Susan Applewhaite – Covid Activities 🎨

Susan Applewhaite – Performer with tiger princess dance projects 

I am a dancer with tiger princess dance projects.  Yvonne cast me to be a part of  Sleeping, Tucked in the lonely Purple which will premiere at Toronto Fringe Festival this July 2022. We started rehearsals via zoom during the first lockdown, which went remarkably well considering we were all trying to get our heads around rehearsing from a distance.

I trained as a ballet dancer, but after an injury, I moved towards acting and singing, and I have been a theatre creator for twenty years. I have always danced, taken a class in whatever city I lived in, but I haven’t performed as a dancer since my youth, many, many years ago, so being part of Yvonne’s project is a joy, a surprise at this point in my career, but a joy.

During lockdown, I started painting and drawing, and surprisingly discovered I was not bad at it.  It makes a difference doing something with zero expectations of success. For me it is an opportunity to learn something completely new, and get lost in creating for its own sake.

My other obsession is traditional Argentine Tango.  I say traditional because most people are introduced to stage tango, which is amazing but has very little to do with the way people actually dance. My husband and I were lucky enough to go to Buenos Aires, to learn about tango and the culture of tango. It is a completely improvised dance; one person leads the other follows. There is something quite magical about creating a connection through movement and music.  Which is exactly what the four of us in Yvonne’s project managed to achieve, even over zoom!