{"id":6631,"date":"2014-08-22T00:12:31","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T07:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=6631"},"modified":"2014-08-22T12:04:07","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T19:04:07","slug":"dorrance-headlines-vancouver-tap-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/08\/22\/dorrance-headlines-vancouver-tap-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorrance headlines Vancouver tap festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dorrance Dance will perform at the Rothstein Theatre on Aug. 30. (photo from Vancouver International Tap Festival)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be like a jazz festival presenting Oscar Peterson,\u201d said Sas Selfjord, executive director of the Vancouver International Tap Festival. She is so proud that tap dancer Michelle Dorrance is headlining her festival that she compared Dorrance to the great Canadian jazz musician. \u201cMichelle Dorrance is the \u2018it\u2019 girl,\u201d she said of the artist who takes the stage Saturday, Aug. 30, at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre.<\/p>\n

The dance festival is now in its 15th season and it\u2019s time to celebrate. A weekend of professional performance and a fundraising gala are on the schedule that runs Aug. 28 to 31.<\/p>\n

With this, the festival\u2019s 15th edition, Selfjord said, the Vancouver International Tap Festival \u201cis one of the top two or three in the world. With that reputation,\u201d she said, \u201cwe can attract any artist we want. That\u2019s a very egocentric statement, but it\u2019s true. People want to be part of the Vancouver festival, so that is the legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Selfjord said anyone who has ever enjoyed tap, even in old movies, will appreciate the festival\u2019s artists. \u201cFred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelley, the Nicholas Brothers, these are people we revere in the highest regard,\u201d she said. \u201cTheir work is a subset and that work is always carried through in everything that a tap dance artist does, except we give our own relevance to it \u2026 there could be a little bit more hip hop, there could be some breakdancing, there could be, you know, innovative combinations that no one has ever heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to Dorrance Dance on Aug. 30, the festival features two other professional performances, on Aug. 29, also at the Rothstein. First is LOVE.Be.Best.Free<\/em>, choreographed by Danny Nielsen with an all-male cast. Selfjord remembers encountering Nielsen years ago. \u201cI remember he was at our very first festival and what was he, 14? He\u2019s now an internationally revered artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Travis Knight (photo from Vancouver International Tap Festival)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Second on the Aug. 29 ticket is Lisa La Touche\u2019s Hold On<\/em>, the debut of a work commissioned specifically for this festival. \u201cLisa was here from the get-go,\u201d said Selfjord. \u201cNow she\u2019s in New York and she\u2019s revered.\u201d Hold On<\/em> has an all-Canadian cast of dancers.<\/p>\n

Selfjord is also proud of Travis Knight, one of the performers in Hold On<\/em>. Knight has been a tap consultant with Cirque du Soleil and performed at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Olympics. He has toured with the Australian show Tap Dogs<\/em>. Knight \u201cis one of Canada\u2019s top artists,\u201d said Selfjord, \u201cand I remember he came to our first festival. He took a Greyhound bus and came out on a scholarship from Montreal. He is one of Canada\u2019s amazing, talented, generous artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gala fundraising and awards event, which takes place Aug. 28 at the Holiday Inn Downtown Vancouver, benefits from the sculpting talent of local ceramics artist Suzy Birstein. The local artist \u2013 who once chose dancing class over Hebrew school \u2013 was commissioned to design the awards to be presented. Birstein, who dances with the society during the year, was given the task of coming up with fancy ceramic shoes to honor some of those who have made the society great. \u201cThey pretty much gave me carte blanche as to what I wanted to do,\u201d said Birstein. \u201cSo, I\u2019m making shoes, like miniature shoes, not just like tap shoes. They\u2019re just kind of in my style,\u201d she said, referring to her own internationally known approach to sculpture.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Three of the 15 individually crafted awards \u2013 created by Suzy Birstein \u2013 that will be given out at the Aug. 28 gala event. (photo from Suzy Birstein)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Each of the clay shoes will bear a special feature. \u201cThey\u2019ll all have something that looks like a tap on the bottom of them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Rounding out the weekend is Tap It Out on Aug. 31, where, according to the schedule, \u201ceveryone in Vancouver is invited to experience the tap phenomena themselves … when more than 100 dancers take to Granville Street,\u201d and a performance by four youth ensembles that night at the Rothstein Theatre.<\/p>\n

The festival idea began in the late 1990s when Selfjord took a trip to Minneapolis on behalf of others in the Vancouver tap world \u201cto see what we could do to help build community and engage the community at large, and we thought a festival\u201d might be the idea.<\/p>\n

In Minneapolis, she encountered \u201ctwo of tap\u2019s greatest legends,\u201d the Nicholas Brothers. To some, they are the greatest tap dancers who ever lived. Born in 1914 and 1921, the two became famous as children and opened at the Cotton Club in 1932. They made films throughout the 1930s and \u201940s that showed off the prowess of the dancing team, which combined tap with ballet and acrobatics.<\/p>\n

Meeting the brothers, said Selfjord, \u201cturned me right on my head. I thought, how am I sitting having a brandy with the Nicholas Brothers and talking to them and engaging them? I was just so motivated by having access to artists of that calibre, that just set the stage to come home and to do the festival, so we did.\u201d<\/p>\n

For tickets and more information, visit vantapdance.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Michael Groberman<\/strong> is a Vancouver freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dorrance Dance will perform at the Rothstein Theatre on Aug. 30. (photo from Vancouver International Tap Festival) \u201cIt would be like a jazz festival presenting Oscar Peterson,\u201d said Sas Selfjord, executive director of the Vancouver International Tap Festival. She is so proud that tap dancer Michelle Dorrance is headlining her festival that she compared Dorrance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[785],"tags":[1786,1785,1782,1783,1633,1781,1784],"class_list":["post-6631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-performing-arts","tag-danny-nielsen","tag-lisa-la-touche","tag-michelle-dorrance","tag-sas-selfjord","tag-suzy-birstein","tag-travis-knight","tag-vancouver-international-tap-festival"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}