“Coming Together/Attica” World Premiere in Nova Scotia

Just a few months ago we collaborated with the internationally renowned Scotia Festival of Music, Nova Scotia dance presenter Live Art Dance Productions and the Canada Council for the Arts to produce an epic residency in Halifax. We performed two distinct evenings of work, each with live music, to packed houses and rave reviews. Among our busy schedule of company classes and rehearsals we managed to have a lobster feast, bake pies, and enjoy the ocean air. We premiered Coming Together/Attica, choreographed with Frederic Rzewski’s score of the same name, with 12 musicians provided by Scotia Festival of Music. The stellar musicians come from across the globe to be part of the festival and they played the iconic score with passion and verve. Two days later we performed I Just Like This Music (a revised version of My Serenade from 2009 with Pytor Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C Major) with a 32-piece string orchestra on stage conducted by Bernard Gueller, principal conductor of Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra. The opportunity to dance with live music is increasingly rare and these performances introduced a new model for collaborations between organizations to enable more performance opportunities. One of the reviews described Coming Together/Attica as “Imaginative, immediate, innovative, intense, energetic, exertive, exciting, evocative, curious, chaotic, compelling, creative…”