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Dragon Dance Theatre
....exploring visual and performing arts since 1976

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Dragon Dance Theatre is a non-profit organization founded in 1976.  

we are Non-Governmental Organization accredited to provide advisory services to the UNESCO Committee which oversees the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. 

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Our community embraces and operates entirely in the spirit of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. Dragon Dance has been leading international cultural exchange programs through participant and process oriented residencies that focus on culture and art as forms of collective learning.

In the last 48 years, we have offered workshops and residencies focusing on collective creation which culminate in public performances in the following countries:  Argentina, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, the US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Finland and France. 
 
Dragon Dance was founded in 1976.
Sam Kerson has been the artistic director during this forty eight years.  
Katah joined the theatre  in 2000. 

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Dragon Dance aims to participate in the preservation of intangible cultural heritage through artistic expression.   During our collective creation workshops, our idea is to create a temporary and mobile Utopia. A place local and international artists, come together and form a provisional community, created for the occasion.   As a group, we can do what we like and want to do; be creative, make things, realize scenes and dramatize moments which comment on history using myths, legends and oral tradition while we bridge with the events of the day. We want to participate in the struggles and society of our times, using our art, our theatre skills and our experience.  We want to be acting preservationists of the intangible cultural heritage of the communities that welcome us. 

We arrange these laboratories/ artist residencies in such a way that we can present our findings to the public, in the theatre or on the street, with pageants, plays, dances, parades and tableaux. We use music, actors, masks, banners, paintings, large masks, puppets, objects, projected images, sculptures and whatever we can invent to tell our stories. In these residencies, we as a community, create an environment where we can focus and concentrate on the chosen themes.

Anna Kaisa - Spring dance.jpg
Large mask making and dramatization workshops ; reinventing the theatre

 

We invite you to join us and we assure you that this experience will move you, heart and soul.  If you decide to join us, you are sure to have a deep and memorable experience that will be reflected in your creative and artistic work for years to come.

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We look for people of different ages with different skills, different cultural backgrounds and different languages including music and dance. We think of the workshops as a theatre laboratory. We use masks that we create together.  We use texts that we improvise. We imagine and create a different theatre; we  explore, we propose, we invent. As a group, we make a very special piece of creative work that we can share with the people of the surrounding towns and villages where the residency and workshop takes place.

DRAGON DANCE THEATRE
Théâtre la Danse du Dragon

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