On Oct. 27, dancers from four Prince Albert studios and countless others across the province are teaming up for a province-wide performance.
Dancers from Ballet and all that Jazz, Bold Dance Productions, the Prince Albert Performing Arts Warehouse and the Prince Albert Dance Company will take part in #SKdancestogether, a social media campaign designed to celebrate dance, and let residents know that arts are still here despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“(We wanted) to just band together as a province and show support,” said Gillian Horn, a Prince Albert-based dance teacher and examiner for the Royal Academy of Dance and Canadian Dance Teacher’s Association. “We are still here. We are resilient. We have adapted to our surroundings, and we are safe, viable places.”
Horn said dance studios were hit hard by COVID-19, with some struggling to survive the cap on public and private gatherings, as well as strict cleaning protocols.
Dancers, choreographers and instructors banded together over the internet to help support one another, and that helped launch the #SKdancestogether campaign.
Horn said studios are important to a dancer’s health and well-being, whether they’re youth or adult participants. She’s hoping their dance campaign can show off that aspect, as well as the work studios have done to keep everyone safe.
“We’re the most adaptable we’ve ever been,” Horn said. “That’s in our nature. We are very creative. We can pivot. We can change things. I do foresee that we are going to bounce back.”
Students from each of Prince Albert’s four studios recorded their performances last week. Those videos will be shared on social media on Oct. 27, along with roughly 120 others from Saskatchewan dance studios.
Dancers were encouraged to wear Saskatchewan’s provincial colours of green and yellow to show their love for dance, and the province.
A Tisdale dance teacher created a special routine for the campaign, and organizers secured royalty free music for the performance. Horn said it’s been an exciting development for a group hasn’t had much to get excited about since COVID hit.
“It was so much fun just to be together and have something to look forward to,” she said.
“We just started to get the word out to each other (saying) let’s teach this combination to our students, but also to other people. I’ve heard in other places of the parents doing it, dance festival boards learning it, dance moms in the parking lots learning it. It’s actually kind of a fun thing to do, and it’s been so long since we’ve had anything fun to look forward to. It was a real bright spot.”