About Good Women Dance Collective
GWDC is a creation-based company that is committed to creating and producing innovative new works and helping build a vibrant and sustainable dance community in Edmonton, Alberta. The collective offers performance, education, professional development opportunities and affordable rehearsal space to artists working in the city and is passionate about making contemporary dance more accessible to the public.
Collective Artist Biographies
Ainsley Hillyard is an Edmonton-based performer, choreographer, and educator who works in dance and theatre. Since earning a Diploma in dance from Grant MacEwan College and a BA (Hons) from The Winnipeg School of Contemporary dancers in 2008, she has become a stalwart force in the Edmonton dance community. As an independent artist, Ainsley has choreographed for several theatre companies including: Pyretic Productions (Bears), Workshop West (Double Double); Surreal SoReal (Beckett’s Shorts, Genius Code); The Serca Festival (Tristan and Isolde); Catch The Keys (Snout); Prospero Theatre (Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Cowardly Kiss Theatre (Night Time). She is also an emerging actor, having recently performed in pool (no water) for Studio Theatre, and Snout for Catch the Keys Productions.
Photo © Marc J. Chalifoux
Alison Kause is a founding member of the Good Women Dance Collective. She works with the collective and independently. Alison is a graduate of the Grant McEwan Dance Program and the School of Contemporary Dance at SFU. She has worked with Peggy Baker, Sasha Ivanochko, Melanie Demers, Mile Zero Dance, Heidi Bunting, Brian Webb, Jen Mesch Dance Conspiracy, AM Choreography, Krista Posyniak, Richard Lee and GWD Collective artists. Alison has performed in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Edmonton. Alison teaches dance at the University of Alberta and in Edmonton Public Schools as a supply teacher and an artist in residence. She is thrilled to be embarking on new educational and independent projects as well as endeavors with the Good Women Dance Collective and is continually supported by her family and friends in the convergence of these two careers.
Alida Nyquist-Schultz is a performer, choreographer, teacher, and collective artist of the Good Women Dance Collective. She holds a BA with Honors from the School of Contemporary Dancers in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her choreography (Counterpart, Pod, Withheld, Love Fail) has been performed at numerous festivals and events across Canada. Alida has performed internationally for @tendance and locally for Peggy Baker, Mélanie Demers, Usha Gupta Dance, the Edmonton Opera, Heidi Bunting Dance, the Jen Mesch Dance Conspiracy, AM Choreography, Pyretic Productions, and Pro Coro Canada.
Photo © Max B. Telzerow
Kate Stashko is a dance artist and writer based in Edmonton and a graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. She has trained and worked across Canada and Europe, dancing with artists including Peggy Baker, Helen Husak, Sasha Ivanochko, Mélanie Demers, Mile Zero Dance and Heidi Strauss. She recently performed in the Prairie Dance Circuit as part of Brian Webb Dance Company’s season, and collaborated with Pyretic Productions in Bears (2015). Kate is an artist of the Good Women Dance Collective, has presented her own work in Montréal, Toronto and Alberta, and teaches, acts as an outside eye, and freelances for various dance magazines.
Photo © Max B. Telzerow
Back Up Front
Back Up Front proposes a new hierarchal structure and brings the movements of back up dancer/singer to the forefront. This work invites the viewer to gaze at both the conformity of rhythmic synchronization found through set movement phrases, and movement scores occurring in the present which prioritize the individual. Back Up Front works through the labour of the backup dancer/singer using repetition, and interrogates ideas around spectacle and cultural production.
Credits
Choreographer: Justine A. Chambers
Performers: Ainsley Hillyard, Alison Kause, Alida Kendell, Kate Stashko
Composer: Nancy Tam
Lighting Designer/Stage Manager: Beth Dart
Costume Designer: Sydney Gross
Set Design/Build: Adam Turnbull
Photography/Videography: Epic Photography (Marc J. Chalifoux and Ian Peter Jackson)
Past Performances:
Convergence, GWDC (Edmonton)
Length:
30 minutes
Withheld
Withheld explores the body’s ability to withhold, confine, and distort emotions, impulses, and information. Withholding may be seen as due to a political, social, or psychological threat. Four dancers express the physical vocabulary and interpersonal dynamics that evolve out of this withholding or confinement of expression. How is our desire to reach out and connect to another affected by repression? The essence of Withheld lies in the examination of this question, and the complexities of the human condition that it reveals.
Press
Sound + Noise
Vue Weekly
Credits
Choreographer: Alida Nyquist-Schultz
Performers: Ainsley Hillyard, Alison Kause, Richard Lee, Kate Stashko
Outside Eye: Davida Monk (Dancers’ Studio West)
Composer: Marjan Mozetich
Lighting designer: Beth Dart
Photographer: Marc J. Chalifoux
Videographer: Marc J. Chalifoux
Length
30 minutes
Past Performances
AIR, Dancers’ Studio West (Calgary) Expanse Movement Arts Festival (Edmonton) Convergence, GWDC (Edmonton) Orographic Lift, Fluid Festival (Calgary)
“…daringly physical dancing and further interrogation of human relations.”
– Kelsie Acton, Sound + Noise
Caveat
Caveat blends striking theatrical images with physical risk-taking. Recapturing the Aesop fable: Avaricious and Envious, Caveat examines what happens to the characters after the end of the fable, picking up the story where Aesop left off. How will they deal with their new found realities, their guilt, and each other? The piece also explores female competition and the idea of ‘winner’s remorse’. The performers fight for validation in paper crown form, each embodying the traits of a character in the fable: Avaricious, Envious, and Jupiter, the God who ultimately decides their fate.
Press
Vue Weekly
Credits
Choreographer: Ainsley Hillyard
Performers: Alida Nyquist-Schultz, Alison Kause, Kate Stashko
Outside eyes: David Van Belle, Yvonne Coutts
Poetry: Liam Coady
Text: Alida Nyquist-Schultz, Alison Kause, Kate Stashko
Sound designer: Torstein Colyer
Lighting designer: Beth Dart
Photographer: Marc J. Chalifoux
Videographer: Marc J. Chalifoux
Length
33 minutes
Past Performances
Work-in-progress showing, Ottawa Dance Directive (Ottawa) Convergence, GWDC (Edmonton) Orographic Lift, Fluid Festival (Calgary)
“unfailingly inventive and theatrical”
– Liz Nichols
Kate Stashko in Caveat © Marc J. Chalifoux
We’ll Be Fine
We’ll be Fine is a new work created by Mélanie Demers in collaboration with artists from Good Women Dance Collective (GWDC) and dance-theatre artist Richard Lee. The work premiered in November 2015, with three performances at L’Uni Théâtre in Edmonton, Alberta, presented by GWDC. As is typical of Ms. Demers’ work, the piece oscillates between extreme physicality and moments of nothingness, and teaters on the edge of hilarity and tragedy, challenging performers and audience alike in their consideration of what we choose to do and say to one another. The work asks us, “Faced with an imminent threat, what would we do? How would we act?”
Press
Edmonton Journal
Vue Weekly
Credits
Choreographer: Mélanie Demers
Performers: Ainsley Hillyard, Alison Kause, Richard Lee, Alida Nyquist-Schultz, Kate Stashko
Composer: Mykalle Bielinski
Rehearsal Director: Anne-Marie Jourdenais
Costume Designer: Sydney Gross
Lighting Designer: Beth Dart
Photographer: Marc J. Chalifoux
Videographer: Marc J. Chalifoux
Length
40 minutes
Past Performances
Convergence, GWDC (Edmonton)
From Ms. Demers
This piece revolves around triviality and spirituality, plays with poetic justice and political injustice, finds solace in lust and love, digs into hearts of different shapes and caresses skin of different colours, is filled with extreme physicality and moments of nothingness, shallowness, emptiness. This piece militates. This piece penetrates. This piece exonerates. This piece excruciates. Sometimes it’s silly. Other times, it’s tragic. And I like the moment when it shifts. When it’s not funny anymore. When the party turns to dark and cold and lonely. When it’s not possible to explain. When things are suddenly useless, unjustified and unnecessary. Only then this piece may mean something.
Touring Plans
GWDC has been working with Ottawa Dance Directive, which has also recently commissioned work from Ms. Demers, to seek out joint presentation opportunities. At Ms. Demers suggestion, we have been working to present a double bill of her work, including a pending application at Calgary’s Fluid Festival, and possible presentation dates at Quartiers Danses in Montréal in 2016 and 2017. We are hoping to build a tour of We’ll be Fine, either on its own or in the context of this double bill with ODD.
“We’ll be Fine juxtaposes modern positivity with the sinister but oft-ignored knowledge that everything is not fine at all.”
– Fawnda Mithrush, Vue Weekly
Yang
This duet embodies precise physicality and commitment to origins. “Yang is one of the two major principles of Taoist philosophy. Represented in writing by the ideogram for the sun’s rays, and in hexagrams of the I Ching as an unbroken line. Yang is all that is bright, dry, hard, masculine, round, odd numbered, and upward moving” (Peggy Baker Dance Projects, The Choreographer’s Trust). The two solos exist in the same world layered upon each other and illuminated by dramatic lighting. The soundscape is driving and bold as it punctuates and underscores the movement purposefully. The GWDC are so pleased to have Yang as an anchor in our repertoire and are proud to represent the timeless artistry of Peggy Baker through our interpretation of her work.
Link to full work
Cast #1
Cast #2
Credits
Choreographer: Peggy Baker
Composer: Thierry de Mey, Frisking (1990)
Performers: Ainsley Hillyard and Kate Stashko (cast #1), Alison Kause and Alida Nyquist-Schultz (cast #2)
Lighting Designer: Original design by Marc Parent
Photographer: Marc J Chalifoux
Videographer: John Newton
Costume Designer: Original costume design by Caroline O’Brien, costumes re-interpreted by Tamara Bliss
Length
12 minutes
Past Performances
Dance Motif, Orchesis Dance Group (Edmonton)
“their dancing is honest precise and uncontrived”
– Fawnda Mithrush
Alida Kendell & Alison Kause in Yang by Peggy Baker © Marc J. Chalifoux