Barabara Bourget | |
---|---|
Born | 1950 (age 72–73) Port Alberni, British Columbia, Canada |
Education | Royal Winnipeg Ballet School |
Occupation(s) | Dancer, choreographer |
Partner | Jay Hirabayashi |
Children | Joseph Hirabayashi, Dan Haggart |
Career | |
Current group | Kokoro Dance |
Former groups | Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Mountain Dance Theatre, Experimental Dance and Music (EDAM) |
Barbara Bourget is a dancer, choreographer and the artistic director of Kokoro Dance Theatre Society in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is known for her butoh performances and choreography. Her work has been described as difficult, punishing and uncompromising. She was born in Port Alberni, British Columbia in 1950.
Bourget began tap dancing at age four and went on to take ballet class at age nine. From 1961 to 1967 she studied with Mara McBirney and from 1967 to 1969 Bourget was a scholarship student at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. [1] Her teachers at the Royal Winnipeg School included Arnold Spohr, Gwynne Ashton, Jean McKenzie and Maria Fay. She danced with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens from 1969 to 1972 and then began working in modern dance.
Bourget performed from 1974 to 1978 in Mauryne Allan's Mountain Dance Theatre in Vancouver. In 1975, encouraged by Allan she choreographed "Trio for Three Women". She met Jay Hirabayashi in 1979 when both were dancing with Paula Ross's company and they married in 1981.
In 1982 Bourget and Hirabayashi with Peter Bingham, Ahmed Hassan, Lola MacLaughlin, Jennifer Mascall, and Peter Ryan, co-founded Experimental Dance and Music (EDAM). They left EDAM after four years to co-found Kokoro Dance. In 1987 she performed Rage, choreographed by her husband Jay Hirabayashi. [2] Since forming Kokoro Dance, Barbara has choreographed over one hundred dances. These include Dis/Zero (1987), Episode in Blue: A Cantata from Hell (1988), Zero to the Power (1989), Crime Against Grace (2001), and Sunyata. [2]
In 1998 Kokoro Dance began producing the Vancouver International Dance Festival. Initially as a platform for butoh performance, the festival expanded across genres over time. [3]
Bourget's 2012 work A Simple Life was created as an exploration of her decades-long career in dance. The piano score accompanying the work was composed her son Jason Hirabayashi. [1]
Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is known to "resist fixity" and is difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with "distress". Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments. It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.
The Royal Winnipeg Ballet is Canada's oldest ballet company and the longest continuously operating ballet company in North America.
Kokoro Dance is one of Canada's leading butoh dance troupes. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, it was founded in 1986 by artistic directors Barbara Bourget and Japanese Canadian Jay Hirabayashi. They have performed across Canada, in the United States, and abroad.
Terese Capucilli is an American modern dancer, interpreter of the roles originally performed by Martha Graham. She is one of the last generation of dancers to be coached and directed by Graham herself. A principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company for twenty-six years, she became associate artistic director in 1997 and from 2002 to 2005 served as artistic director, with Christine Dakin, seeing the organization and its dancers through the rebirth of the company. A driving force of Graham's work for nearly three decades, she is now Artistic Director Laureate.
The Vancouver International Dance Festival is an annual, month-long contemporary dance festival held in Vancouver, British Columbia. The festival, produced by Kokoro Dance Theatre Society, began in 1998 as a Butoh Festival. The following year it became the Vancouver International Dance Festival.
The Canadian Ballet Festival was an annual event staged in Canada from 1948 to 1954 that brought together various Canadian dance companies to generate public interest in classical dance. Prior to the festivals, it was difficult for professional Canadian dancers to earn a living by practising their art in their own country. When the festivals ended in 1954 after six years, Canadian dancers were able to find paid work in Canadian television practising their art.
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