Local Dance Students Learn the Value of a Minute

By Jen Merritt – Arts Editor

June 5th; the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and inside the walls of the Chatham Cultural Centre, the bodies were dancing. June 5th, you see, wasn’t just any humdrum Friday afternoon. No ma’am (or sir); June 5th was a very special day at the CCC. On this date, a troupe of Toronto dancers arrived in town to cause a ripple in the Chatham-Kent dance community. They arrived to teach, and they arrived to perform. But most of all, they arrived to launch the Ontario Arts Council’s Ontario Dances Program – “a three year pilot program to develop a better understanding and appreciation of dance by both audiences and presenters.” Chatham is one of seven cities across Ontario to be selected as a pilot site – perhaps reflecting the growing dance community found within our fine Municipality? According to literature distributed at the Ontario Dances launch,  the purpose of the Ontario Dances project is to increase the number of live dance performances in communities, to facilitate a deeper appreciation of dance. In short, making dance more accessible to people outside the cultural metropolis of Toronto.

To actively engage Chatham-Kent in preparation of the launch, the Kiwanis Theatre held a workshop for local dance students. The workshop was run in conjunction with the troupe of modern dancers from Toronto – henceforth known as Dancemakers.

Dakota Wilson, a 17 year old student at Chatham-Kent Second School, attended the workshop on June 5th. Dakota has experience with several dance forms and identifies herself as a hiphop dancer. Shes says she would like to pursue a career in dance, and although she was uncertain what to expect from this workshop, says she feels like she has improved just from the short experience working with Dancemakers. She explains that in the workshop, the instructors challenged students to actively encounter a minute in time and then explain how to do an everyday project in a minute (for example, how to put on makeup). Dakota says it was a difficult assignment, but was able to put meaning to the task that evening at the official launch when Dancemakers performed their piece of choreography, It’s about time: briefly. Dakota explains that the dance routine explored how an individual experiences a minute in time. The performance consisted of 20 Dances in 20 Minutes (an abrieviated version of the original 60 Dances in 60 Minutes). Dakota says that the performance really made her “appreciate time and how to put time into a more visable aspect.”

Dance has been part of Chatham-Kent for generations, however it seems that over the past few years an interest in dance has skyrocketed, creating a demand for more dance classes, more ranges of training options, and more dance studios. The arrival of the Ontario Dances pilot program signifies that Chatham-Kent may be on its way to becoming a hub for arts and culture.

For more information on DANCEMAKERS, visit their website.
For more information on the ONTARIO DANCES pilot program in Chatham-Kent, refer to this CKDP article.