- ABOUT THE COMPANY
- LUCY
Blue Ceiling dance is a vehicle for the choreographic and interpretive work of dance artist Lucy Rupert. The repertoire includes original works, collaborations and commissioned dance works, all with the aim of transforming emotion into deeply rooted physical experience. Lucy takes great inspiration from Edvard Munch's statement "It is not the chair that should be painted, but what the person has felt at the sight of it." This is how she approaches creation and performance.
The blue ceiling is a metaphor for imagination that seems to be trapped within the body-much like the sky, the blue ceiling, seems trapped within a spectrum of light-yet somehow the expanse and possibilities of the sky and the mind are endless.
Blue Ceiling emerged in 2003 with the creation of Tropic of Cancer, an adaptation of Henry Miller's 1934 novel of the same name, choreographed for two actors and four dancers. The first performance garnered the attention of critics and Lucy was named an artist "among the ones to watch in the future." (Globe and Mail).
Lucy worked closely with dance artists Jennifer Bolt and Caroline Niklas-Gordon from 2002-2005 and it was with these wonderful dancers that she launched into a verdant period of creating dances inspired by literature and literary imagery from a range of authors and artists: T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, I.G. Kovacic, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Marlene Dietrich, Modigliani, Antoine de St. Exupery, Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell. Caroline Niklas-Gordon and Jennifer Bolt remain artistic confidantes for Blue Ceiling dance.
In 2005 Lucy was granted a residency at Harbourfront, and won the Lab Cab Award, an honour usually given to theatre artists. In 2006, Lucy took a small but important turn with a solo the speed of our vertigoes, which explored the landscape of Einstein's theories through a 15 minute solo. Working with theatre director Allyson McMackon (Theatre Rusticle), she discovered a new way of performing and creating. Using a spontaneous imagination on top of the choreography to test the physical and emotional truth of each movement. "The speed of our vertigoes" toured to Montreal, Guelph, and Stuttgart, Germany in 2007.
Since then, Blue Ceiling and Lucy have been primarily focused on the development of solo work and work in creative collaboration with one or two artists at a time. Blue Ceiling dance commissioned solo works from choreographers Malgorzata Nowacka and Jenn Goodwin, and was commissioned to create a solo for Dusk Dances 2006. In the fall of 2007 Lucy collaborated with singer-songwriter Sarah Slean on a new solo work, The Abecedarian, for which Sarah wrote a gorgeous poem to serve as inspiration and as the basis of film projection for the dance. The immediate future for Blue Ceiling dance focuses on collaborations with international artists and the commissioning of new solo work.