Julia Sasso dances
at the National Arts Centre
7pm, Tuesday 11, June 2002
The Canada Dance Festival 2002 presents the world premiere of Beauty.

"Julia Sasso's Beauty used the title word as an umbrella to examine the beauty of life, from birth to death, and took great risk in presenting the five dancers in vulnerable situations, whether as mewling and puking babies, or depicting graphic sexual encounters replete with appropriate orgasms. Sasso's gutsy piece has been the surprise hit of the festival thus far."



Choreography: Julia Sasso
Dramaturgy: Brian Quirt
Original score: Geoffrey Bennett and TTG Music Lab
Lighting Design: Hugh Conacher
Costumes: Heather MacCrimmon
Created with and performed by: Justine Chambers, Mike Moore, Michael Sean Marye, Ron Stewart, Heidi Strauss and Michael Trent

A co-commission of Julia Sasso dances, Harbourfront centre and Nightswimming.

Also on the programme: Julia Sasso dances Carol Anderson's Elsinore. Of recent performances of Elsinore at the Premiere Dance Theatre (as part of Spring Rites 2002), it was noted:

"Carol Anderson's Elsinore, created for the marvelous Julia Sasso in 1999, is a great Canadian classic, using the metaphor of sea creatures to depict the downward spiral of inner turmoil. Thus, as a sad but romantic Mendelssohn piano piece is heard, Sasso's hands are transformed into crab's legs, while her whole body twists into shells of armour. Anderson quotes a poem that contains the line "meat for the monsters in me," and this is what Sasso brings to life in her agonized struggle for some kind of dignity against a wall of black despair. The choreography is a brilliant rendering of the dark heart of Hamlet, Ophelia and the other blighted souls of Elsinore."