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Culture Dance

Moving into acting

FROM THINE EYES choreographed and directed by Michael Greyeyes (DanceWorks/Signal/Native Earth). At the Enwave (231 Queens Quay West). Opens tonight (Thursday, September 22) and runs to September 24, Thursday-?Saturday 8 pm. $15-$33. 416-?973-?4000. See listing.

Strong. Sensual. Fluid. Those are words you could use to describe dancer Sean Ling, who spent nine years with Toronto Dance Theatre before beginning an exciting freelance career.

Now he’s using a different set of muscles in From Thine Eyes, Michael Greyeyes’s new dance/theatre piece. For the first time onstage, Ling gets to act as well as move.

“Acting is a hard thing for a dancer to do well, since we’re used to communicating in a completely different way,” says Ling. “But Michael, who’s got a background in dance, theatre and film, has been coaching us, and Katherine Duncanson has been helping us with the voice work.”

The ambitious piece tells the stories of several people who, approaching death, return to scenes in their lives that affected them strongly. Ling plays a middle-?aged drug addict who once beat a priest to death.

“Not my normal dance role at all,” he says, laughing.

Ling describes the choreography as a mixture of “small, internal and quite visceral moves with some much more expansive and broad gestures.”

When Greyeyes approached him about the part, he didn’t hesitate, even though it would take him out of his comfort zone.

“Michael’s so calm and confident in what he wants to do that it’s impossible to say no,” says Ling. “He’s really a great human being. And how can you say no to that?”

He says the same about choreographer Peggy Baker, who cast him in 2010 in the evocative Coalesce and a new work that goes up in January.

Now that he’s done some acting, are there other speaking roles ahead?

“I’d be happy to do this again, but it’d have to be in a setting where I felt supported and safe. If Michael asked me, I’d say yes for sure.”

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