WinterSong’s ‘Holiday Season’ show gives high school-age hopefuls a leg up in the dance world

For 17-year-old Hope Fritz this weekend will mark the fulfilment of a dream.

In 2019, Fritz joined classmates from Mississauga’s Cawthra Park Secondary School to attend a student matinee of Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre’s annual late-fall programme, “WinterSong.” As with every edition of this perennial favourite, subtitled “Dances for a Sacred Season,” the show ended with “Nowell Sing We,” a work choreographed by contemporary dance veteran Carol Anderson for the first “WinterSong” in 1988.

Fritz was mesmerized by the work’s central Mother character. Now, as a member of Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre, she’s getting to dance the role.

“It’s a very emotional and full-circle moment,” Fritz wrote in a blog posted to the company’s website.

There are plenty of full-circle moments in the company’s 42-year history, a reflection of how a troupe co-founded by Deborah Lundmark and husband Michael deConinck Smith to provide training and professional-level performance opportunities for talented school-age dancers, has become embedded within the broader dance community.

For example, Hope Fritz, in pursuit of her dream, joined the company as an apprentice member in 2020 but was far from being a rookie. Cawthra Park is one of two Regional Arts Schools in the Peel District School Board. The head of drama and dance there is Rachael Lutes, a former Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre member. Fritz arrived at the company well prepared.

While company alumni have gone on to train and perform professionally elsewhere — its dancers “retire” at age 18 — several have circled back in other capacities. Lutes became a long-serving company teacher. In 2014, after a decade building her dance career in New York, Belinda McGuire became the first former Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre member to choreograph a work for “WinterSong.”

As a repertory company, the theatre’s “WinterSong” program has always been a mixed bill made up of several relatively short works, new and old.

For the current edition, artistic director Lundmark has revived two works that were particularly well received last year, Rodney Diverlus’s jazz-inflected “sagittarius, meet capricorn” — that’s right, all lower case — and Alyssa Martin’s “STAR SEED” (yes, all caps). Lundmark is also reviving a personal favourite from 2017, Apolonia Velasquez’s “UNHUSH.”

“It’s such a distinctive work and has an original score,” said Lundmark.

“THAW,” the new work in this weekend’s program — it must be the prevalent fashion to use capitalized shouting mode for titles of dance works — is the latest to be commissioned from a familiar guest of the company, British-born, California-based Colin Connor.

When Lundmark launched “WinterSong” she aimed to offer audiences an alternative, you could almost say antidote, to the candy-coated consumerist orgy known as the “Holiday Season.” Lundmark understood that the lore and traditions surrounding the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice far predate the early Christian church’s somewhat arbitrary decision — the Bible does not specify — to pin the celebration of Jesus’s birth to the solstice.

It makes sense that early human societies would accord mystical significance to the moment when the sun’s movement south appears momentarily to stop and reverse itself, thus bringing with it the promise of warmth and of a rebirth of life. In some form or another, every work included in a “WinterSong” program relates to this overarching idea.

Of course, unless you’re a meteorologist, it must seem counter-intuitive that as the hours of sunlight do indeed begin to lengthen we pull out the skis and the snow shovels and keep them handy even into March, by which time we’re close to the spring equinox.

Given the title of his new work, the thought must have floated in Connor’s mind as he worked closely with the dancers during Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre’s 2022 summer intensive to build the choreographic foundations of “THAW.”

The work, set to the music of American composer Patrick Grant, is in part a metaphorical parallel for the post-pandemic societal thaw that has accompanied a return to quasi “normal” life. As the dance evokes the thawing of ice and the resulting flow of swift-running rivers it also embodies the return of physical connection after a prolonged dark winter of solitude and social distancing.

And then, as always, comes the traditional closer, Anderson’s “Nowell Sing We.” It’s a much anticipated moment — at least by attendant parents — when the regular 10-member company is joined by an almost equal number of junior apprentices in a work that is as close as “WinterSong” gets to a Christmas theme.

“It’s so beautiful when the little ones make their entrance. It’s a wonderful performance opportunity for them,” said Lundmark, adding pragmatically: “They also bring in an audience!”

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