For the first year Broken Rhythms is excited to announce the recipients of the Rhythmical Contemporary Scholarship Training Program. This pilot program enables emerging professional artists to gain the experience necessary to succeed technically and artistically as professionals in the artistic field of the participants choosing.
Goals of the program…
- Accessibility, and deconstruction of traditional ‘dance’ standards regarding ideas around body, gender, and age
- To provide training to future Broken Rhythms Company Dancers
- To support the local dance community
- To help local dancers network/learn/grow in a safe and accepting environment
- To offer individual and specialized ways of learning and engagement in dance
Please Welcome!
Victoria was raised and currently resides on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples. Victoria began dancing at a young age and after taking a prolonged break from formal dance study in their adolescence and early adulthood to pursue various athletic endeavours. This included roller derby, where their love for dance was reborn after returning home from competing at the 2018 Roller Derby World Cup, when they were introduced to dancing on roller skates! Over the past four years, Victoria has exclusively studied and trained this unique, hybrid dance style, with a level of intensity honed from years of playing competitive sports. They have had the opportunity to perform at numerous local events, and teach, choreograph, and produce shows to showcase their students’ progress. Victoria is a certified instructor with Roll Right Skating Academy. Victoria was first introduced to Broken Rhythms through Dance Days in 2019. It was their first off-skates dance class in 12 years! Victoria is thrilled and beyond grateful to have been awarded the opportunity to train with the Broken Rhythms Victoria Society! They are looking forward to learning as much as possible from this experience.
I am a primarily self-taught and improvisational dancer who has been engaged in collaborative and experimental work with Victoria-based artists, Lindsay Delaronde and Kemi Craig. My work with Lindsay has focused on creating non-western forms of story-telling and dance, learning embodiment practices and playing with improvised movement. Kemi and I have woven various elements, like dance, film, text and video projections into our experimental and personal work. The theatrics of joy and pain, the tensions of living and decaying and the relationship between anger and release—are themes woven into my style and approach to dance. My movements are influenced by traditions of ceremony within Jamaican revivalism, as well as Japanese butoh dance. I embody frenetic movements that echo the trance-inducing state of ecstatic ceremony, as well as contemplative, grotesque and theatrical attitudes, like that of butoh theatre. The transformative possibilities of free movement in the body are explored within my practice. I attempt to translate mental and emotional landscapes into physical expressions. Dance, for me, has been a continuous process of either remembering, revealing, retelling, or resisting, and sometimes each of these occur at the same time. These ideas, though sometimes abstract and elusive, can take shape in every part of the body. When I dance, I am actively pursuing freedom, because I believe it lives in the body. Dance is the medium I experience freedom through, and I am grounded in an artistic practice that uses the entire body.
Broken Rhythms 