The power of growing older: With Terrill Maguire

About Terrill Maguire

Terrill Maguire is an award-winning dancer, choreographer, teacher, and artistic director. She has been an advocate for the integration of the arts into everyday life and mainstream society wherever she has lived – in her native California until the mid ‘70s, in New York City in the early ‘80s, and since then, in her long-time home, Toronto.

Among her accomplishments, Maguire founded and directed the Inde Festivals of New Dance and Music, a seminal series of national festivals that took place between 1985 and 1995, which were dedicated to building creative synergy and community through collaborations between artistic disciplines. She has also done extensive Artists-in-Schools residencies throughout Ontario, making annual trips to remote communities in the James Bay region of northern Ontario since 1997.

Throughout her career, Maguire has produced, and participated in, numerous interdisciplinary community arts events: these have included performances in the Toronto Music Garden, site-specific dance/music/art-making works for Opening Days at the Evergreen Foundation’s Brick Works, and interactive dance-music pieces in the Zen Rock Garden at York University, including at the recent Dramaturgy conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, in June 2011.

She has choreographed and performed as well for theatre, opera, television and film: most recently she provided the dance sequences for a film of native poet/artist/educator Duke Redbird’s Totem Impact. Primarily a western contemporary dancer, Maguire has been inspired and informed by the dance styles of many cultures. Among her fruitful collaborations have been those with Menaka Thakkar Dance Company (for whom she has also acted as rehearsal director), choreographer Sashar Zarif, and Troy Emery Twigg of the Blackfoot/Blood Nation in southern Alberta. She has found her own ancestral heritage another rich source of creation, mining elements of Irish/Celtic sacred traditions in works such as Bile, (Dusk Dances in Withrow Park, Toronto), Grove (Yo Yo Ma’s Toronto Music Garden), Shivering Tree (Riverrun Centre, Guelph), and Sanctuary (Trinity Bell Plaza, Toronto). Read more about Maguire, and her work at the Department of Dance at York University here.