![]() “During a performance, threw me up into a lift and my hand slipped and I somehow ended up slapping him across the face,” Emma recalled with a chuckle. Emma, who had recently been promoted from apprentice to the corps de ballet, was set on completing an assigned lift when something happened that she’ll likely never forget. It all started in September 2009 when Kansas native Emma Love was paired with Indiana native Price Suddarth for a group number in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet. Kevin O'Day, the American dancer and choreographer, is artistic director of the company.This Valentine’s month enjoy the love story of newlyweds Emma and Price Suddarth… Since then, she has been commissioned to choreograph for nearly every major Canadian company - Ballet British Columbia to Alberta Ballet to Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal - as well as return engagements with National Ballet of Canada and ballet companies in Germany, which led to her appointment in Mannheim. "Bill showed me that if you are strong enough and have something to say, you can move ahead and do it."īarely a decade after entering the National Ballet of Canada, Dumais left to become a free-lance choreographer and dancer. When Forsythe, a noted American choreographer who made his career in Germany, came to Toronto to stage one of his ballets, she saw how the traditional language could be modified and stretched. However, Dumais struggled with the confines of the classical ballet vocabulary. By the mid-1990s she was creating work for other companies. Her choreographic efforts followed quickly at the company's workshops. She did leading roles in 19th-century story ballets, the works of George Balanchine as well as those of William Forsythe, James Kudelka, Glen Tetley, David Parsons and Jiri Kylian. But I didn't: I had a pretty strong character."ĭumais joined the National Ballet of Canada in 1987 and was quickly noticed. I missed them and their constant, unconditional love and thought every once in a while about returning home. "My leaving was difficult for all of us but at the same time, my parents wanted the best for me and they were delighted I was so passionate about something so young. Her parents, she said, preferred National Ballet of Canada because it offered their young daughter not only first-class dance training but a full academic life within the school and a residence next door. I always loved to dance and, early on, choreograph."Īt the age of 11, she was accepted into the school of the National Ballet of Canada in Toronto, an 11-hour car ride from her hometown. Something that combined the physical and the artistic really suited my temperament. ![]() ![]() She had a lot of energy, with the outdoors representing "one big adventure." She liked to do "little shows. I didn't want to be submissive to a particular aesthetic."ĭumais' passion for dance began at an early age in Lac Saint-Jean in Quebec. That creates some amount of submission and a bit of a blow in developing your own mind and creativity. In classical dance, girls are taught to stand in a straight line, to be the same as others in order to be part of the corps. But if she had been a man, she would have done more work. An exception was Bronislava Nijinska (younger sister of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky). "In the classical tradition, the masters were men. In modern dance, there has always been a strong orientation toward creativity, with composition classes and choreographic workshops. "There are many women choreographers in modern dance, from such pioneers as Mary Wigmore and Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham to the present. It's one of four works on a program that caps a busy week of dance in Seattle.Īs for women choreographers, "That is a question I am often asked and one to which I have given a lot of thought," Dumais said after arriving in Seattle from Europe, where she is artist-in-residence and deputy director of the National Theater in Mannheim, Germany. The score combines music of Bach and Arvo Part. "Scripted in the Body," her first commission for a major American ballet company, is a 22-minute piece set for two couples and a narrator and explores the impermanence of daily life.
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