Dancer, choreographer, educator. Anna Wyman (née Roman) was born in Graz, Austria in 1928. She studied ballet and contemporary movement in several European cities and danced in Austria until 1948. Wyman emigrated to England and opened her own school in 1952. In 1968, she relocated to Canada and established the Anna Wyman Dancers in 1970. Their professional debut took place in 1971 with a series of performances at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 1973, the troop’s name was changed to the Anna Wyman Dance Theatre when it began to receive operational support from the Canada Council for the Arts. The Anna Wyman Dance Theatre was considered to be Canada’s foremost modern dance companies from the mid-1970s until its closure in 1990. It was the first modern dance troupe to tour Canada (1975). One of the most traveled dance troupes in North America, Anna Wyman Dance Theatre was also the first modern dance company from the West to tour China (1980). The troupe also toured India, Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, and Mexico. Up until the mid-1980s, the troupe performed solely Wyman’s choreography, which mixed improvisation with an abstract and highly theatrical choreographic language, performing narratives with socio-political content. Though the Anna Wyman Dance Theatre is defunct, the Anna Wyman School of Dance continues to this day in West Vancouver.
Additional information and materials about Anna Wyman are available on request in Art, Architecture and Planning at the University of British Columbia Library. http://www.library.ubc.ca/finearts/
Discrete project sites documenting the work of specific artists and collectives in detail.
Essays and conversation providing a context for exploring the Project Sites and Archives.
Video interviews conducted between December 2008 and May 2009 reflecting on Vancouver’s art scene in the sixties.