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In 1982 the Dance Committee of the International Theatre Institute founded International Dance Day, to be celebrated every year on April 29, the birthday of Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810), regarded as the creator of modern ballet. Every year the ITI selects an outstanding choreographer or dancer to provide a message to celebrate dance and its ability to bring people together with a common language.  

This year the message is authored by BC and Vancouver’s own Crystal Pite: 

Humans move – our arms reach out, our knees collapse, our heads nod, our chests cave in, our backs arch, we jump, we shrug, we clench our fists, we pick each other up and push each other away. This is language as much as it is action. This is what the body has to say about need, defeat, courage, despair, desire, joy, ambivalence, frustration, love. These images flash with meaning in the mind because we have felt these things so purely in the body – we have been moved.  

We are dancers, all of us. Life moves us; life dances us. Ephemeral as breath, concrete as bone, a dance is made of us. We sculpt space. We write with our bodies in a wordless language that is deeply understood. We grace the space within and around us when we dance.   

Like life, a dance creates and destroys itself in every moment. Like love, it is beyond reason.   

I like to think of the body as a location; a place where being is held and shaped. When we dance, we are profoundly engaged in being there.  

I’m writing this in early 2026, when there seems to be no end to the oppression, upheaval and suffering in our world. Daily, as we witness the horror of what humans are capable of doing to each other and the machinery of power that funds and fuels unspeakable violence to people and planet, dance feels like a facile, useless response. It’s hard to imagine what a dance artist can do in a world that so badly needs radical change and healing.   

And yet – art, like hope, is a form of love. Defiantly generative in the face of desecration, art is a solvent for the calcifying mind and a balm to heal it. Art is a vessel to hold us while we grapple with questions – together – in a way that is different from news, different from documentary and education, different from opinion and social media, different from activism and protest, but not incompatible.  

Through creativity, we accumulate resistance and hope through small acts of courage, curiosity, kindness and collaboration. In dance, and in dance-making, we find proof that humanity is more than our latest heartbreaking global failure.  

But dance needs no justification, no explanation. It’s made of us yet owes us nothing. It only needs to inhabit a willing body. From that location, it can translate the ineffable; acting as an intermediary between us and the unknown.   

We are moved by these vanishing traces of beauty in the present moment. And as we embody both the dance and its disappearance, we are reminded of our impermanence. At the same time, if we are paying attention, dance will give us an occasional glimpse of the soul. 

— 

Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite is a former company member of Ballet British Columbia and William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt. 

In a choreographic career spanning 35 years, Pite has created more than sixty works for companies such as The Royal Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater, The Paris Opera Ballet, and The National Ballet of Canada. She is known for works that courageously address themes such as trauma, addiction, conflict, consciousness and mortality; her bold and original vision has earned her international acclaim and inspired an entire generation of dance artists. 

She is an Associate Artist at three institutions: Nederlands Dans Theater, Sadler’s Wells (London) and Canada’s National Arts Centre. She has an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University, is a Member of the Order of Canada and holds the honour of Officier de l’Ordre of Arts et des Lettres from France. 

In 2002, she formed Kidd Pivot in Vancouver, a company that strives to distill and translate universal questions into artworks that connect us to essential parts of humanity. World-renowned for radical hybrids of dance and theatre, Kidd Pivot tours internationally with critically-acclaimed works such as Betroffenheit, Revisor, and Assembly Hall (co-created with Jonathon Young), The Tempest Replica, Dark Matters, Lost Action, and The You Show. 

Pite’s many awards include the 2022 Governor General of Canada’s Performing Arts Award, the 2011 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and the Canada Council’s 2012 Jacqueline Lemieux Prize. In 2017, she received the Benois de la Danse for her creation The Seasons’ Canon at the Paris Opera Ballet. In 2018, she received the Grand Prix de la danse de Montr茅al. She is the recipient of five Sir Laurence Olivier awards for creations with Kidd Pivot and The Royal Ballet. 

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Read about The Dance Centre’s International Dance Day 2026 events.

Explore dance performances currently presented by The Dance Centre. Each season, you’ll find new dance shows. See what’s on today.

Photo: Anoush Abrar