The Sunshine Coast will get a fresh jolt of contemporary dance at the Sechelt Arts Festival this month when international performer Joshua Beamish takes the stage at Raven’s Cry Theatre for a premiere of a new show, Falling Upward.
The event on the evening of Saturday, Oct. 17 and in a matinee on Sunday the 18th will include a short film and Beamish in a mix of solos and duets with dancer Reneé Sigouin, choreographed by Beamish, Ballet BC’s Kristen Wicklund and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. One segment will feature a Beamish-choreographed work performed by two emerging local dancers, Natalie Martin of Gibsons and Sechelt’s Francesca Manson.
“The whole show is going to be about 45 minutes long,” Vancouver-based Beamish told Coast Reporter. “There’s five different pieces. Falling Upward is the name of the whole show, and also the name of the film that we’re going to present as a kind of centerpiece. It’s a dance film I created with Scott Fowler, who’s a B.C. artist now based in the Netherlands Dance Theatre.”
Natalie Martin, just 13 years old and already a veteran of seven local productions of The Nutcracker, said in an interview that she had no idea of what Beamish had planned, but was “very excited to get the opportunity to work with him and to be a part of this duet.”
Beamish was interviewed Oct. 2 while still in quarantine after returning from a working trip to Lithuania and The Netherlands. He said he was going to use the livestreaming app Zoom to introduce the two young dancers to the piece he’d created for them. The short timeline was not an issue, he said, as student dancers are accustomed to adapting to new projects quickly.
“I find that students have different resiliency because they’re constantly learning new things for dance competitions,” he said. “They’re always accessing new information with very little time to prepare. They have to deliver constantly.”
Beamish, whose works have been performed across North America and in Europe, Asia, and Africa, will also be conducting two workshops at Waldorf Ballet in Sechelt while he’s on the Coast. They will take place at on Friday, Oct. 16 and Sunday, Oct. 18.
Due to COVID restrictions, only 50 tickets will be available for each of the two performances at Raven’s Cry Theatre. Sechelt Arts Festival is also producing a video of the show, which it will livestream at a later date.
