Thank you, and thank you to the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today.
I'm a choreographer and the co-artistic director of RUBBERBANDance Group, a Montreal-based company that creates, produces, and disseminates stage works and film works. The company tours extensively, performing full-length stage works and repertory programs across Canada and internationally. Our award-winning short film projects have been screened around the world.
What has distinguished me as a choreographer is a melding of influences that come from contemporary, classical, and hip hop or street dance forms. I'm recognized for not simply cutting and pasting these influences together, but for deconstructing and developing these forms into a new, distinct aesthetic. My artistic vision is a result of my personal background.
I grew up in Los Angeles and I was surrounded by a hip hop culture from a young age. My first exposure to dance was through street-corner breakdance battles and freestyle circles in the clubs. Late in my adolescence I began a more formal training at an arts high school and was introduced to classical and contemporary forms of movement and composition. I became familiar with conceptual art and notions such as cubism, surrealism, and minimalism. This is where a cross-pollination began inside of me where high art would influence what I had experienced through hip hop.
But only after securing contracts as a dancer with top choreographers and performing with major contemporary ballet and post-modern companies in New York and in Montreal would I eventually take on the role of choreographer myself. So since 2002 I've created over a dozen works for my company, RUBBERBANDance Group, and taken on a dozen commissions from other dance companies in North America and in Europe. From 2007 to 2011, I was an artist-in-residence at Place des Arts, which is where we've created and premiered the past four RUBBERBANDance creations.
These creations are partly funded by various types of co-producers, including presenting organizations like Montreal's Place des Arts; Danse Danse; or funding programs like CanDance here in Canada or the national dance project in the United States.
Depending on the show we are touring, the company employs about six or seven dancers by project, usually totalling 35 weeks of work. We average about 50 performances a year, typically performing in theatres that seat between 300 and 900, and we'll perform between one and five shows in each venue. We often hold post-performance sessions so we can exchange with the audience. In each city that we perform in we also offer master classes and workshops or lectures and demonstrations to young audiences.
As a medium-sized established company, we receive support at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. The real challenge for me in the past years has been finding the right dancers to work with. Up to this point it's been extremely rare to encounter a dancer who has a background like mine with extensive experience in classical, contemporary, and street hip hop forms. This has forced me to become an expert at training dancers who come from one side of the dance spectrum or the other. It becomes necessary to transmit information that a dancer might be missing and through a rigorous training process prepare them to work in my style. In this way, being pioneers in a new, burgeoning genre of contemporary hip hop means that the formal academic dance institutions have not yet been equipped to train the dancers in an updated manner and that responsibility has fallen on me.
The RUBBERBAND movement method is a technique that I developed to do just that, and it prepares dancers in a new way that considers all the advancements in movement invention that we've seen in recent times. In financial terms, this adds several weeks to a normal choreographic process for us, which is already one of our most costly activities.
I would compare the training that is necessary for our work to the equivalent of an actor needing to learn a new language to perform a new role. Only, in our case, without knowing the physical language that we work in, meaning the training of the body to work upright as well as in the inversions, not only does the choreography not read but it is also dangerous for the dancer.
Now, even though I've developed the RUBBERBAND method to prepare dancers to work in my signature style, on the flip side I've seen how the method has a transformative effect on dancers, whether they work in my choreographic style or not. In a way, it's upgrading a computer's operating system, so I've begun teaching RUBBERBAND method master classes in dozens of universities and conservatories and I recently spent a semester training and creating a work in the dance department at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Next year I will serve as a visiting artist on faculty at the new Glorya Kaufman School of Dance at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Typically, the academic institutions are behind the curve as to what artistic innovations are happening on the front lines, but they are slowly catching up.
It is because the dance world in general has felt the appeal that hip hop influenced contemporary dance has that companies like ours have shown that hip hop influence doesn't need to remain only in the flash and the fireworks, but that it can be used in subtler ways and even to speak about the human condition.
As dancers are expected more and more to have skills that come from all ends of the dance spectrum, it is important to consider that for a company like ours especially, grants that allow for apprenticing and training are extremely important.
Le Conseil des arts de Montréal has the DémART program, which encourages internships to newly arrived or first-generation Canadian citizens. There are grants available at the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and also at the Canada Council for the Arts that support professional dancers in continuing training in their professional development.
Our company dancers and apprentices have benefited very much from this assistance, and I believe that this support for dancers is more important than ever.
Thank you for your time.