Dance Art Foundation | Artistic Director Joe Moran

At Once Twice
Christopher House and Joe Moran

Artistic Director of Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) since 1994, Christopher House is one of Canada’s most respected dance artists. Resident Choreographer of TDT since 1981, he has contributed over sixty works to the repertoire. His most recent works include Chiasamata (2007), Dis/(sol/ve)r (2009) and Pteros Tactics (2010), with dramaturgy by Guy Cools. Christopher House has also created choreographies for Ballet Gulbenkian, the National Ballet of Canada, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal and Ballet British Columbia, among others, and directed two collaborations with Joel Gibb and The Hidden Cameras. He has received many awards for his work, including three Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding New Choreography. He received the Muriel Sherrin Award for International Achievement in Dance in October 2009, and was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Memorial University in 2010.

As a performer, Christopher House has toured internationally in his own works and in those of Sarah Chase, Peter Chin, David Earle, Deborah Hay, James Kudelka, Mark Morris and Peter Randazzo. As a guest with Les Grand Ballets Canadiens, he performed the title role in Michel Fokine’s Petrouchka, in works by Nijinska and Kudelka, and in his own solo work Schubert Dances. He premiered his adaptation of News by Deborah Hay in December 2006, and presented five performances of this piece at the Canada Dance Festival in June 2008. He has subsequently learned two more solos from Hay, I’ll Crane for You and At Once. He is Artistic Advisor of the Professional Training Program of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and has taught technique and creative process across Canada and at such international institutions as the Juilliard School, Rotterdam Dansacademie and Jacob’s Pillow. He is an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre.
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Joe Moran is a London-based choreographer, dancer and Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation. He creates dance performance, film and installation for theatres, galleries and public spaces. His work is currently driven by a fascination with a number of choreographic propositions: choreography as a structural intervention to provide a frame for the investment of meaning in the experience of pattern, organisation, variation and repetition; choreography as perceptual directives to cohere action and presence; choreography as an embodiment of ideas and critical thought; choreography as presence and rethinking subjectivities. Joe’s recent works, On The Off Chance, Singular, Surveyed and The Swarm Quintet were presented as part of Differ & Repeat, a choreographic collection of live performance, film and installation that he curated in multiple spaces across The Place, June 2011. He was commissioned to create Score for 30 Dancers in 2010 in response to the unique architecture of Christchurch Spitalfields and in the 2007/08 Dance Art season his work was presented at Herald St and Wilkinson galleries in London. His 2010 work Unsignal, a quartet for the celebrated dancers Lauren Potter, Sasha Roubieck, Marina Collard and Annie Lok, will be remounted for touring in 2012, with Arrangement, his new group work for an international company of male dancers, for which he began research in September 2011 with support from The Place.

As a dancer, Joe has worked with many distinguished choreographers including Deborah Hay, Siobhan Davies (Bank 2008), Gaby Agis, Stephanie Skura, Kate Brown, Florence Peake, and Christopher House (Toronto Dance Theatre). He has collaborated with visual artists Daria Martin, Magali Reus and Shaan Syed. Joe is intrigued by curation as a choreographic endeavour and often curates other artists’ works in counterpoint to his own. In 2008, he co-convened the Dance & Critical Theory Group, a self-organising group of independent artists considering critical theory and contemporary dance practice. Joe trained in dance and choreography at London Contemporary Dance School, for which he received a Fund for Excellence Scholarship and Arts & Humanities Research Council Award, following his undergraduate training in theatre at Bristol University and extensive independent study in the UK and America. He teaches widely, for universities, festivals, studios and companies in the UK and internationally. He is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique and is currently leading participatory projects for Siobhan Davies Dance and at the Royal Opera House.
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At Once Twice
Dancers: Christopher House, Joe Moran
Photography: Gunter Kravis