Dancecast

Dancecast

By Silva LaukkanenEducationArtsPerforming Arts
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Dancecast episodes

  • Interview with Ginger Lane

    “It Comes Down to Loving Movement”

    Text by Emmaly Wiederholt

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Ginger Lane, a Chicago based dancer, teacher and

    choreographer. Ginger shares how the themes of dance and disability activism have come together in
    her career, specifically through her involvement with Access Living and MOMENTA Dance Company. She
    discusses the struggle that physically integrated dance faces in being seen as a legitimate art form, the
    slow progress in the US as compared to Europe, and the difficulty building repertoire in physically
    integrated dance.

    https://www.accessliving.org

    http://momentadances.org
    https://3arts.org/artist/ginger-lane/
    https://stanceondance.com
    https://bodyshift.org

    35 min
  • Interview with Sally Davison

    Interview with Sally Davison; The Language of the Body is the Oldest Language.

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Sally Davison, a dancer, choreographer, and master

    DanceAbility teacher in the UK and Finland. Sally discusses the strength of DanceAbility as valuing
    participant-led knowledge and making inclusion possible. She asserts that DanceAbility is not just about
    disability, but about the beauty of giving space to others and moving beyond one’s own patterns to
    listen to someone else’s vocabulary or timing. Silva and Sally also discuss how embryology and birth, as
    well as basic movement patterns, can affect a person’s sense of body and self.

    Text by Emmaly Wiederholt

    https://www.bodyshift.org

    http://stanceondance.com
    http://www.danceabilityfinland.com
    http://danceabilityfinland.com/kaaos/

    47 min
  • Interview with Aaron Wheeler-Kay

    Access is Good for Everybody

    Text by Emmaly Wiederholt

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Aaron Wheeler-Kay, creative director of Echo Theater

    Company in Portland, Oregon. Aaron, a master DanceAbility teacher, shares how he applied
    DanceAbility to create an accessible circus arts space, as well as leverage his privilege to feature and
    support other voices. After teaching DanceAbility to his staff, he describes the shift in culture at the
    company and how creating an accessible space isn’t a checkbox but an ongoing process and continuous
    reassessment.

    Aaron Wheeler-Kay lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is the creative director of Echo Theater

    Company, a non-profit with a focus on combining different performance disciplines including circus arts,
    dance and devised theater to produce original performance works. Aaron teaches dance, acrobatics and
    aerial arts to people of all ages and abilities. He became certified to teach DanceAbility in 2016.

    https://www.bodyshift.org

    http://www.echotheaterpdx.org
    https://www.danceability.com
    http://stanceondance.com

    39 min
  • Interview with Margot Greenlee

    Dance Applied to Real Life

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Margot Greenlee, a choreographer, theater director and

    artist educator based in Washington DC. Here, Margot discusses her involvement with Jacob’s Pillow’s
    Curriculum in Motion® and her own project, BodyWise Dance, which provide dance classes and
    workshops for individuals and groups in healthcare, education and corporate settings that offer
    movement as a way of learning and processing information. She details one program of BodyWise
    wherein dance and theater practitioners work with a group of people with intellectual disabilities to
    create and perform an original show with the goal of using performance as an opportunity for community integration.

    Text by Emmaly Wiederholt

    http://stanceondance.com

    http://www.bodywisedance.com
    https://www.jacobspillow.org/programs/community/jacobs-pillow-curriculum-in-motion/
    https://www.bodyshift.org

    38 min
  • Interview with Connie Vandarakis

    Experiencing the Democracy of Dance

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Connie Vandarakis, a master DanceAbility teacher

    in Philadelphia. Connie shares her unusual entrance to dance, her experience in academia, how
    chronic hip pain and a hip replacement led her to DanceAbility, and why she deeply believes in
    the curriculum of DanceAbility. Her drive to serve in the arts felt answered by DanceAbility’s
    mission and vision. She describes how the use of improvisation calls for everyone to be
    responsible in the moment, both in and out of the dance studio.

    https://www.danceability.com

    http://stanceondance.com
    http://www.bodyshift.org
    https://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/report.pdf

    35 min
  • Interview with Jana Mezsaros

    Interview with Jana Meszaros; Promoting Freedom and Equality

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Jana Meszaros, a DanceAbility instructor in Eugene, OR.

    Jana describes her small-town upbringing, how she discovered DanceAbility through contact
    improvisation, and her road to becoming a Master Teacher. She shares her belief in DanceAbility as a
    tool for creating experiences where disabled and non-disabled dancers can dance together, as well as
    her preference for the term ‘facilitator’ rather than ‘teacher’ because everyone in the room can always
    learn from each other.
    Text by Emmaly Wiederholt and photo by Jennifer James Long

    http://www.danceability.com

    http://www.bodyshift.org
    http://stanceondance.com

    37 min
  • Interview with India Harville

    Exploring Her Own Access and Excellence

    PODCAST BY SILVA LAUKKANEN TEXT BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews India Harville, a dance artist and teacher in the Bay Area.
    India shares her journey to inclusive dance through yoga, body work, and her ongoing experience with
    temporary paralysis. She also describes her recent one-woman show, Enough, which explored a
    recovery process for her recurring feelings of not feeling black enough, disabled enough, or able-bodied
    enough, as well as her future goal of making a video piece about dancers who cannot regularly and
    easily leave their homes. She discusses how to track progress and measure rigor when common
    assessments cannot apply to her.

    http://lovingtheskinyouarein.com

    http://www.stanceondance.com
    http://www.bodyshift.org
    http://www.danceability.com

    37 min
  • Interview with Maylis Arrabit

    Maylis was visiting me here in the US after dancing and studying with Axis Dance Co in their annual summer intensive. While we were finishing our lunch we chatted about her work and future plans. Maylis shared her visions for her next choreographies and where she is currently with her own work. Thank you Maylis for being so open and willing to share.

    MAYLIS ARRABIT

    I took my first class / dance class in 2011 with AXIS in Oakland, California. It's there that everything has changed!
    In 2012, after finishing my Masters in organizational psychology and returning to my native region, I joined Co&ciedanse (Biarritz) as a student and dancer, a contemporary dance company for amateurs led by Deva Macazaga. Thanks to her, I have learnt a lot for two years in contemporary dance and contact improvisation, grew a lor as a dancer, each time discovering new possibilities of movement and I even participated in the creation of BoxFloor, for Biarritz dance festival, Le temps d'aimer la danse (2013) . Following the departure of Deva from Biarritz, I have kept taking mainstream contemporary dance classes with Wyllia Lapouge and various teachers in France and Spain.

    I enriched and keep enriching my knowledge of inclusive practice by taking workshops with Adam Benjamin, Candoco dance company, Jordi Cortes and more regularly Stopgap dance company for which I have a real admiration.

    As a dance artist, I participated in Integrance (2014-2015), a EU funded project, which brought together 4 companies from Belgium, Scotland, France and England to promote the practice of inclusive dance. In March 2015, I also danced in Gorputza, an dance piece choreographed by Jordi Cortés as part of the festival dFeria, in San Sebastian (Spain). Later, I started a choreographic work on a solo called In (-) Between, a search currently in parentheses. At the end of 2016, I chose to focus on dance and I am currently working on my first project as an artistic leader, Habra Que Ponerse Cachas, a duet for two male dancers with and without disabilities. In 2017, I have joined InterDanse, a newly based dance company, under the artistic leadership of Tomos Young (Normandie, France). We premiered InterDanse's first creation, #Onesttoutslashrien in July 2017, as part of Les Sorties de bain festival, Granville, France and hope that it's just the beginning.

    http://www.interdansecie.com

    http://www.bodyshift.org

    30 min
  • Interview with Julie Crothers

    Choreography for An Arm and A Half

    PODCAST BY SILVA LAUKKANEN; PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIM ISOM AND TEXT BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Julie Crothers, a freelance dancer and emerging choreographer in the Bay Area. After dancing with AXIS Dance Company for three years, Julie began exploring her own choreographic voice. She describes the impetus of her piece Secondhand, which explores alternate uses of her collection of prosthetic arms. Julie shares stories and perspectives of what prosthesis has come to mean for her, and how she came to the decision in her early 20s to not use a prosthetic arm day-to-day. She goes on to explain how she feels able to dance more freely without filling in that space, and her growing curiosity about what her body uniquely does.

    37 min
  • Interview with Gretchen Pick

    In this episode of DanceCast, Silva interviews Gretchen Pick, executive director of Young Dance in Minnesota’s Twin Cities region. Young Dance offers youth classes and performance opportunities, and started to include dance classes for children and adults with disabilities in 2010 after realizing nothing else was being offered locally. Gretchen shares her belief in recognizing the uniqueness of individual bodies and supporting that expression, her passion for teaching, and how she’d like to expand and build upon Young Dance’s All Abilities program in the future.

    http://www.youngdance.org

    http://www.croiglan.com
    http://www.bodyshift.org
    http://stanceondance.com

    34 min

About Dancecast

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We talk about dance as an art form when it is created, taught and explored in a non-traditional environment with non-traditional doers.