Tuesday, July 31, 2018
We are a small but mighty committee. We share a love of dance, good food and we really like working together. There are 5 of us and we each bring something unique to the table. We meet on a semi regular basis and we always begin with a really yummy potluck. We chit chat about life and the community. And then we brainstorm. We throw around ideas and concepts and dreams of ways of bringing dance to Haliburton County. We actually don’t want to work too hard (but sometimes we end up doing that in service of our goals). We try to keep everything as simple as we can. We are called DH3 and it means Dance Happens Here. We apply for grants and rely on sponsors to do what we do.
Our first project was to bring Noriko Yamamoto to the annual Minden Festival of the Moon in August 2015. Noriko did a performance that included mime, dance and silent story telling. It was beautiful. That same year we brought 2 dancers from Winnipeg Verba Ukrainian dancers who performed traditional Ukrainian dancing in the annual production of Heritage Ballet’s Nutcracker. A workshop was offered to local kids as well and we love that our kids get to work with these professionals. And then we met again and brainstormed and looked for funds and ate more good food and dreamed of more dance opportunities. We are risk takers. We never know how our ideas are going to work and what will come out of them. Our next idea was to partner with the Haliburton Film Festival and bring “dance shorts” to the opening of some of the movies. We brought in 1 professional dance called “Cheap Sunglasses” which was choreographed by Holly Small. The dance kicked off the festival and then we commissioned local dancers to create other pieces. The dances were fun and well received. Then we brought back the Verba Ukrainian dancers (4 this time) to perform in the Nutcracker and we decided to host an”Kolomykja”, an evening of joy, community and dance. We had no idea if anyone would attend, and boy were we surprised. About 100 gathered and danced and celebrated Ukrainian food and music. Our committee had smiles as wide as the world that night.
And now we have embarked on another project that came out of a conversation about how cool it would be to have dancers in residence in the Sculpture Forest creating movement around the sculptures. We raised the funds to hire The Throwdown Collective (who have performed here a few years ago when Dusk Dances used to come here). We invited them to come and create something in the Sculpture Forest that is totally unique and will involve people from our community. And so they are dancing and creating in the Sculpture Forest this week and their final presentation to the public will happen on Monday August 6 and Tuesday August 7 at 6pm. There are lots of unknowns for us in the project and I think that it what we love most of all. We know good things will happen, we just aren’t sure exactly how it will unfold. One thing for sure is that it will be totally unique to Haliburton. We are a creative community and that just makes it so interesting to live and vacation here. Hope to see you there. For more information about the performance please check out the article in this weeks Echo. Thanks
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