By Nadine Matthews About midway through director Jamila Wignot’s most recent film, Ailey, the eponymous subject of the documentary muses in voiceover recording about “the agony” of growing up poor, with a single mother, in Jim Crow-era Texas. Alvin Ailey explains that, as a Black man, he was made to “feel as if you were
By Kathleen Smith For dancer/choreographer Syreeta Hector, the solo work Black Ballerina is the distillation of years-long personal research into identity, family history and how to be an artist in a society that tends to tamp down both. Created largely pre-pandemic, and two years in the making, Black Ballerina poetically gathers the threads of Hector’s
By Sheenagh Pietrobruno When COVID-19 darkened and emptied the four performance spaces at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, the executive producer of NAC Dance, Cathy Levy, swiftly engaged with the Centre’s lively digital stage. Levy invited dance artists across Canada to apply to present their shows through #CanadaPerforms on Facebook Live, a relief effort launched by