Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

COVID is not getting in the way of Ammena Dance Company‘s annual show! Thanks to Zoom dance classes and the Yates Theatre pivoting to do live streams of shows, the dancers have been hard at work in their homes preparing the dances. As long as we’re allowed to get together for performances by March, the show will be live streamed to ticket holders. This means you don’t have to live in Lethbridge to see the show this year!

This year’s theme is a haunting, centring around the ghosts rumoured to reside at the theatre. I had two ideas for posters around our spooky show. The first was inspired by vampires and Rocky Horror Picture Show (“The Time Warp” appears in one of our dances). For the second, I wanted to take the ghost theme literally and create multiple exposures where our choreographer, Lise-Anne, was the ghost. Because I couldn’t decide, I just did both! (The second design can be seen after the “read more” page cut.)

In the 2021 show we have the return of a few favourites that were missing from last year, such as Bollywood, and new additions like lyrical!

Tickets for households can be purchased through the City of Lethbridge’s tickets website up until the show.

This year was both fun and challenging coming up with a vintage 50s inspired feel for the poster for An Explosion of World Dance and Music, the annual dance show put on by Ammena Dance Company. Our original location we had planned to use fell through in a big way. Luckily one of the dancers in the show had a bit of a time capsule bar in their basement!

The retro vibe was inspired by a few specific pieces in the show, and you’ll see the costume pictured in the Grease number! The rest of the show has many of the usual dance styles people have come to expect from the studio, such as Latin, dancehall, bellydance, jazz, African, and many more. Come check it out!

After one year off, Ammena Dance Company is back!

It was so fun to return to poster design brainstorming with her. With a number of Beyonce songs in the show this year, we were inspired by both a classic European feel as well as the aesthetics from the music video for Formation. Donning a very Beyonce-inspired wide brimmed hat that will be used in one of the pieces, we explored downtown Lethbridge around her new studio location. We were very generously given access to a private property that made it onto the final poster, and had been exactly the feel we were going for.

This year’s show will feature Bollywood, tango, bellydance, burlesque, The Greatest Showman, Footloose and more, so please come check it out! There will be lots of themes of starting anew :)

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This year’s showing of An Explosion of World Dance and Music by Ammena Dance Company will be a bittersweet event. Along with all of the love and energy that goes into creating this show, we will be paying our respects as it is the last show ever. Ammena is starting a new chapter in her life and closing her dance studio this spring. Some of us have been with her for 12 years so this really marks the end of an era!

The 2017 poster is based on one of the cutest pieces this year, Jetset, which features sparkly blue flight attendant outfits. Ammena used her connections to get us access to an airplane and once there, the poster photos quickly turned into an aviation themed pinup photoshoot because it was just so much fun! We also chose this theme as it reflects Ammena jetting off to her next adventure in life.

This year’s show will feature Bollywood, Broadway, African, Soca, contemporary, burlesque and more, so please come check it out!

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Ammena Dance Company’s “An Explosion of World Dance and Music” 2016 is coming soon! Tickets will be on sale on February 2nd at the Yates Memorial Centre in Lethbridge and this year we are doing two shows again: Friday March 4th and Saturday March 5th!

This is a very theatrical year for the show as we feature a reoccurring character throughout the pieces, have a few numbers bigger than ever, and open the show with a fun circus themed piece. This year’s show really centred around the circus so we did the poster photos earlier this year to make use of the Whoop Up Days fair in August. Ammena Talhami was quite the spectacle at the fair grounds in her costume, though I’m shocked we had no photo bombers ;)

This year’s show will feature Can Can, Bollywood, bellydance, African, Dancehall, funk, jazz, and more, including the special circus themed piece so please come check it out! The show will also be starting a little earlier this year as we do our first preshow, continuing the circus theme.

Model, Wardrobe: Ammena Talhami
Makeup and Hair: Jennifer Murray
Concept, photography, design: Tanya Plonka

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Ammena Dance Company’s “An Explosion of World Dance and Music” 2015 is coming soon! Tickets will be on sale on February 3rd at the Yates Memorial Centre in Lethbridge and this year we are doing two shows again: Friday March 6th and Saturday March 7th!

We have a lot of black and red costumes in the show this year, including our awesome broadway tango finale piece, so it was important to get those colors into the poster. Plus, after saying we wouldn’t have a lot of props to dance with this year, Ammena Talhami brought in all kinds of goodies for us! Candles will be a big part of the show, so we covered the floor with them (which were much easier to clean up than rose petals!).

Because the setup wasn’t as complicated as last year, we got to sneak in a few extra non-poster photos as well :)

This year’s show will feature bellydance, Bollywood, dancehall, burlesque, tango, broadway, and more, so please come check it out!

Model, Wardrobe: Ammena Talhami
Makeup and Hair: Ammena Talhami
Concept, photography, design: Tanya Plonka

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