Saying they’re fed up with the lack of large-scale dance works coming to Vancouver, local dance producers Barbara Clausen of New Works and Jim Smith of Eponymous will announce Thursday (April 10) that they have joined forces to create DanceHouse, a new presentation series at the Vancouver Playhouse.

“It’s just been remarkable that we haven’t had this level of subscription series, this high-calibre touring international work, coming here regularly enough,” Clausen told the Straight by phone. “I just think the city deserves it.…Stuff is out there but it just doesn’t come here. Sometimes it skips us and goes right to Victoria, because there’s a well-established season there, Dance Victoria.…Our point is, let’s put it in the Playhouse, and let’s make it regular so people have a regular hit of this calibre of work.”

DanceHouse launches May 2 and 3 with the Vancouver premiere of Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s Body_Remix/Goldberg Variations. The 2008-09 subscription season will open in November with Les écailles de la mémoire (The Scales of Memory), a collaboration of New York’s Urban Bushwomen and Senegal’s Compagnie Jant-Bi. In February 2009, Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company will make its Vancouver debut with Deca Dance. And in April of next year, the season wraps up with a selection of works by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

Clausen said the new series has obtained solid funding from the Canada Council, Heritage Canada, and other institutions, in addition to private donations, adding that “we see this as establishing a permanent series in Vancouver.”