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Amy Bowring
The daughter of Italian immigrants, Nancy Lima Dent made a significant contribution to modern dance in Toronto and Sudbury. She taught from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s in her own schools, in community centres and colleges. After ballet classes with Toronto's Rita Warne and Boris Volkoff, and modern dance studies with Elizabeth Leese, Lima Dent travelled to New York City to study with Martha Graham, Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham. Working in the 1940s and 1950s with Toronto's New Dance Theatre, she presented works at the 1950 and 1952 Canadian Ballet Festivals.
From 1955-1957, Sudbury's Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers' Union sponsored her establishment of dance schools there and in nearby Garson. The Nancy Lima Dent Dance Theatre performed at the 1960 and 1961 Toronto Modern Dance Festivals, which Lima Dent organized with fellow choreographers Bianca Rogge and Yoné Kvietys. She created a body of over thirty dance works, many of which commented on social issues such as war and teen violence, including Set Your Clock at U235 (1946), Heroes of Our Time (1952) and Concerto Grosso (1959). Nancy Lima Dent was a visionary who tried to establish a studio/venue for experimental dance in 1959, three years before the experimentalists of New York's Judson Dance Theater emerged and fifteen years before Toronto's 15 Dance Lab opened its doors to dance experimentation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bowring, Amy. "Canadian Dance Festivals, 1948-1978," International Dictionary of Modern Dance, edited by Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. St. James Press: Illinois, 1998.
Collier, Cliff. "Dent, Nancy Lima," The Encyclopedia of Theatre Dance in Canada/Encyclopédie de la Danse Théâtrale au Canada, edited by Susan Macpherson. Dance Collection Danse Press/es: Toronto, 2000.
RESOURCE
Available for viewing on videotape at Dance Collection Danse
Heroes of Our Time: the 1986 Encore! Encore! reconstruction of the work.
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Photo: Nancy Lima Dent
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