fbpx
The EMERGE Choreographic Award is a natural extension of our mission to connect artists to new opportunities, collaborators, and cultural organizations worldwide.

Emerging ChoreographersILLUME Choreographic Award

GIBNEY COMPANY/SPRINGBOARD
ILLUME AWARD (2022)

Gibney Company partners with Springboard Danse Montréal to offer the annual Gibney Company/Springboard Illume Award. Formerly the EMERGE Award, under new Company Director Gilbert T Small II the Illume Award aims to cultivate and actualize the burgeoning visions of today’s emerging artists toward becoming tomorrow’s creative leaders in the field. Illume Awardees receive:

  • A two-night run of a new or existing choreographic work at Gibney Center, including technical and marketing support
  • Opportunities to teach classes and share their creative process through dialogues at the Center
  • A $5,000 stipend to support their artistic work

Each year, one of Springboard’s Resident, Fellow, or Emerging Choreographers, past or present, is selected by Gibney Company to present in Studio H (The Theater) at Gibney: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, which is Gibney’s largest production space. The awardee is selected by the Gibney Company Director, who travels to Montréal each summer to observe the Resident, Fellow and Emerging Choreographers at Springboard Danse Montréal.
Launched jointly in 2018, the ILLUME Choreographic Award is a natural extension of Springboard Danse Montréal’s mission to connect artists to new opportunities, collaborators, and cultural organizations worldwide. It highlights the continual expansion of Gibney Company’s mission: from its beginning as a vehicle for the choreographic vision of its Founder Gina Gibney to then welcoming re-stagings and new commissions from a wide range of guest choreographers, and now creating a platform to provide visibility, resources, and space to rising voices in the community.

Previous awardees of the Illume (EMERGE) Award

2022 ILLUME awardee UNA Productions

2020-2021 EMERGE awardee LA TRESSE *

2019 EMERGE awardee: Mark Caserta

2018 EMERGE awardee: Micaela Taylor

ABOUT GIBNEY DANCE COMPANY

With an unrelenting focus on artistic excellence and social integrity, Gibney Dance Company co-creates an environment where dancers are activated towards their full artistic, entrepreneurial, and socially-minded selves through rigorous physical, intellectual, and interpersonal practices.
GDC is a creation-based repertory company that performs the work of Founder Gina Gibney as well as internationally renowned guest choreographers. GDC’s full-time dancers, known as Artistic Associates, embrace a broad spectrum of activities – in the studio, on stage, within our organization, and throughout the community. In addition to performing, Artistic Associates facilitate hundreds of movement workshops each year for survivors of intimate partner violence; offer healthy relationship dance assemblies to high school students throughout the city; and each company member develops programming addressing pressing issues in the dance field, such as cultivating long-term diversity, connecting artists around the globe, and empowering dancers with financial literacy training.

GDC’s vision is to expand the current dance company model into one which acknowledges the many facets of expertise that dance artists offer our world. The uncompromising work ethic, creative problem-solving, and empathic negotiation implicit in successful dancing can create positive forward movement in the arts field and beyond. We see this comprehensive model as a way to not only cultivate the next leaders of the field, but to provide a concrete example of the wide-reaching relevancy of artists in our society.