Canada Dreams

Susan McNaughton's Intermezzo blends with Brahms to set the stage for this revisit to the essential myth of Persephone and Demeter. The fundamental quality of feminity is change. Women's bodies change many times in their lives. Their relationships with the people they love change too.

So it is with mothers and daughters.

This is the dance of life. Where Persephone dances flowers grow.
The earth is forever spring and summer.

Hades sees the beautiful Persephone and seduces her into the underworld.
Demeter is left to search the world for her daughter. When Helios tells Demeter where her daughter is the Earth Mother reacts vengefully sending winter to earth.

Disturbed by the blight of the Earth Zeus intervenes with Hades. Persephone is eventually released, but she has consumed seven pomegranate seeds, the symbol of fertility and is bound to winter in Hades for eternity. Seven is that magic Pythagorean number like a diminished seventh note always offering the eighth and the return. Women hunger for their seeds to grow and are in the end left to hunger in their loneliness.

She must find her peace with the cycles of life and the wheel of the fates. She passes from her life as a maiden to the responsiblities and joys of the world.

Wendy Chiles and Kathleen Pyper work brilliantly under the guidance of choreographer Susan McNaughton.

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