August 5-8 · 7:30 p.m. · August 9 · 2:00 p.m.
Margaret Greenham Theatre, The Banff Centre
Adult $16, Senior and Student $13, Child $9
Arts Lover Passholders Free
Banff Centre Box Office: 1-800-413-8368 or 762-6301
Presented as part of the 2008 Banff Summer Arts Festival
Overwhelmed by worry about the future, choreographer Robert Glumbek was inspired to create a new work in dance that reflects the uncertainty of our times. Winner of The Banff Centre’s Clifford E. Lee Award in choreography, Glumbek will premiere Prefigured Effect from August 5 to 9 as part of the Centre’s Festival Dance program in the Margaret Greenham Theatre.
Glumbek is completing a five week creation and production residency at the Centre and although costumes are being created on-site, the piece involves no set design, just 16 dancers onstage. Along with Prefigured Effect, the program for Festival Dance will also feature George Balanchine’s Divertimento #15, Peggy Baker’s Julio Lumo, and an excerpt from Act II of August Bournonville’s La Sylphide. Lindsay Fischer, director of the Centre’s new Professional Dance program, says the three ballets were chosen because of their challenges for dancers in training, specifically in their variety of aesthetics and biomechanics. “They are not just steps to music, but instead an expression of experience and belief,” he explains.
Newly restructured on the occasion of The Banff Centre’s 75th anniversary and drawing on a 60-year legacy as one of Canada’s premier programs for creative development in dance, the Professional Dance program brings participants to Banff for four weeks of intensive training, followed by a week of mainstage performances. The program is led by Fischer, a former principal dancer with Het Nationale Ballet in the Netherlands and the New York City Ballet, who has spent more than 10 years helping young dancers transition into professional artists, most recently as the head of the National Ballet of Canada’s apprenticeship program.
“For a long time dance was about masters and peons and you had to beg the master to give you the knowledge,” Fischer says. “The way of becoming worthy of the master’s knowledge was unclear and unfair. I’m not saying the system didn’t work, but this is a different time, a different society. If you are alive and breathing you have a right to an opinion, you are unique, not right or wrong. Students come with expectations (of a certain system) like I come with history. They have to be careful not to solidify expectations and I have to be careful not to repeat history. Ever since I’ve been teaching, I have made that a priority.”
Dancers in the program have been chosen by the artistic directors of seven top ballet companies: Andre Lewis of Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Karen Kain of the National Ballet of Canada, Gradimir Pankov of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Alberta Ballet’s Jean Grand-Maître, John Alleyne of Ballet British Columbia, Bengt Jörgen of Ballet Jörgen, and Mikko Nissinen of Boston Ballet.
The creation of the Arnold Spohr Distinguished Guest Artist Endowment for Dance also enabled The Banff Centre to bring Sorella Englund, former principal dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet and one of the world’s foremost experts on the works of Bournonville, to instruct in this summer’s Dance Program.
