Tears on the dance floor Annual Q Dance event includes emotional farewell for RWB couple By: Holly Harris Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Jun. 5, 2019 Last Modified: 10:53 AM CDT Thursday, Jun. 6, 2019 Updates

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Winnipeg audiences will get to see the creative fruits of Peter Quanz’s labours when the acclaimed choreographer’s “experimental dance laboratory,” Q Dance, unveils its latest program featuring three world premières this week.

“I’m so incredibly fortunate to work with a group of dancers that I’ve known for a long time,” Quanz says. “Whenever I approach a Q Dance program, it’s in the spirit of family, fun, as well as always being a little bit chaotic because I’m trying to create works that speak to the dancers, and challenge them directly. It’s a very collaborative process.”

The four-show run that opens Thursday, June 6 at 7:30 p.m. and continues through Saturday, June 8 (including a 2 p.m. weekend matinée) at the Gas Station Arts Centre features an A-list of mostly Royal Winnipeg Ballet company members cherry-picked by the Baden, Ontario-born Quanz: Liam Caines, Philippe-Alexandre Jacques, Alanna McAdie, Yosuke Mino, Josh Reynolds and Jo-Ann Sundermeier, with a sole contemporary dancer, Winnipeg’s Kathleen Hiley added to this year’s mix.

Quanz, 39, whose contemporary ballets have been performed around the world, has also been working extensively with several Chinese troupes over the last five years, including the Guangzhou Ballet, the Beijing Dance Academy, and the Wuxi Song and Dance Company, which toured Quanz’s full-length Red Crowned Crane throughout Canada and the U.S. in 2016. That same company will be heading for North American shores with another brand-new Quanz ballet this fall.

However Quanz, who graduated from the RWB School Professional Division in 1999, says his artistic roots will always be firmly planted in Prairie loam – and particularly his adopted hometown and base for his now nine-year old ballet baby that made its auspicious debut at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series in 2009. Quanz officially incorporated his fledgling company the following year, which will step up to celebrate its 10th anniversary next season.

“Q Dance is very important to me, because I feel the responsibility of trying to show myself in a new way every time,” the soft-spoken dance artist reveals. “I have to question my work further with each production and can’t just rely on a bag of tricks. We also don’t have big sets or flashy costumes to hide behind, and it becomes a very naked and vulnerable performance. That’s definitely a challenge, however is also one that I find extremely interesting.

The 55-minute program (no intermission) features retiring RWB principal dancer Sundermeier (an original Q Dance founding member, along with Mino) performing her local swan song with husband, RWB soloist Josh Reynolds. The American-born couple is moving back to the U.S. this summer to join New Orleans Ballet Theatre, teach ballet and raise their infant daughter, Ayla, closer to relatives.

Their searing pas de deux titled Wistful, set to Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 encapsulates the duo’s own journey in life, love and dance.

“It’s really exciting to perform in this show because I started working with Peter during the very first year of Q Dance,” Sundermeier says during a rehearsal break at the RWB’s Graham Avenue studios — the two companies have always shared a simpatico relationship. “It’s a gift to be able to dance this work as our last public performance.”

And, bring Kleenex. The highly emotionally charged duet is certain to leave no eye dry, not just for the viewers, but likely also for the beloved dancers with Sundermeier quipping “tenderness is a natural thing for us.”

“That’s always the nice thing about Peter’s work is that it’s supposed to be very personal,” Reynolds says. “Whether it’s funny, or emotional, or romantic, it’s still very intimate for everybody, and I feel like this is going to be a very beautiful pas de deux.”

The mixed bill also includes a larger-scale ensemble piece Sprezzatura — that’s Italian for “studied carelessness” — set to a pastiche Baroque score, that sees each dancer, garbed in graphic checkerboard jumpsuits, including black-and-white soft ballet slippers, leaping and spinning as an effervescent combustion of kinetic movement.

Finally, Musings spotlights Hiley with Jacques, Caines and Mino in an intensely athletic ensemble work teeming with percussive movement and gestural movement vocabulary, accompanied by accordion works extracted from a vintage album Quanz discovered in a used CD shop in Stratford, Ont., many years ago, instantly knowing he would someday create a dance for it.

Quanz praises Hiley, who is grounded in an entirely different movement vernacular, for easily holding her own among the classically trained ballet dancers who take daily classes, rehearse and perform regularly together. Hiley also premièred Quanz’s harrowing solo Sans titre, created for her own solo production in February 2016, later reprising the work with Q Dance’s spring show a few months later as a featured guest artist. This weekend marks her first time seamlessly integrating with the ballet dancers themselves, which creates a wholly different dynamic for all.

‘It’s a program with truly something for everyone’–Peter Quanz

“It’s been a really great experience, and everyone’s been working so hard,” Hiley, who has been nurturing her own solo career lately, says of the three-week rehearsal period. “For me, the most challenging thing has been working on my counts, and getting used to being together with an ensemble. Working with Peter again has been so wonderful, and we’ve been able to build on the relationship that we had before, and go deeper with our creative process.”

New this year with Q Dance is a wittily tiled set of Q Cards — think baseball cards — that will be presented to audience members, detailing each dancer’s biography. Once again, there’s also a Q-and-A session following each up-close-and-personal performance, where viewers are able to ask questions of all artists.

“It’s a program with truly something for everyone,” Quanz says. “There is some quirky movement, some works that are classically based, and others that are more sculptural. It’s such a privilege to collaborate with these interesting, fascinating, intelligent and beautiful artists, and I hope the audience will just have a fabulous time.”

 

Holly.harris@shaw.ca