founding member of Screaming Flea Theatre for ten
years and has worked in independent theatre and contemporary dance for the past
twenty years, with companies such as Battery Opera, Radix, The Leaky Heaven
Circus, Caravan Farm Theatre, Boca Del Lupo, Kinesis, Co.Erasga Dance, Serge Bennathan, Mascall Dance, Neworld Theatre, Helen Walkley and Kokoro Dance. He is the recipient of the Sydney Risk prize for Outstanding Original play by an emerging writer in 2014 and is the 2021 winner for Best Experimental Film for light-bearer at the Cannes World Film Festival.
 
James Maxwell is a composer of concert music and music for contemporary dance, theatre, film, and media, and is Artistic Co-Director of Restless Productions. Recent works include Mama, do we die when we sleep?, by choreographer Rachel Meyer, The Razor Hiss of a Whisper, for Turning Point Ensemble and Couloir, and Finding itself [it] deviates, for Standing Wave. Upcoming and in-progress works include a new production with Fight With a Stick Performance, a new work for Tempest Flute Choir, and a new interdisciplinary performance project with Restless Productions.
https://www.jamesbmaxwell.com/
 
Lighting designer James Proudfoot from Edinburgh, Scotland, where he received his initial theatre training, has been living in Vancouver since 1993. He is currently Resident Lighting Designer and Lighting Director for Ballet British Columbia and has designed more than 20 pieces for the company.  Specialising in the realm of dance lighting, James has contributed designs for dance works to many local and national companies.
http://www.jamesproudfoot.com/
 
 
Leah Weinstein is a Vancouver-based artist working in sculpture, costume and performance. Using everyday objects and readymade materials, she explores relationships between individuals and collectives, and the space between action and display. She completed an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2014, and her work has been supported by Access Gallery; Dynamo Gallery; the BC Arts Council; Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation; Banff Centre; Touchstones Nelson Museum of Art & History; Charles H Scott Gallery; and City of Richmond Public Art Commissions. http://www.leahweinstein.com/
 
Leslie Parent is a Métis designer and was raised in Chestermere Lake on her family's heritage farm.  She attended Kwantlen Polytechnic University for Fashion Design and has been designing from her White Rock studio for the last 30 years.  Leslie has collaborated with several dance troupes, athletic performance groups, dancers and choreographers in the lower mainland.
 
Chris Nichols is a co-founder and co-owner of Wood Shop Workers Co-op in Vancouver. Founded in 2013, Wood Shop Workers Co-op makes and sells reclaimed wood furniture and interiors, commercial millwork and metalwork, and engages in community collaborations including DIY workshops. As a democratically run worker-owed organization, Wood Shop's mandate is to provide meaningful employment to its members while growing the cooperative economy and being at the forefront of material reuse in Vancouver. https://www.woodshop.coop
 
Helen gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Dance Centre, the School for Contemporary Arts/ Simon Fraser University, the Firehall Arts Centre and SFU Woodwards Cultural Programs.
 
Helen and all the collaborators are grateful to live and work on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples.
​

John is a memoir of my oldest brother John, who disappeared from Vancouver in May of 1969, never to be heard from again. I sourced from an archive of family letters dating from 1959 – 2010, which document the years leading up to his disappearance, his medical history, and the subsequent tracking my parents did of his disappearance. He was twenty-three at the time and I was thirteen.
 
Company profile:

There are multiple meanings in any given moment, dependent upon the point of view of the experience. This is the pathos and beauty of our existence and can render any heart and mind tender. It is this which compels me to create my work, and it is with this that I go out the door every morning to meet all the incidents of a single day. Everyone’s story meets— sometimes colliding and careening—in unarticulated moments as simple as being jostled on a crowded bus. This layering and cross-referencing exposes humanity and is heartbreaking and mind opening.
 
In this sense my work is transpersonal. Through a layering and cross-referencing in my processes there is an energetic transmission through space and time in performance, and everyone receives their own story. Their hearts and minds are touched in a way unique unto themselves, and there is the potential for a sharing of experience.

Key collaborators:

Choreographer/Helen Walkley
Composer/James Maxwell
Light design/James Proudfoot
Text/Helen Walkley and an archive of family letters dating from 1959 – 2010
Performers/Josh Martin and Billy Marchenski
Costume/ Leah Weinstein and Helen Walkley
Construction of the shirts/ Leslie Parent
Set/Helen Walkley
Construction of the box/ Chris Nicols
 
Photo credit: Chris Randle

https://www.helenwalkley.com/index.html

---

Love+Loss Performance Series: Outreach Lutheran Church

• BLOWIN by Robin Poitras and Krista Solheim with Valerie L. Hall
• SINFONIA by Laurence Lemieux

Date/Time: Friday, April 15th at 7:30PM

Location: Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (1909 Ottawa St, Regina)

FREE* and welcome donations

OUTREACH
Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church

​​
BLOWIN

Silk dance with live harpsichord music

Music
Paduana Lachrymae by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) is based on Englishman John Dowland’s lute solo, Lachrimae Pavan.  The popularity of Dowland’s work was so great throughout Europe that arrangements of the Lachrimae appeared for almost every domestic instrument then in use.  He subsequently created a version for voice and lute to the text, “Flow My Tears”, which enjoyed an exceptionally long life.  Sweelinck uses the work as inspiration for one of his many sets of keyboard variations published in Amsterdam.  Sweelinck was noted throughout Europe as a brilliant composer, teacher and organist - one with whom many prominent musicians travelled to study.   He accomplished a magnificent synthesis between the variation technique of the English virginalists and the brilliant style of the Italian organists.  In Sweelinck's Paduana, each of the three main sections is followed by one variation on that section - A A1 B B1 C C1.   
 
Valerie L Hall, BMus, MCM, ARCT, FRCCO (hon. causa)
valerielhall.com

Artists​

Credit: AliLauren Creative Services
​from ​http://valerielhall.com/

Valerie L. Hall
​Nationally renown as an organist, harpsichordist, educator, mentor and church musician, Valerie Hall has given solo recitals across Canada, in the United States and Europe. A native of Winnipeg, she obtained a Bachelor of Music in Organ Performance from the University of Manitoba and a Master of Church Music from Concordia University, River Forest, Illinois. Valerie is an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music and serves on both the Voice and Keyboard faculties of the Conservatory of Performing Arts, University of Regina. As a continuo player on organ and harpsichord, Valerie has performed under the batons of Bramwell Tovey, Ivars Taurins, Rosemary Thomson, Dale Barltrop, Victor Sawa and Gordon Gerrard. She regularly appears as guest harpsichordist with the Regina Symphony Chamber Players. A tireless advocate for Canadian music, Valerie has commissioned substantial repertoire for organ as well as voice. Her long association with Montreal-based soprano Kerry-Anne Kutz has seen the duo tour much of Canada with entertaining and diverse programs of Canadian music for voice and organ. Valerie was recently distinguished with an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Canadian College of Organists (RCCO), a national organization for which she has variously served as National President, National Chair for Membership and Regional Director for the Prairies. Her playing has been featured at national RCCO conventions and she has served on juries for national organ playing competitions. Valerie is a member of the Regina Musicians’ Association (AFM) and the Saskatchewan Registered Music Teachers’ Association (SRMTA).

Credit: Don Hall

​Krista Solheim is an independent dance artist and movement teacher based in Regina, SK. She received her early dance training at the Youth Ballet Company of Saskatchewan, then completed a BFA in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University in 1998. In 2014, she became STOTT PILATES® certified instructor. Over the past 20 years, Krista has pursued an independent creative and performative dance practice. As choreographer, Krista has been active in developing her voice as a soloist. As performer, she has worked with a range of choreographers from across Canada. Since 2017, Krista has been working with New Dance Horizons (NDH) Creation Base, NDH/ Rouge-gorge; dancing in the creations of Robin Poitras and Edward Poitras.

Robin Poitras is one of Saskatchewan’s most prolific dance and performance creators. Creating dance, performance and installation works, she has been actively engaged in contemporary dance practice since the early 80s. For many years Robin has traversed the formal worlds of dance and performance art. She co-founded New Dance Horizons in 1986, where she continues to act as Artistic Director. With an interest in research into diverse fields of artistic and somatic practice she has developed a unique interdisciplinary approach. Robin’s works have been presented across Canada, in Spain, France, Germany, Mongolia and Mexico. She is a recipient of the 2016 Lieutenant Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2006 Mayor’s Awards for Business & The Arts’ Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2004 Women of Distinction Award for the Arts.

SINFONIA
​
How to express and describe human suffering, human loss in the time of the pandemic.
How can one dancer convey the global loss we are experiencing.
How can we even comprehend the scale of this loss?
Perhaps it is in the personal stories, the individual ones that we can understand the scope of this human tragedy.
The music inspired by the death of Christ.
The pain of its mother
The pain of all humanity.
My approach will be of course inspired by the music and its absolute beauty.
It resonates in so many hearts, and resonates with me because of its Christian background, because of my Catholic upbringing.
The starting point is the pain of the mother losing a child.
It is a universal pain.
The dance will aim to express in a simple setting, an empty room, the loss. The absence.
The “coming to terms with”
If music and dance are able to elevate the soul, to make us feel part of the bigger universe,
I truly hope to be able to pay homage to this, and in doing so actively participate in our global healing.
​
Review link: https://www.citadelcie.com/review-laurence-lemieuxs-sinfonia/

Credit: MIMNAGH

About Artist

Laurence Lemieux
As artistic director of Citadel + Compagnie for nearly two decades, Laurence Lemieux has established herself as a leader within Toronto’s dance community. Her multi-faceted experience as a dancer, choreographer, teacher and presenter has guided the company’s mandate of community outreach and engagement and given rise to C+C’s distinctive artistic voice.

Born in Québec City, Lemieux studied dance at L’École Supérieure de Danse du Québec, and at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Her performance career began when she joined Toronto Dance Theatre in 1986, dancing for founders David Earle, Peter Randazzo and Patricia Beatty, and later for Christopher House. A member of the company for 8 years, Lemieux’s 1998 performance in House’s Cryptoversa earned her the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Performance in Dance.

Over the course of her career, Lemieux has danced for some of Canada’s most prominent choreographers, including William Douglas, Margie Gillis, James Kudelka, Benoît Lachambre, Sylvain Émard, and Jean-Pierre Perreault. Since presenting her first choreography in 1983, Lemieux has created over thirty original works, drawing deeply on personal experiences that resonate strongly with audiences and presenters alike.

As an educator, Lemieux has taught at many respected institutions including Ryerson University, York University, Concordia University, the University of Quebec in Montreal, l’École Supérieure de Ballet Contemporain and Canada’s National Ballet School. Lemieux uses her cumulative artistic experience to inform her programming choices for the company’s multiple presentation series, showcasing the work of diverse talent from emerging, marginalized and established choreographers.

In 2012, Lemieux created the Citadel Dance Program and brought high quality, accessible dance classes to children and youth living in Toronto’s Regent Park. She is a passionate advocate for the arts and is President of the board of Daniel Leveillé Danse in Montreal.
​
Lemieux’s satisfaction as an artist comes from sharing her passion and talent with dance audiences and students, and as a deeply engaged and active member of the dance community.

---

Shelley Bindon
by Shelley Bindon Christie Schultz

Shelley Bindon is a writer, communicator and multi-instrumentalist who is interested in how sound can accompany, augment and undermine communications. She designs soundscapes that dive into and play off the emotional context and content of art works.

​
Alphabet Elegy

Rae Staseson’s Alphabet Elegy is a performed ‘list’, using the rhythm of voice, combined with an exploration of language, to pursue loss, grief, memory, and longing. Often political, sometimes playful, always personal, this work intends to challenge and entertain. Alphabet Elegy is a collaboration with sound designer Shelley Bindon, whose original soundscape will further transform the meaning and lamentation of this work.
 
For Alphabet Elegy, a list of losses, she broke apart songs, scales, intervals and meters of the music and sounds that mark milestones, grieve losses and help us let go of pain. The result is a soundscape that will haunt, lament and underscore the losses in ways that hit at our shared culture and experiences.
 
“Rae’s list is subtle, subversive and in-your-face. The sound needs to hang around the words, cling from the walls but be there to poke, pluck and caress in the liminal spaces.”

​Duration: 18 minutes

New Dance Horizons are thrilled to welcome you to the continuation of the Love+Loss Performance Series featuring
​

• Alphabet Elegy by Rae Staseson and Shelley Bindon
• Conversations with a Faltering Heart by Ashley Johnson
• SINFONIA by Laurence Lemieux

Date/Time
April 14, Thursday at 7:30pm
​
Location
New Dance Horizons, 2207 Harvey Street

Price: $20 for adults; $10 for children and seniors

HOUSE OF DANCE TWO

Artists​

Rae Staseson

Rae Staseson is an intermedia artist, educator, producer, and arts administrator. Her work has been exhibited in more than a dozen countries including at prestigious museums in France, Mexico, USA and Canada. She has performed in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, New York City, Chicago, Calgary, and Regina. Staseson’s work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Harvard Film Archive, and the Walker Art Center, among others, including private collections. She is interested in making meaning from juxtapositions of body and site, in creating contemplative experiences while challenging the acts of ‘looking and listening’, as well as investigating the conceptual intersections of language, and creating extraordinary moments out of the mundane world that surrounds us.

​Ashley Johnson is a dance artist and Registered Somatic Movement Educator trained in group facilitation and hands on bodywork as a teacher of the Mitzvah Technique/Itcush Method and Continuum Movement. Upon completing a diploma in Dance from Grant MacEwan College and a BA in Dance from University of Calgary Ashley spent ten years apprenticing with movement pioneers from around North America. She trained extensively with her two primary mentors Amelia Itcush and Emilie Conrad until their passing in 2011 and 2014.  As a dance artist and educator, Ashley creates interdisciplinary site specific creations that blend embodiment practice with creative process. She is currently based out of Regina, SK where she teaches and performs independently and with New Dance Horizons.
www.constantlyseekingsoftness.ca

---

Artists​

Conversations with a Faltering Heart 
 
A congenital heart defect is my inheritance.
 
Through my father I inherit my heart and with it a fallible valve.
 
Through speaking and dancing I examine the timeline of my own heart.
 
Musical score created by Jeff Morton using augmented steel guitar, piano and sound recording of my heart beat during an echocardiogram. In collaboration with Karlie King this work is part of The Moving Heart an interactive exhibition of sculptural hearts that asks us to slowly bring the internal external.

​Special thanks to Traci Foster and Deanna Peters as outside/inside eyes, Tom Perron for anatomy expertise, my ever patient cardiologist Dr. Colin Yeung, the Canada Council for the Arts, and 
SK Arts for funding this project.  

Duration: 14 minutes

Photo by Kana Nemoto

SINFONIA
​
How to express and describe human suffering, human loss in the time of the pandemic.
How can one dancer convey the global loss we are experiencing.
How can we even comprehend the scale of this loss?
Perhaps it is in the personal stories, the individual ones that we can understand the scope of this human tragedy.
The music inspired by the death of Christ.
The pain of its mother
The pain of all humanity.
My approach will be of course inspired by the music and its absolute beauty.
It resonates in so many hearts, and resonates with me because of its Christian background, because of my Catholic upbringing.
The starting point is the pain of the mother losing a child.
It is a universal pain.
The dance will aim to express in a simple setting, an empty room, the loss. The absence.
The “coming to terms with”
If music and dance are able to elevate the soul, to make us feel part of the bigger universe,
I truly hope to be able to pay homage to this, and in doing so actively participate in our global healing.

Duration: 14 minutes
​
(Review link: https://www.citadelcie.com/review-laurence-lemieuxs-sinfonia/)

Credit: MIMNAGH

Artists​

​Laurence Lemieux
As artistic director of Citadel + Compagnie for nearly two decades, Laurence Lemieux has established herself as a leader within Toronto’s dance community. Her multi-faceted experience as a dancer, choreographer, teacher and presenter has guided the company’s mandate of community outreach and engagement and given rise to C+C’s distinctive artistic voice.

Born in Québec City, Lemieux studied dance at L’École Supérieure de Danse du Québec, and at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Her performance career began when she joined Toronto Dance Theatre in 1986, dancing for founders David Earle, Peter Randazzo and Patricia Beatty, and later for Christopher House. A member of the company for 8 years, Lemieux’s 1998 performance in House’s Cryptoversa earned her the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Performance in Dance.

Over the course of her career, Lemieux has danced for some of Canada’s most prominent choreographers, including William Douglas, Margie Gillis, James Kudelka, Benoît Lachambre, Sylvain Émard, and Jean-Pierre Perreault. Since presenting her first choreography in 1983, Lemieux has created over thirty original works, drawing deeply on personal experiences that resonate strongly with audiences and presenters alike.

As an educator, Lemieux has taught at many respected institutions including Ryerson University, York University, Concordia University, the University of Quebec in Montreal, l’École Supérieure de Ballet Contemporain and Canada’s National Ballet School. Lemieux uses her cumulative artistic experience to inform her programming choices for the company’s multiple presentation series, showcasing the work of diverse talent from emerging, marginalized and established choreographers.

In 2012, Lemieux created the Citadel Dance Program and brought high quality, accessible dance classes to children and youth living in Toronto’s Regent Park. She is a passionate advocate for the arts and is President of the board of Daniel Leveillé Danse in Montreal.
​
Lemieux’s satisfaction as an artist comes from sharing her passion and talent with dance audiences and students, and as a deeply engaged and active member of the dance community.

CANCELLED/POSTPONED
Please note: NDH are in process of recheduling this weekend's April 1st, 2nd shows. Sorry for the inconvenience. We really appreciate your patience. If you have already registered for tickets and/or are on NDH email lists, you will soon receive an email update. Watch for updates and complete line-up of Love+Loss series programs soon to be announced on the site.

Rae Staseson is an intermedia artist, educator, producer, and arts administrator. Her work has been exhibited in more than a dozen countries including at prestigious museums in France, Mexico, USA and Canada. She has performed in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, New York City, Chicago, Calgary, and Regina. Staseson’s work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Harvard Film Archive, and the Walker Art Center, among others, including private collections. She is interested in making meaning from juxtapositions of body and site, in creating contemplative experiences while challenging the acts of ‘looking and listening’, as well asinvestigatingthe conceptual intersections of language,and creating extraordinary moments

House of Dance ONE

---

Shelley Bindon
by Shelley Bindon Christie Schultz

​Shelley Bindon is a writer, communicator and multi-instrumentalist who is interested in how sound can accompany, augment and undermine communications. She designs soundscapes that dive into and play off the emotional context and content of art works.

Rae Staseson’s Alphabet Elegy is a performed ‘list’, using the rhythm of voice, combined with an exploration of language, to pursue loss, grief, memory, and longing. Often political, sometimes playful, always personal, this work intends to challenge and entertain. Alphabet Elegy is a collaboration with sound designer Shelley Bindon, whose original soundscape will further transform the meaning and lamentation of this work.
 
For Alphabet Elegy, a list of losses, she broke apart songs, scales, intervals and meters of the music and sounds that mark milestones, grieve losses and help us let go of pain. The result is a soundscape that will haunt, lament and underscore the losses in ways that hit at our shared culture and experiences.
 
“Rae’s list is subtle, subversive and in-your-face. The sound needs to hang around the words, cling from the walls but be there to poke, pluck and caress in the liminal spaces.”

Date/Time
April 7, Thursday at 7:30pm

Location
New Dance Horizons, 2207 Harvey Street

Price: $20 for adults; $10 for children and seniors

About the Artists