Production Week

Production week is one of my favorite parts of creating a new show. While there always seems to be one more thing to do on the list and inevitably I get pretty under-slept the week can be compared to that beautiful moment before sunset in which your whole life is drenched in gold for one hour.

The construction and bones are complete, layering of additional elements has begun. Lighting and set designs come together to create the worlds that up till now existed only in my imagination. Two years of conceptualizing moments and accumulating them in series all being realized at last!

The production team: Longer Than a Shadow

Roelof Peter Snippe

Lighting Designer

Roelof Peter Snippe began his professional lighting design career with Toronto Workshop Productions under the direction of George Luscombe. In 1973, he began a long working relationship with Toronto Dance Theatre, creating designs for over 150 works in the repertoire. Over his long, distinguished career as a lighting designer, stage manager and technical director, Mr. Snippe has worked with major dance, theatre and opera companies across Canada and abroad. They include the National Ballet of Canada, The Danny Grossman Dance Company, Dancemakers, and numerous other Canadian companies and independent artists, including Denise Fujiwara. In 2010, Mr. Snippe was awarded the Dance Ontario Lifetime Achievement Award.

Cheryl Lalonde

Costume Designer

Born and raised in Toronto, Cheryl Lalonde began her career in the arts with Act IV Theatre at Adelaide Court. After two years backstage at Toronto Workshop Productions, her design debut was for the premiere production of Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters under mentor and director Larry Lewis. Splitting her time between design and stage management has allowed her to travel the world as well as collaborate with many companies, including: Desrosiers Dance Theatre, Danny Grossman Dance Company, Fujiwara Dance Inventions, Eclectic Theatre, Alberta Ballet, Dreamwalker Dance Company, Theatre Smith Gilmour, and Kaeja d'Dance. Ms. Lalonde has been nominated for four Dora Mavor Moore Awards for design and was honored in 1997 for her design of Eclectic Theatre's Chutzpah a-go-go. She has served on the faculty of Theatre Arts at The Banff Centre for seven summers, and recently participated in a panel of Canadian Stage Managers to establish a DACUM occupational analysis for Stage Management.

Andrea Roberts

Rehearsal Director/Artistic Advisor

Andrea Roberts is an active member of the dance community in both an artistic and an administrative capacity. She graduated from The School of Toronto Dance Theatre in 1997, where she currently works as both Professional Programs Co-ordinator and rehearsal director. Over the past decade, she has become increasingly interested in discovering her artistic voice through improvisation and theatre training. She has recently completed a Masters degree in dance at York University, with research focusing on the dance-theatre work of Murray Darroch.

Home

We are home from Burkina Faso, and while the air is chilly and the snow is not red sand I am happy to be here.

The last few days in Burkina were mostly spent in the studio, marrying the music and dance at last. It’s a wonderful feeling when the two art forms start to line up. In our last run through on Saturday afternoon I was conscious to savour the environment the work was created in. The warmth, the children watching through the open door, the visual artist working on the other side of the space and of course the beautiful African wood under my feet.

My French is still terrible but Bienvenue and I have found a way to understand each other. Converse is a testament to the power of communication through the body. This creative process has been an exercise in giving up control, letting the work evolve through a long series of responses and counter responses. Most days we worked for 6-8 hours with short breaks for ‘fuel’ as Bienvenue would say, usually bananas and ground nuts!  There’s undeniably something encoded in the day to day manners of the Burkinabè. Like Bienvenue the average person we talked to placed great importance on acknowledging and taking the time to greet and ask about one another.

Most of the collaborative work John did to create the score was done with Ndoula-speaking griot musician Bema ‘Balafon’ Konaté and members of his family. I think they enjoyed themselves and one another’s company building the layers that would make up the score. This meant travelling around Ouaga on motorcycles to get the various instruments and musicians involved on tape. There were plenty of good ideas to choose from that’s for sure.

Bienvenue arrives tonight and will go directly from the airport to our first rehearsal at the theatre. We are very lucky to have made this work in Burkina and be performing it in Canada, to have had the opportunity to be plunged into each others’ worlds in back-to-back order. Now that the project has unfolded so positively and fruitfully, and staging starts today, I can’t imagine it any other way. Besides I will always jump at a chance to be in West Africa, I am admittedly in love.

The studios: Burkina Faso

Recording space, a popular concert venue during the revolution which established Burkina Faso as separate from Upper Volta on August 4th, 1984

The dance studio is shared with a visual artist. It can be converted to a black box theatre.

Day Three: Burkina Faso

Bienvenue bazie, in rehearsal

Day three – The third day in the studio is always the hardest. I find there’s a hump to climb over every time I begin a process. The body is sore from trying new material, the mind is cluttered with ideas not yet realized and without clear direction of how to explore them. For Bienvenue and I it was also a day of repeat trips to the Embassy to finalize his visa and that meant rehearsal started 2 hours late.


It is easy to walk away or to choose to end a rehearsal early when you’re working alone, in a sense giving up. We managed to stay in the room, as they say, and poke around at some new phrases, though I will admit I am looking forward to the day after the hump.

Burkina: We Begin

It is hot a dry this time of year in Ouagadougou. Red dust hovers in the air the way humidity does on a hot day in July in Toronto. Coming back, there is a kind of is a kind of familiarity allowing us to step in where we left off and deepen relationships quickly.

Day 01: Studio

I remember now the first time Bienvenue brought me here. The complex was built by a French woman a few years ago, it is enviable, three studios built around a courtyard with tables and a café.

We work from 1-6pm in the largest studio/theatre. Next to us a painter prepares a 30 foot canvas. Doors are open, people come and go, keeping us from being too cloistered or precious about our work.

Bienvenue’s physicality is refreshing.  The sounds of other rehearsals surround us, making their way into our rhythms.

John and Bema creating sounds for use in the score at a compound 10 min away.

John MacLean, Sibema Konate, Ouagadougou Burkina Faso