Randy Glynn is the founding and current artistic director and co-curator of Festival of Dance Annapolis Royal (FODAR), a contemporary dance festival in Annapolis Royal, NS. Glynn is also the former artistic director of Live Art Dance in Halifax. He was a dancer with the Danny Grossman Company for ten years and a choreographer and performer with his own company, The Randy Glynn Dance Project. Glynn lives in Granville Ferry, NS with his partner Pam Grundy.
FODAR runs from July 16-20 in Annapolis Royal.
The Dance Current: This year the Festival of Dance Annapolis Royal celebrates its 10 year anniversary. How did the festival come about? What were you looking to accomplish?
Randy Glynn: Nothing! (both laugh) I wasn’t looking to accomplish anything… I’d made this dance on seniors called Dancing In The Third Act and it literally came about because I did a flash mob for seniors in the Annapolis Royal farmer’s market and while I was working with the seniors I thought, you know, I think if I can get these guys in the theatre I can make a workable art with them – a dance! And I did. And so in 2013 we spent the whole summer, myself and twelve really old friends, seniors, and I made a dance and it worked. It was a hit, like we didn’t expect it, literally went around the world and in the end it was even invited to Sadler’s Wells. I mean, the fame of Dancing In The Third Act blew us out of the water.
Locally, 600 people came to see it in three days, it was the largest audience for a local live show, for a live show period they had ever had. So we thought, myself and Grace Butland, we thought, you know we should start a dance festival here and let this audience that seems to like dance see professional dance. So we literally just thought, ok, let’s give it a try. And we did. And it worked. And it’s still working.
DC: Annapolis Royal is a fairly small town in Nova Scotia. Has the local community been supportive?
RG: When you say “local community,” who do you imagine the local community in Annapolis Royal to be?
DC: I’m actually not quite sure. I guess, when I think of a small town, I don’t think of a large audience base for contemporary dance or one that will sustain a festival for 10 years.
RG: There’s a whole raft of people within any community in Canada that has almost zero interest in the arts and contemporary dance is one of the absolute weirdest. In Annapolis, most of the houses here are large, old, wooden Victorian homes that cost a fortune to own and upkeep, so locals don’t own them. It’s retired professionals from away. This is actually most of who comes to FODAR – people who have retired to this community. It’s also statistically the highest percentage of seniors in the country per capita, in Annapolis. So that’s your audience. We have maintained an audience through careful programming over the years, not mainstream programming, but it is working. And we’re trying to attract rural born, rural raised people.
We’re very different from Festival Saint-Sauveur or Jacob’s Pillow. These are festivals situated in giant enclaves of wealthy, urban people. The Berkshires, where Jacob’s Pillow is, I mean you won’t believe the amount of money in the Berkshires there – it’s unbelievable. So they can run one of the largest summer dance festivals in the world.
If you look at the stats for Saint-Sauveur, it’s staggering, I mean, their budget, and what they do, it’s amazing, but the Saint-Sauveur area of Montreal, north of Montreal, is loaded with wealth and money and that’s not here. We’re not a place where the wealthy from Halifax own summer homes …that’s why we do mixed programs rather than do full evening programs. In some ways it’s cheaper to buy full evening programs, but we’ve done mixed programming. We’ve also done a thing where every year we revise a dance from the past so we always know we can at least have a dance that works; we’re blending previous contemporary dances with current contemporary dance in a mixed program format, and every program has in it stuff for somebody.
So we have broad audience appeal in our shows and we always have and we always will. But to try and paint the local community with one colour brush is difficult because it runs the gamut from a fair number of retired, wealthy people and some tourists that are accustomed to going to things like contemporary dance or at least art. And then you have a lot of rural born people.
DC: I know you have a residency program. I’m wondering when the program started and if there are plans to expand it.
RG: The residency program started in 2019. I found ways to raise money through grants for seniors, which are fairly easy for us to get here. It was a little sort of outside the box use of funding for seniors. My pitch was, give us some money, we’ll have dancers in town, they’ll mingle with the seniors, teach classes and I will find a sponsor to make the program go. I had no idea if I could find a sponsor or not, but we did it every year after that, with various creative uses of grants for seniors, you know, creating cultural, artistic activity through it. Out of the blue, we got a sponsor for the program so now we don’t need to apply for those grants.
We’re having Rock Bottom [Movement] in for two weeks and we’re having Maria Osende and a Toronto theatre director named Layne Coleman in for a week. My idea is to approach other sponsors. There are community halls here that are underutilized so they’re quite cheap and we can use them. They’re not perfect dance studios but they’re quite beautiful.
We’re not trying to expand it unless it becomes easily possible through government grants. But it’s been quite successful. It has an impact to have young dancer-people in town for longer periods of time: they meet people, they talk to people, they become friends, they go for dinner, it’s like nothing demystifies an artform like personal familiarity and that’s what we’re doing. It’s why after shows we have meet and greets. We don’t do artist Q&As.
DC: I’m wondering if you’re doing anything new or special to celebrate the 10 year anniversary.
RG: FODAR’s grown 700% since we started, and so the options of who we can invite and what we can do is impressive. We’re inviting more artists than we’ve ever invited so we have 17 artists coming in. But you have to see it to believe it. Market Dances is like this little piece of magic. We started it in the pandemic and we’re doing it again this year and the dancers perform in the stalls of the Annapolis Royal farmer’s market. The stalls are covered but the market itself is outdoors so the audience sits out in the market square and [the artists] dance in the stalls. All the pieces have to be between five and eight minutes and you can do whatever you want as long as it’s family compatible. We don’t charge for it, it’s a contribution if you want, but it’s been hugely successful and at our best night we have one third of the town – 150 people come and see it. Not all of those people come to the mainstage shows, but some do, and they get it. The dancers like it, it’s not too strenuous on them, and so we’re expanding that and we’re going to do it two nights this year.
We’re having our first tap dancer. We have Travis Knights from Toronto and interesting for Market Dances is Travis Knights has agreed to do a dance battle with Maria Osende so we’re gonna have a tap/flamenco dance battle in Market Dances.
DC: Ooh.
RG: So, that’ll be a little bit different.
DC: Yeah.
RG: I just thought of it and I thought he wouldn’t go for it but he said, yeah, I’ll give that a try. So they had a Zoom meeting and figured it out and we’re gonna see what happens. This is a bit seat-of-the-pants.
And The Man In Black is coming back. We’ve had it a few times here and it’s the most requested piece other than Dancing In the Third Act so in our effort to encourage, you know, people that are less accustomed to contemporary dance, we thought The Man In Black is a good choice because of the Johnny Cash music. It’s a superb piece. You know the piece? It’s a superb piece by James Kudelka.
They’re partly redoing it because FODAR asked them to. So we requested it and Laurence (Lemieux), said, oh, that’s an interesting idea, so she’s found some circulation for it and they performed it in Toronto and they won the Dora. So we can have an impact, FODAR. …things happen. We can lobby for money, we can make people do stuff. (laughs). It’s a feather in our cap.
And we’re revising another Kudelka piece, Soudain l’Hiver Dernier… the four people that do The Man In Black, two of them also do this other piece so that’s the revival we’re doing. So two of the Citadel dancers will perform that.
Rock Bottom has done two world premieres at FODAR, both of which have gone on to tour to cities and places and festivals and things, and they both premiered at FODAR. We’re giving them this residency this year and we’re going to host what we would call the soft premiere of Big Time Miss.
The formal premier of Big Time Miss will be at Fall for Dance North in the fall but we’re hosting the creative residency and we will stage it technically, the first go at it. We’re very happy to do that. And the Rock Bottom people, this is their third year in a row and the impact has been that people now know them here and so them spending two weeks here socializing and being in the community also has a huge impact in helping to, you know, bridge the gap, so people don’t feel so weird going to shows.
DC: What’s next for the festival? You have Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo and Michael Caldwell as co-curators this year. Will you be staying on as artistic director for the foreseeable future or are you looking to pass the torch soon?
RG: I think I’d like to have somebody else come on board to help me at this end. Michael and I more or less co-did the festival for several years but he’s now the artistic director of Summerworks so he’s less able to be a boot on the ground here, and I’m very happy with Barbara, Michael and I curating the festival. There are so many different perspectives and voices at the table – there’s three people but about sixty perspectives (laughs). All of us have a lot of international, national and local connections and knowledge and so it’s really great.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Dance Media Group strengthens the dance sector through dialogue. Can you help us sustain national, accessible dance coverage? Your contribution supports writers, illustrators, photographers and dancers as they tell their own stories. Dance Media Group is a charitable non-profit organization publishing The Dance Current in print and online.
Tagged:
