Two young performers who got their start on Okotoks stages are now putting on their own show.
Alberta High School of Fine Arts graduates Jocelyn Leiver and Eden Hildebrand will explore the personal and global struggles of Canadian women during the Second World War through contemporary music and dance with their first performance through their new company EDJE Dance Theatre.
Leiver and Hildebrand, both of whom were also dance students of Lottie Pederson in Okotoks, developed Homefront to connect with the audience’s emotions in a way other media doesn’t.
“We are able to tackle this historical subject matter in a really new kind of way so that the audience has more of the kinesthetic connection to those emotions and struggles that we are trying to explore,” said Leiver. “You have some kind of physical experience, even if you’re just sitting in the audience, just feeling the personal struggles of women who were working on the home front in Canada during World War Two, as well as the larger societal shift that was happening with women going into the work force and creating these new identities and then the conflict when all the men came home and those jobs weren’t readily available for women anymore.”
Homefront portrays the struggles of Canadian woman to finance and supply the war, experience the loss of loved ones, develop new roles in society and return to what had become traditional women’s roles once the war ended.
Hildebrand originally wanted to rework a piece she wrote while studying history at the University of Calgary regarding the German resistance to the Nazis, but her focus soon changed to women.
Hildebrand began thinking about what Canadian women were doing at home during the war, having recently performed in a play about women who met and married Canadian soldiers on the front lines.
“Through my research I realized there is not that much narrative about the battle that women raged here on the home front,” she said. “It’s not one of the things you think of when you think of World War Two. It’s a great story to be told.”
Hildebrand and Levier began reading textbooks, online articles and letters from Canadian women to men fighting in the war to gain a better understanding of what they went through and created a storyboard featuring many aspects of women’s efforts at home from taking on jobs to buying war bonds.
“It really is all encompassing - as much as it can be in an hour-long piece,” said Hildebrand. “I’m thrilled with the way it turned out. It’s really eye-opening and heart-felt.”
The two women used their background and passion for contemporary music and dance to create a unique way to tell their story.
“The biggest thing for us is we love both of these aspects so much we wanted to bring them together and see what we could create,” said Hildebrand. “We wanted to make something accessible to the general public as well that they could come in and experience and appreciate.”
Leiver said she and Hildebrand knew each other through dance and through working on three Mainstage shows, but it wasn’t until they studied dance together at the University of Calgary that they became close friends.
“We didn’t know each other was auditioning for the program or anything, we were just happy to see each other there,” Leiver said. “We kind of supported each other in the first year of university and then we found we had lots of common interests so we just grew a lot closer.”
Both women worked with various Calgary community theatre companies as choreographers and performers before founding EDJE Dance Theatre.
“This idea of having our own dance company for people to have paid opportunities after university was always there in the back of our minds so we decided let’s have this happen,” said Leiver.
Homefront is the start of their dream to provide dance training and job opportunities to their peers, and they hope for great results.
“It was more difficult starting out than the other bigger companies we’ve worked with, but we know that our company members have lots of friends and family that are interested and we have some connections at the University of Calgary so we hope that some dancers from there will come out to see somewhere that they could potentially perform after graduating,” said Leiver.
Performances of Homefront take place at the West Village Theatre in Calgary July 1 at 7:30 p.m. and July 2 at 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Tickets to see Homefront cost $20 and can be purchased online at edjedance.ca or at the door with cash only.
