Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

It’s time for another Ammena Dance Company production of An Explosion of World Dance & Music at the Yates, which also means a new poster design!

This year’s theme is “All You Need Is Love” to highlight how inclusive the studio is and how we have supported each other through the relationships built there. The theme proved challenging once Lise-Anne realized it was hard not to make it look Valentine’s themed and we both had to really brainstorm for the poster. My mind kept returning to the Beatles but Cam warned me not to go too far in that direction or else people would be very surprised when we don’t put on a 60s style show! I tried to let Yellow Submarine vibes come into the process without spending too long looking at Beatles art to go too far in that direction.

The Beatles style definitely came into play with the multiple image idea. Lise-Anne doesn’t like having her photo taken, and yet I somehow talked her into a concept that involved four photos! (By the time I pointed this out to her, it was too late! Ha!)

We have a big show anniversary coming up and Lise-Anne has displayed all of the past posters in the studio. After noticing how often we went with a dramatic dark or red accented theme (red is probably the most used dance costume color!), I had so much fun doing something so colorful and different!

This year’s theme for Ammena Dance Company’s annual show is “The Ammena Chronicles,” a fantasy & magical based theme that ties all of the styles of dance together.

Lise-Anne was originally inspired by a nature photo I had taken on a hike earlier in 2021, and after we tossed around a few ideas about it and that adding her into the scene would look too pasted in, she changed her mind and loved the idea of a magical open book. She expected herself not to be on the poster this time around, but after we froze so much for last year’s poster photos and weren’t able to have a show, I didn’t want those photos to go to waste! As soon as she showed me the open book idea, I pictured a dancer coming out of the magical swirls, and a few of her poses from last year were perfect for it!

Fingers crossed we are back to the stage this year!

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 :)

(more…)

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!

(more…)