Once Removed in the Montreal Fringe Festival

Dear Friends,
Since moving to Toronto, I have founded my own company, Once Removed, and we have been creating new contemporary works inspired by folk dance forms since January, 2008. I am very pleased to announce that in it's first year, Once Removed has been invited to perform as part of the St. Ambroise Fringe Festival in Montreal, June 13-21, 2008. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to perform our work abroad, but we need your help! Your donations will go towards our travel expenses as well as the costs of production and rehearsals.
Your support is immeasurable to myself and to my company- without you we will not be able to share this work. Thank you in advance for helping to make my vision come alive.
Sincerely,
Hannah Naiman

Once Removed performs contemporary dance that isolates and illuminates particular elements of traditional American and English folk dance. Our mission is to highlight and to abstract the fascinating visual aspects of set traditional dances, and to present them to diverse audiences. Dances in our repertoire are drawn from such traditions as contra dance, English dance, traditional longsword dance and rapper sword dance.

Numerology:
Numerology is a suite of duets, trios and quartets that focus on the innate possibilities in numbers. Inspired by the English ritual dance tradition called 'rapper sword dancing', each dancer is linked to another using flexible metal swords. In its original form, this dance has 5 dancers, and they perform pre-existing figures that have been passed on from team to team and generation to generation. It is an exploration of the possibilities that arise when the equation of a perfected traditional dance is altered.