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!

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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