This year’s ROMP! Festival Of Dance will feature the premiere of Joshua Beamish’s new solo collection, Lone Wolf. Beamish, who moved from Vancouver to New York in 2012 and has been working with the ROMP! festival since 2007, says he “basically grew up in a dance studio” as his mother owned one when he was young.
“I started with tap dancing, and then over the course of my very beginnings with dance, also started doing jazz and ballet and modern dance and then I also did Ukrainian and Highland dance,” he says.
Beamish—who says he also helps young dancers recognize their true potential—has never danced a full solo evening of work, as he will be doing in Victoria. He says he considers himself a contemporary dance artist, but he also works with ballet companies a lot.
“I often create for ballet companies, but I create contemporary work for ballet companies,” he says.
Beamish created a duet as part of Restless Creature, a performance for New York City Ballet dancer Wendy Whelan that debuted in 2013; Beamish also performed in the show, and the tour took the two dancers around the globe, which got Beamish thinking about doing more performing.
“That’s what re-awakened my interest in being a performer myself,” says Beamish, “and so when that project was over I wanted to look for other opportunities to continue performing, but I don’t necessarily like performing in my own work with other people.”
Beamish says he thought of the ROMP! Festival when he was putting together this new solo performance as he wanted to do it in a familiar setting.
“I approached the festival because I have a history of working with them,” he says.
“I wanted an environment that I was comfortable in to first present this program.”
Beamish, who will performing Lone Wolf in Victoria at the fest on July 9 and then taking part in Present/Tense 10 on July 10, says that taking his dances on the road have had a big change to how he views the art form.
“When you’re constantly travelling and going from place to place and working with different people, it wildly changes your perspective on dance and what it can be,” he says. “When I’m going to work at a ballet company, a lot of the time the dancers have a very limited idea of what they are or what they can be, so, often, what I’m doing is opening them up to this greater understanding of everything else they can be—all the other possibilities for movement.”
ROMP! Festival of Dance
July 8 to 17, various venues
$20-$45
suddenlydance.ca