Canada to the world; a newly envisioned dance experience, coming to a device near you!

BY JANIECE CAMPBELL

Get on those dancing shoes and prepare for a never before seen experience at home, Toronto!

The city’s premier dance festival, Fall for Dance North is in its sixth edition, titled The Flip Side.  A name intended to represent the totally altered environment that 2020 has become, The Flip Side strives to reinvent how audiences engage with dance by offering to deliver a more personal view of the art through unique performances and experiences. This interactive celebration is set to begin on September 29^th and will be available for worldwide viewing until October 18^th, 2020.

Through the lens of a new, Netflix-style digital platform, the festival will offer free programming put together by over 100 artists, which includes electrifying content; from a new podcast series, to workshops, to even interviews taken place in a bathtub!

On October 3^rd, 2020, the festival will also host an 80-minute signature livestream presentation, featuring a diverse range of emerging and acclaimed Canadian choreographers. As the only ticketed festival event, for $15, viewers will gain access to six exclusive world premieres broadcast live from the 6ix. There are also limited $150 Watch Party packages available, designed to give bubbled family or friends an in-home festival experience. For the daring price, the limited care packages come with a dedicated virtual host of your choice, along with playbills and festival swag.

Lisa La Touche, a tap dance choreographer of Trinidadian descent, is one of the many talented artists that will grace the virtual stage. Originally from Alberta, La Touche has boldly made a name for herself internationally, working among huge names such as Savion Glover and Billy Porter. She has appeared on Broadway in the original, award-winning cast of Shuffle Along. As she enters her first year of working with Fall for Dance North, she is overjoyed to premiere her choreographed performance, Fool’s Gold, a piece using the musicality of tap dance to tackle deep racialized issues.

“In these times of the pandemic, there are conversations about systemic racism and Black Lives Matter, police brutality… I went quiet for a while. I thought about the roots of tap dance, and how we’ve been through all kinds of hard times. I’m from Canada, but I developed a love and passion and career in this African American art. It’s completely rooted in slavery, there’s no way around it,” says La Touche. “My truth is that we’ve been through all kinds of craziness for centuries, but we’ve always been gold. This piece for me is for us as tap dancers who honour integrity and our history. Whether you’re black or white, when you honour the root of this, you arrive to a place where it’s a sacred space.”

The switch to hosting the festival online due to the pandemic has been far from easy, but the eager artists proved they were up for the innovative challenge. La Touche, someone who is thoroughly based on in-person connectivity, was forced to find other artistic methods to bring her vision to life.

“We’re wearing hats that we haven’t worn before. I’m building this piece with composers in New York and that’s happening through voice memos and FaceTime. We’re sending things back and forth and that hasn’t really been done before. It’s stretching my creativity and teaching me new ways of getting to the gold,” she says. “I will greatly miss performing in front of a live audience. There’s nothing more rewarding than feeling the energy in the room. That being said, this has us tuning into each other as dancers on a much deeper level. We don’t have to rely on outside gratification, we rely on us being proud of what we have to present.”

Arts enthusiast across the globe are encouraged to check out the dazzling celebration at https://www.ffdnorth.com.