There’s no better place for a pop-up dance tour than the nooks and crannies of Granville Island, and no better person to lead the way than Kat Single-Dain.
Better known to the bundled-up audience as Barbara, the jazzercise expert who looked like she just stepped out of a time machine dialed to an L.A. Gear window display circa 1986, Single-Dain propped a boombox on her shoulder and rolled over park benches and bike racks to lead the crowd into Origins Coffee where she hustled them inside.
“Nice work parkouring! Nice work!” she called out to the audience, none of whom actually attempted any parkouring. But that’s okay as it was all part of the fun of Granville Island’s Winterruption festival held this past weekend. It was the ninth annual version of the festival which included many different cultural elements where participants could learn how to glass-blow at New-Small Sterling, check out the evening’s music with We Are the City and Wake Owl at Performance Works, feel European by watching one of the Francophone Film
Fest offerings as part of its 20th anniversary, eat a Winterruption donut at Lee’s or get their faces painted.
“People lose their minds over the face-painting. In almost any weather, there seems to be a line-up for face-painting,” said Granville Island marketing’s Scott Fraser through chattering teeth. “I actually tweeted out a picture a little while ago to say, oh my God, there’s no line-up for face-painting right now, move fast!”
The first clue Granville Island gets packed for Winterruption was the line-up of cars that extended to West Fourth Avenue. Thus, no shortage of people for no shortage of events.
So the beauty of pop-up dance is the audience was already there.
“I think with the way we set it up, it’s based on audience participation so we’re already including them when we’re creating,” said Dianna David after the end of the first of the day’s four shows in the coffee shop with fellow street dancers Natasha Gorrie and Kim Sato. “Everybody interacts because they’re excited, they’ve already come on a walk to watch which means we can be ourselves and really engage.”
“Well, there was that one man who started moving back up the stairs,” added Gorrie, laughing. “He knew we were going to call him to come down.” Which may or may not have had something to do with the trio, called the Emergency Neighbourhood Watch, laying down the law which included telling the fellow to “remember to close the blinds when he’s getting jiggy with it” before breaking out into dance to Gramatik’s “Hit that Jive.”
Single-Dain moved the growing crowd to a large woodworking shop on Railspur Alley for the last dance station, featuring her and fellow dancer from the Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret Aaron Malkin, aka, Sven. There, the two showed off their acrobatic skills amid planks of wood and saws.
“Granville Island is one of those places you’ll walk around and discover something,” said Fraser. “As I was walking around this morning, I turned a corner and there was a woman doing Japanese flower arranging in a store window."
