Post one: Introduction to Clarke!

Hello hello!

My name’s Clarke and I’m very excited to be dancing with Frog in Hand this summer and working as the marketing and communications intern! I’ll be writing one of these blog posts weekly to reflect on the process, as well as to provide a little inside perspective on what we’ve been working on!

A little background about me: I trained with the Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre and danced with their company for 3 years while I was in high school. I first met Colleen (who is also an alum of CCDT!) in my first year in the company when she came back to remount a work called A Ceremony of Carols choreographed by Deborah Lundmark.

I’m currently a student at the University of Toronto studying cell biology and neuroscience. Growing up, science was an integral part of my life very much in the same way dance was, and after high school I decided to pursue a degree in the sciences and maintain my dance training on my own, outside of a post-secondary institution.

Photo by Rosemary Snell

My recent training has manifested itself in a lot of summer workshops and intensives, and this past January I had the pleasure of working with Social Growl Dance on a new work commissioned for Dance Ontario Dance Weekend. I’m very grateful to be able to train, learn, and work in two fields that I care very deeply about, and am very excited to have the opportunity to work with Frog in Hand this summer!

I'm also really looking forward to writing these posts! Both as a challenge for myself to critically reflect and verbalize my thoughts on the process, but also to give you as an audience more insight into the rehearsal and creation processes – information which I often feel like I'm missing from program notes alone.

So stay tuned, more is on the way!

- Clarke Blair