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Dancing across the generations

DSDance
DSDanse
DSDanse group will head to Belgium next year to represent Canada’s participation in the 1915 Battle of Ypres.

 

Twenty student dancers from Dominique Hutchinson’s DSDanse program will be visiting Belgium next August on a special trip, and they are requesting your help — not with money, but with your stories.

As we draw nearer to Remembrance Day this Tuesday, Nov. 11, you might be thinking a lot about how your grandparents or great-grandparents fought or lived through the First World War, or the Great War, as they called it. At the 1915 Battle of Ypres in Belgium near the French border, Canadians played a big part, and their role will be honoured during ceremonies to take place in 2015 at that location. The students will travel there to dance the stories with choreography that they have created themselves.

Erika Wrightman, now president of the Sunshine Coast Youth Dance Association (SCYDA), will be going on the trip as a dance teacher and performer, and she’s proud of what the dancers, aged 11 to 19, are putting together during their workshops and rehearsals. They are currently gathering war stories from their families that they will turn into a February dance show at the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons, titled Canada, with Love.

“We’d like to extend that invitation to the community,” Wrightman said, “that they share their personal or familial stories of the First World War.”

The stories will be used to spark dances and some of the information in the form of quotes or statistics will be projected onto a screen on stage.

The performance’s finale is a musical version of the poem, In Flanders Fields. The dances they create for the February show will be the ones the students take to Belgium to perform and represent Canada during the ceremonies.

“This generation might not know what role their families played,” Wright-man said. “There was so much silence after that war.”

She hopes that this project is a way of connecting this generation with a previous generation.

It’s difficult to know what stories will turn up, so difficult to project how the performance will go.

“We don’t want only a soldier’s point of view,” she said, as they are seeking alternate points of view as well — stories from the women who were left behind, the mothers, sisters and wives, and how they coped with the war.

After the February dance performance, the dancers will be visited in July by their counterparts in Belgium, a group called Cie Ph/fase that has visited here before as part of an exchange with the Coast String Fiddlers. The Belgian dance group will present their own performance, Belgium, with Love, and will return to their country to await the visit of the Canadian dancers in August.     

Wrightman credits Hutchinson with much of the work going on behind the scenes to help these kids make the trip of a lifetime. She is adamant that our veterans be honoured and that, as Wrightman puts it, “Our participation in Belgium is a privilege because of what came before.”

Send your stories about your family’s involvement in the war by mail to 1121 Marine Dr., Gibsons, BC V0N 1V1, or send them by email to dominiquesdance@eastlink.ca.