Workshop Intensive for Dancers, Performers, and Choreographers
Young Lungs Dance Exchange is thrilled to present Toronto-based Choreographer, Dramaturge, and Teacher Alejandro Ronceria, Director of Dance Training at The Banff Centre for the Arts, for a week-long workshop intensive over Spring Break.
When: Monday, March 31 – Friday, April 4, 2025, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Where: School of Contemporary Dancers, 204-211 Bannatyne Avenue
Early Bird Price (ends March 16): $200 for 5 days / full week pass
Regular Price (after March 16): $250 for 5 days / full week pass
To register, please click here.
Partial days will only be available for registration after 10 participants register for the full week.
Register for the full week-long workshop before March 1st and get 2 free tickets to the 20th Anniversary Festival on June 26-29, 2025 at le Centre Culturel Franco Manitobain.
About the workshop:
This workshop allows emerging to established dancers, performers, and choreographers focused on conception and development to gain creative and performing tools and learn to use space, time, dimension, musicality, and narrative elements. The participants engage in movements and exercises to discover their relationship with space, sound and the physical environment.
Workshop overview:
Morning:
Ronceria´s movement class
Choreographic Lab (individual & group work)
Lunch Break
Afternoon:
Choreographic Lab continues (individual & group work)
About Alejandro Ronceria:
Alejandro Ronceria (he/him) is a Toronto-based Artistic Director, Choreographer, Producer and Educator with a career that spans over 30 years of experience in Canada and abroad. Internationally acclaimed for the creation and direction of original cultural experiences in dance, he has helmed the artistic direction of significant national and international cultural productions including choreographer for the Welcome from the Indigenous segment, for the official opening of the 2010 Canadian Winter Olympic Games. Recent projects include “Amalgama” City of Toronto dance commission for the Pan-American Games (2015), artistic director “Adaka Festival Gala” in the Yukon (2019) as well as director/dance dramaturge for “Kateri Tekakwitha”, a multidisciplinary production with composer Barbara Croall and the McGill Chamber Orchestra in Montreal (2019).
Recognized as a pioneer in Indigenous dance worldwide, Ronceria was Program Director of the first Aboriginal dance program in North America, at The Banff Centre for the Arts from 1996- 2000. The ground-breaking program brought together diverse Indigenous/Inuit dancers from across Canada, the USA, Mexico, New Zealand and Greenland, an incubator that developed a bold new generation of Indigenous dance artists and served as a model for various schools for Indigenous dance internationally. One of the program’s productions included “Bones” the first Canadian Aboriginal Dance Opera (2001), in collaboration with Sadie Buck and choreographed by Ronceria. Recently Ronceria returned to the Banff Centre and developed and directed the “Intercultural Indigenous Choreographers Creation Lab”, an intensive creation lab for choreographers.
As well as directing, Ronceria is an inspired educator, experimenting with new methodologies, guest teaching and leading master classes in choreography and movement. Very active also as a Dance Dramaturge, he has worked with numerous independent choreographers. Ronceria is the first recipient of York University’s MFA in Dance Dramaturgy and the first to hold this degree from a Canadian university. Ronceria was also an early pioneer in dance and new media in Canada and directed several dance and performing arts films including “A Hunter Called Memory” which world premiered at TIFF 1996, followed by an international premiere at Sundance.
He continues to explore the intersection of dance and new media and often incorporates new technologies in his productions. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Ronceria is classically trained and danced for the National Ballet of Colombia and National Opera Company of Bogota. He continued his classical training in the Soviet Union, New York and Montreal and moved to Canada in 1984. He danced for Canadian contemporary choreographers like Jean-Pierre Perreault and Karen Jamieson before premiering his first major solo work “The Jaguar Project” at the DuMaurier World Stage Festival in 1991. With the Jaguar Project, Ronceria began to explore his mixed race heritage (Indigenous/Spanish) as an artist, leading to a lifelong passion for new forms of dance, pushing boundaries of traditional Western dance frameworks and creating space for emerging diverse artists.