Favourite local dancer

Jill Groening

Laina Brown

Jill Groening says finding out she was nominated for favourite local dancer for a third time came with mixed emotions.

“To tell you the truth, it first filled me with dread and panic,” she says. “I’ve experienced some online bullying and abuse of it because of receiving this before for the first two years.”

“It’s bittersweet, because it’s nice, and it’s nice to be acknowledged, but there is an element of frustration and sadness or anger just because of the past bullying,” she added.

Greoning started dancing when she was 11 years old. She started in jazz and tap, because that’s what some of her pals were doing. Then she found ballet and really loved the movement of it.

She went to the Intensive Training Program at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet while she was in high school. She took a year off after high school, because she was burnt out from dance and school, she says.

She got into the Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers school a year later.

“Doing ballet, I knew that’s not what I wanted to do, not to mention the physical … not having the perfect body, disagreeing with a lot of the gender politics involved with it,” she says.

Greoning is currently working with a local contemporary dance company called Gearshifting Performance Work, and she does work with Jolene Bailie.

She’s toured to Vancouver and Toronto with the company’s show Hybrid Human.

She’s currently in the creative process of a new show that will be out in April 2018.

“I really, really like this new work that I’m really lucky to be creating under Jolene Bailie,” she says. “It’s so fun. It’s so cool to be a part of a creative process, especially with people you can be vulnerable with, people that you really trust. There’s nothing like creating new work.”

Published in Volume 72, Number 12 of The Uniter (November 30, 2017)

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