Lights Dance Festival 2020: Shadows & Songs
The 4th Annual Lights Dance Festival, taking place from June 18-21, is curated around the concept of Shadows & Songs to consider our humanity in the changing landscape of communication and technology. Due to the ongoing global pandemic, we are not able to congregate in person this year. Instead, this season’s selected films will be made available for streaming for free. Don’t forget to vote for your favourite film for the Audience Choice Award! Learn more about the films in our two programs this year on our 2020 Program page.
Schedule of Events
Times listed are in Eastern Standard Time
Thurs., June 18; 7PM: Live opening ceremony, featuring live dance performances by Bethany Mitchell and Leigh Schanfein.
Thurs., June 18; 7PM: Launch of PROGRAM 1: BALLADS
Fri., June 19; 4PM: FREE Online Workshop: “Intro to Ballet with Leigh Schanfein.”
Fri., June 19; 7PM: Launch of PROGRAM 2: CHIAROSCURO
Sat., June 20; 7PM: Q&A with Angela Rosales Challis (Stages) & John Graham (Unfold)
Wed., June 24; 7PM: Closing ceremony with live performances and announcement of Audience Choice Award.
For the latest updates and announcements, make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And share the festival with your friends by inviting them to our Facebook event page.
2020 Partners and Sponsors
Thank you for making this festival possible!
Aaron Tucker, Scott-Grimes Sibling Duo, Silver Thorn Studios, Natalie Zara Belly Dance, Dance Umbrella Ontario, Karen Kim
Lights Dance Festival is a non-profit organization that relies on ticket sales, sponsorships and donations to pay artist fees, instructor fees, and operational costs. This year, due to the pandemic, our festival is being offered online for free. If you are enjoying our offerings, please consider making a donation to help us pay our artists and instructors and to help us continue to celebrate dance and dance film.
Salt Water
Salt Water explores the contrast between the force of natural events and our own need and desire for stability. The work opens with an abstract sculptural mass of more than twenty dancers interlocked with bare curved backs that sway, rise and fall in wave-like motions. Individual identification is only a momentary glimpse. Beneath the abstract form, intimate human connections reside.
MASS
MASS is a 10 minutes single take video-dance shot in Paris. The project was framed within the Danse en Seine’s choreographic workshops, including 40 amateur dancers. Images of the crowd appear more and more often and symbolize the current upheavals all over the world, evoking alternately parties, migrations of refugees, manifestations, religious gatherings or just the daily life of big cities. We thus work on the mass, with all the drunkenness and horror it can inspire. We confront the individual with crowd movements, in order to observe how he resists or lets immerse himself.
