Navigating Home: Artists of the NL Dance Project

By Amy Bowring
Foreword by Des Walsh
Author Amy Bowring’s literary portraits vividly illuminate the histories of dancers who participated in “Navigating Home: The Newfoundland and Labrador Dance Project”. This endeavour gathered Newfoundland dancers from home, with those who live away, to engage in movement explorations with celebrated choreographers Christopher House and Anne Troake. The dancers’ individual stories reveal complex relationships to “home” – one’s reasons for leaving, aspects of Newfoundland life that persuade many to remain, factors that entice others to return. Herself a descendant of several of Newfoundland’s settler families from the 18th and 19th centuries, Bowring examines her own relationship to the island and her experiences growing up in Ontario as a diasporic Newfoundlander. While the book offers an evocative response to dance in Canada’s most easterly province, it reflects on the art form with passion and insight, defining dance as an influential presence … not only in Newfoundland and Labrador but across Canada and abroad.

About the Author
Amy Bowring is the Executive and Curatorial Director of Dance Collection Danse, an organization that safeguards Canada’s dance archives and artifacts and disseminates these legacies through its varied programs. She holds an Honours BA in Fine Arts Studies from York University, an MA in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario, and teaches dance history in the School of Performance at Ryerson University. She is the editor of her grandfather Derrick Bowring’s book Down to Bowring’s: A Memoir (Breakwater Books / Creative Book Publishers, 2015), and is based in Whitby, Ontario, where she lives with her husband and two sons.