Remembering Anna Blewchamp
Dancer, choreographer, scholar, and educator Anna Blewchamp died in her sleep on the night of August 26th/27th. Many in our community will remember Anna as their beloved Graham technique teacher at York University – myself among them. Anna always taught in footless tights and a leotard so we could clearly see what she was demonstrating … with her long, burgundy hair draping over her shoulders from its middle part. That hair was iconic. So iconic that when a contingent of the dance community was gathered for the “Renegade Bodies” conference in Ottawa in 2010 during the Canada Dance Festival, choreographer and mentor Peter Boneham commented on it when he saw Anna for the first time in many years. He was speaking on a panel and Anna raised her hand to ask a question. Peter, with astonishment, said, “Is that Anna Blewchamp? You still have that long hippy hair,” to which Anna replied flatly, “And you don’t,” wittily commenting on Peter’s, by then, relatively hairless head. An example of Anna’s quick mind and dry humour.
Anna was born in London, England, and trained at the Corona Theatre Academy and the Ballet Rambert School. She also studied and danced with Gary Cockrell’s jazz company and then continued her jazz training in New York with Luigi and Matt Mattox. Later studies include the Martha Graham School and Alvin Ailey, among others. She moved to Toronto in 1969 and soon connected with Elizabeth and Robert Swerdlow and their Global Village Theatre where she taught and performed. That relationship led her to Factory Theatre founder Ken Gass who engaged Anna to teach movement classes to actors.
Freelance teaching in the early 1970s put her in contact with students at Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) who spoke glowingly of the Martha Graham technique. Though she did not enjoy her experience of Graham in England, she found a new affinity for the technique at TDT and was inspired by founders Peter Randazzo, Patricia Beatty, and David Earle. By 1973, she was teaching and performing with the company – a favourite role being the Lady in Red in Randazzo’s Nighthawks.
Anna did the first show in 1974 at 15 Dance Lab, a theatre created by DCD’s founders Lawrence and Miriam Adams. By the mid-1970s, Anna was choreographing regularly for the newly created company Dancemakers (where she was associate artistic director from 1977-1978) including Arrival of All Time, Baggage, A.K.A., Terminal, and Homage. Arrival of All Time, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, was later remounted by the Danny Grossman Dance Company. The original costumes reside in DCD’s collection.
(L to R) William Douglas, Carol Anderson, and Pat Fraser in Ann Blewchamp’s Arrival of All Time, Dancemakers, c. 1975; Anna in her booth displaying her “assemblages” at Toronto’s Outdoor Art Show, 2014; Vanessa Harwood and Richardo Keens-Douglas in There’s Always Been Dance, choreographed by Anna Blewchamp for Dance Collection Danse, 1986 / Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann
Anna continued to choreograph on a freelance basis through the 1980s including her 1981 work Shadows of Formal Selves for Toronto Dance Theatre, with text by Graham Jackson, and she was engaged in 1986 as choreographer for There’s Always Been Dance – a DCD presentation at Expo ’86 following the reconstruction project that began DCD. Reconstruction would inspire Anna’s graduate work at York University in the 1990s when she brought Gweneth Lloyd’s 1942 ballet The Wise Virgins back to life. After watching National Film Board outtakes in the archives at DCD, Anna was inspired by the more modernist movement in the work. She set the work on the York Dance Ensemble complete with its raked stage set piece and cypress trees. She had guest taught at York in the 1980s and was brought on as an assistant professor in 1989 where she taught until 2013.
In the 2000s, Anna engaged in mixed media visual art pieces that she called “assemblages”. She used found objects, antique pieces, natural elements and fabrics that she combined inside vitrines, old clocks, wooden boxes and other interesting housings.
Human relationships, the isolation of artistry, social concerns, how people operate in the world, humour, and the joy of pure movement are all aspects of Anna’s choreography. However, her career as a whole cannot be summed up merely by her choreography, for her contributions as a teacher, advisor, and scholar are part of the complexities that made up this extremely private artist. She told me once she had always had a love/hate relationship with dance, at times completely frustrated by it, others times uncontrollably drawn to it. She told me, “Dance has true eloquence and speaks from the soul.”
– Amy Bowring
(L to R) Anna Blewchamp, c. 1972; Poster for Anna Blewchamp’s Homage at 15 Dance Lab, 1974; Anna Blewchamp (right) in class or rehearsal in the 1970s
Banner Photo: Anna Blewchamp, c. 1977
