Photo | Cindi Wicklund
CREATE A STIR
Dance review: Two creatively inspired solos explore the joy and struggle of artistic expression at Chutzpah Festival
The honed and intensely expressive Ballet BC alumna seems to channel whatever streams of emotion Kerr taps in his highly gestural painting. At times her body arches like curved brush strokes, or turns like a shifting idea; at others her feet step manically on the floor, a bit like an outpouring of mark-making. Those gushes and surges of inspiration are also echoed in the score’s freeform strings and found sounds.
Kerr is deeply interested in the way that art offers opportunities for its viewers to exercise their empathy muscles, and Fletcher has found a deeply empathetic way to connect to the artist’s thoughts and intentions—to find the indefinable “light in the rafters” that inspires him. Don’t be surprised to find the entire piece leading you to pull out the acrylics and brushes
Photo | Vanessa Goodman
CREATE A STIR
Alexis Fletcher switches it up with Vanessa Goodman and Ted Littlemore, creating a new sonic connection.
WHAT HAPPENS when three inspired artists from different realms of the Vancouver dance community get into a room together to work on a piece?
Until recently, that’s been largely off-limits during pandemic social-distancing. And the three artists behind the new Tuning are ready to make the most of their collaboration, exploring live, vocally generated sound as well as movement. The fact they are now able to perform it in front of a live audience only strengthens the feeling of making new connections.
“To get that email from Dancing on the Edge that were going to go live... I just felt my spirit lighten,” says choreographer Vanessa Goodman, adding the duet was conceived last year, at a time when the world was in lockdown and the artists were yearning for connection: “Definitely it was influenced by the fact we were missing that interconnectedness. We wanted to explore how we can be together and what that means. We’re social creatures!”
Set to be performed at the Firehall Arts Centre in this final week of the Dancing on the Edge festival, the work brings together contemporary-dance artist Goodman, recently seen in the critically acclaimed Graveyards and Gardens with Caroline Shaw; Alexis Fletcher, a 14-year dancer with Ballet BC who’s now artist in residence at the company and carving out an independent career; and Ted Littlemore, a celebrated contemporary dancer, musician, and drag performer. Fletcher commissioned Action at a Distance’s Goodman for the duet partly as a way to link up with artists inside the community but outside the circle of the company that was her familiar terrain dating way back to the reign of artistic director John Alleyne. […]
Photo | Michael Slobodian
Photo | Sylvain Senez
THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT
Dancing on the Edge: Alexis Fletcher discovers pleasure of Tuning with two artists from different dance backgrounds.
There are two possible interpretations for the title of a new dance duet called Tuning.
According to dancer Alexis Fletcher, who commissioned the work, it can be taken literally because she and fellow dancer Ted Littlemore sing and make sounds with vocorders and a looping machine in the production. But Fletcher, who spent 14 years with Ballet BC, really sees the title as reflecting how two dancers are tuning into one another. The choreography is by Vanessa Goodman, in collaboration with Fletcher and Littlemore.
“It almost feels to me like when you bring two magnets together—and you can start to feel either the drawn-in or the repelling forces,” Fletcher told the Straight by phone. “Like you can feel that little field between the magnets. There’s something about the piece that feels that way to me between him and I.”
Fletcher said that a 30-minute excerpt of Tuning will premiere at this year’s Dancing on the Edge festival, with a full-length production to be presented next February. For Fletcher—who is used to performing in large productions with many dancers, as well as choreographing her own solo production, called assemble, during the pandemic—it has been refreshing to be part of a small group “building this little world”.
Working with Goodman and Littlemore has also enabled Fletcher to pursue her passion for exploring how “the movement potential of the human body becomes a way of accessing the inner landscapes of our spirits and psyches”.
Photo | Mike Wakefield, North Shore News
NORTH SHORE NEWS
Relearning empathy – from the inside out at the Gordon Smith Gallery
Ballet BC’s Alexis Fletcher uses dance to reconcile conflict within herself and in the world.
From growing up in a welcoming home with two yoga-loving parents and an extended spiritual family, to time spent hosting artists in her culturally rich house called Casa Om today, it’s clear kindness and community are in Alexis Fletcher’s bones.
“I believe that it is always possible to be kind in the world,” the Ballet BC dancer says. “I’m certainly not saying I always achieve it, but I do believe in that possibility and it is something I always aspire to.”
The concept of kindness – and its more nuanced companion, empathy – is a key component in a series of upcoming shows choreographed and performed by Fletcher at the North Shore’s Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art.
During light in the rafters, Fletcher will dance amid the backdrop of artist/advocate Tiko Kerr’s current exhibit, Reframed: Painting and Collage. She will be accompanied by a beautiful piece of music entitled Serere, composed by James Beckwith Maxwell, and recorded by the cello and harp duo Couloir (Ariel Barnes and Heidi Krutzen). Fletcher’s husband and collaborator Sylvain Senez is the visual designer. […]
Photo | Michael Slobodian
POINTE
Ballet BC Dancer Alexis Fletcher Turned Her Home Into a B&B and Performance Space
This story originally appeared in the October/November 2016 issue of Pointe.
Vancouver, British Columbia's 2010 Olympic Winter Games were golden for more than just big-name athletes.
Like so many Vancouverites at that time, Ballet BC dancer Alexis Fletcher and her husband, former rehearsal director Sylvain Senez, struggled to keep pace with the skyrocketing cost of living. The couple wondered if they could rent out two empty bedrooms to Olympic visitors to help make ends meet. “We posted our place on Craigslist, just to see what would happen," Fletcher explains.
The response exceeded their hopes, financially and socially. Their guests loved the rooms. And it turned out that Fletcher and Senez enjoyed welcoming strangers into their home—everything from providing fresh fruit and pastries in the mornings to hanging out with their guests after work, swapping stories. When the Olympics ended, the couple made the B&B—dubbed “Casa Om"—a full-time venture.
Six years later, Fletcher and Senez now rent out the original bedroom, plus a garden-level suite. The couple share the cleaning and administrative tasks, and Senez takes care of breakfast duty. Running a B&B is a full-time job on top of her dance career, but Fletcher finds it incredibly rewarding. “We have this new skill set—hosting," she says. “Welcoming people into a space, allowing them to have privacy and comfort and whatever they need." […]
Photo | Michael Slobodian
THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT
Revealing the new Giselle
In a momentous task, Ballet B.C. and José Navas re-envision the quintessential tutu classic through contemporary eyes.
It is the ultimate tutu ballet, as sacrosanct a classical work as Swan Lake. Born at the height of the French romantic style, Giselle focuses on the dainty peasant girl who’s so fragile she goes mad and dies of a broken heart when she can’t unite with the man she loves, the disguised nobleman Albrecht.
Sitting in the studio at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, watching 20 Ballet B.C. dancers push themselves to the max, you immediately realize that choreographer José Navas’s ambitious contemporary take on Giselle does not feel that fragile. The dancers are leaping and turning out of unison to Adolphe Adam’s climaxing orchestral strains, and it’s a miracle they’re not colliding. They are creatures from the second act’s vision of the afterlife, and it looks like the world’s most graceful mosh pit until they all pull back into synchronization again.
“This Giselle has bone, muscles, and fluids,” the Montreal-based choreographer says later, with a tired smile, too involved in talking about his momentous project to touch his lunch. “I want Giselle there and I want people to leave the theatre saying, ‘I saw Giselle,’ ” he stresses. “Believe it or not, I do want the piece to feel romantic.…I don’t want this to be a modern-dance version of Giselle. It’s a real attempt to make Giselle relevant.”
“He sees the same story with new eyes,” explains his assistant, Amy Shulman, who’s out here to help to set Navas’s vision on the troupe. Referring to Navas’s highly architectural aesthetic and penchant for beauty, which local audiences have seen in works like Bliss, she adds: “I think the piece is very classical—and classical doesn’t mean putting people in tutus.” […]
Photo | Cindi Wicklund
THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT
Alexis Fletcher
"I'd always said the only reason I would stay in Vancouver is if something came up with Ballet B.C.," says Alexis Fletcher as she takes a break between rehearsals at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. Fortunately for her, right at the moment her bags were packed to move out East, where she'd been offered an apprenticeship with Toronto Dance Theatre, her talent won her an invitation to join the ranks of British Columbia's internationally respected company.
Accepting the full-time contract from artistic director John Alleyne "was a really easy decision to make", explains Fletcher, exuding fresh enthusiasm and a vibrant energy as she speaks to the Georgia Straight. "It just felt so right, and now that I'm here I'm so happy. I just feel so lucky."
While gearing up for her debut in Alleyne's grand spectacle Carmina Burana from November 17 to 19 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the 20-year-old is steadily making the transition into company life. She cites "being completely responsible for yourself" and "taking total ownership of everything you do" as big adjustments. She stresses she's eager to improve her partnering skills, admitting she has never danced with men before, and she's excited about having her weekends free so she can spend more time hanging out with her high-school sweetheart, practicing yoga, and reuniting herself with horseback riding-a childhood hobby.
A graduate of Arts Umbrella's senior-professional-training program, Fletcher, a native of the Comox Valley, never doubted she would make a career of dance. At 14 she joined Dance Dreams, a youth company in Parksville that offered pre-professional classical and contemporary instruction. It introduced her to a way of life that would forever change her.
"The year I was accepted into Dance Dreams, everything took off. It just clicked," she says. "I knew I was meant to dance and I haven't wavered since."
Audience Review highlights.
Alexis Fletcher is currently at the very pinnacle of her creative powers: the length and breadth of her formidable artistic voice will definitely be celebrated as a hallmark in Canadian culture.
Tiko Kerr | 2018
“In her solo performance to the music of Eric Satie in Itzak Galili’s Things I Told Nobody, I was transfixed. She was superb, particularly because her body with incredibly strong thighs tears down the concept of the swan-like ballerina to the different reality of our 21st century. The swan needed the man to carry her and lift her. Alexis Fletcher is in no need of help.”
Alex Waterhouse Hayward | 2010
It was gorgeous […]. You're a beating heart on stage, nothing at all held back. Even more so when the stage is hardly divisible from the audience.
Audience member message after premiere of solo, light in the rafters | 2019
Juliet's Nurse (Alexis Fletcher[‘s]) emotions are certainly apparent as she gets caught between wanting to do the right thing for Juliet but also stay loyal to her employers. With just a turn of her head, Fletcher was able to telegraph her innermost regret or confusion as she pushes the heartbroken Juliet to follow her parents.
Shari Barrett | BWW Review: Ballet BC Presents a Contemporary and Emotionally Impactful ROMEO & JULIET at The Soraya, 2020
I love all the Ballet BC dancers individually but the corp is organic. Tonight it was all about the troop, pas de deux, pas de trois, men and women exploring. The whole a thing alive. I believe its ever increasing creativity, cohesiveness and oneness reflects the visionary genius of artistic director, Emily Molnar.
Of the dancers, Alexis Fletcher is in her 11th season. I simply can’t get enough of her. Every year I’ve watch her art grow. She is amazing.William Hay, Writer | Review from William Hay, winner of 3 Kenneth R. Wilson Writing Awards and Folio Award, 2015.