Dracula's Garden Rising

Dracula’s Garden is a contemporary dance series exploring the universe of Gothic literature: its stories, creatures, and themes. We call them a series of contemporary ballet poems - brief dance works, with each dance exploring a unique theme. "Dracula's Garden Rising" is a short dance film highlighting excerpts from different ballet poems in this series. “Dracula’s Garden Rising” is an introduction of movement qualities, characters, and themes from this on-going series.

In Dracula’s Garden contemporary dance series, we are interested in how Gothic literature and its themes evoke a range of emotions, from love to horror. Curiosity, excitement, exploration of something dark or dangerous, adventure, loss, deformation, search for humanity – the themes reflected in these stories that continue to appeal to us many decades after they were written. Each dance poem addresses these themes from different stories and characters. In this series, dance artists explore the personal, cultural, and historical symbolism of pointe shoes in the context of ballet, and re-imagine and re-invent their meaning, use, and symbolism. The Gothic literature themes, stories, and personages provide a juxtaposition to the classical balletic ideology of beauty. We look for ways to un-demonize and resurrect creatures, habits, humans, and emotions that, through processes of marginalization, are banished from cultural spot light. The Dracula’s Garden series investigates social constructions of beauty; ugliness; deformity; both the sublime and the grotesque, and the line between the two.