Interview with Jean Pierre Lefebvre

Contest winner conducts the NAC Orchestra

Countdown to the Rite of Spring-Part 4 of 5

Aggressively Anti-Balletic Vaslav Nijinsky will live on as the first modernist choreographer and one of the greatest dancers of the twentieth century. In his twenties he made a series of ballets that, as Joan Acocella notes in The New Yorker: “…challenged academic dance as Picasso, around…

Melody Johnson Talks About Miss Caledonia

Interview with composer Ana Sokolovic

Small islands, big questions: Birds With Skymirrors May 24-25

Lemi Ponifasio’s Birds With Skymirrors is a multi-layered, multi-media production, a series of highly stylized, sometimes hauntingly beautiful, images that create a mystical world onstage. Birds With Skymirrors is a radical composition in dance, ceremony, poetry, and chant that is also a…

Countdown to the Rite of Spring-Part 3 of 5

The Premiere The premiere performance of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) took place on Thursday, May 29, 1913 at Paris’s newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The program that night also included Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la Rose and Polovtsian Dances. A Modernist Affair…

Playoffs at the NAC

The NAC Orchestra and Orchestre Métropolitain performed together on stage while the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens battled on the ice in game 5 of the playoffs. NAC Orchestra musician Marjolaine Fournier interviews conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin between periods to check in on player…

2013 GGPAA Recipient Announcement

Countdown to The Rite of Spring Part 2 of 5

The Igor Stravinsky Connection The virtually unknown Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was commissioned by Diaghilev to create the score for the full-length ballet The Firebird, choreographed by Fokine for the Ballets Russes’s 1910 Paris season. Stravinsky composed three further works for…

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty

The Famous 5 honours Northern Women during Northern Scene

As part of the National Arts Centre’s Northern Scene Festival, three extraordinary women from the North were honoured at a luncheon hosted by the Famous 5 Foundation in Ottawa. Each of them has played an integral role in the development of the North over the course of their lives,…

Interview with Justice Playwright Leonard Linklater

Countdown to the Rite of Spring – Part 1 of 5

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the premiere of The Rite of Spring, NAC Dance is launching a 5 part weekly blog  covering its history. Every Wednesday, leading up to the anniversary on May 29th we will present interesting facts about one of the most enduring and influential works of…

Projections of the North

What do you make of the North? Inspired by northern imagery drawn and photographed from storybooks, instructional texts and northern themed books, a variety of shapes represent how we have come to ‘project’ the north. Romantic, historical, and sometimes cliché, these images combine…