Anna rehearsing choreography with flutist & harpist. Double click to view intro clip as 25.1 MB Windows Media Player file
Anna rehearsing choreography with flutist & harpist.
Double click to view intro clip as 25.1 MB Windows Media Player file
Anna's Dance
Anna's Dance is the compelling story of a woman's struggle to express her faith through sacred dance. Anna Douthwright began her work in Canada in the late 1960's as a Roman Catholic Montessori teacher. Newly arrived in London Ontario from England, with her husband David, Anna had earlier tried to use movement and dance as a means to express her faith as a missionary in Alaska. She began to take formal dance instruction herself in the late 1980's just before she was diagnosed with cancer. Beginning more formally with her self, her children and other children in the neighborhood, Anna became involved in choreographing more and more ambitious sacred dance productions into the 1990's. Arising from her faith and the community in which she lived, Anna produced a series of sacred dance productions including Gwynna, Donkey's Dream, Ruth, Missa Gaia and Jubilate Deo.
Shortly after their arrival in London, Ontario, Anna and David began a family and made a conscious commitment to participate in forming an intentional faith community in downtown London, led by a young Roman Catholic priest by the name of Marcel Gervais, now Archbishop of Ottawa. Anna's family together with others moved into a downtown neighborhood together to form a faith-based community. Anna's dance grew out of this community in very profound and spiritual ways.
Anna works to draw dance out of people, to help them express the dance inside of them. They may not even have known what was inside them prior to becoming involved with Anna. She often works with people who have not been involved in formal dance training. Rather than trying to emulate professional dance productions already popular elsewhere, Anna and those drawn to work closely with her, have sought inspiration from dance everywhere to mould entirely new dance creations that are unique and adapted to the spirituality and talents of those involved in their production.
Although Anna has sometimes encountered resistance to her love for dance, even from the faith community itself, her love for dance has also profoundly enriched her faith community, and the lives of many others far beyond. Her works are deeply spiritual both in terms of their conception but also in terms of their ongoing faithfulness to deep and rediscovered religious traditions.