An industry showcase featuring Alberta and British Columbia artists.
Supporting western based movement artists with strengthened connections to build presence and mobilize opportunities for touring.
This unique, collaborative platform promotes innovative contemporary performance, supporting artists who explore body-based interdisciplinary approaches through engaged and rigorous practices.
Program Here
Featured Artists
Shion Skye Carter · Cobalt
Shion Skye Carter カーター詩音スカイ (she/they) is a dance artist originally from Gifu, Japan, who lives and dedicates time to their artistic practice in Vancouver, Canada as a settler on the unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Through choreography hybridized with heritage art forms such as calligraphy interacting with objects and design, Shion’s work is alive in content and multidisciplinary in form, utilizing a sensitive intensity to navigate the body’s complex internal and external worlds through performance.
If I cover up myself in blue, perhaps I won’t be so blue anymore? Cobalt reflects the vibrant pigmented abundance that I strive to feel in my body, a body that I constantly scrutinize and critique; a body that doesn’t always feel like home. Moving through time from my childhood to the future, I oscillate between these portraits of self, attempting to succeed in the impossible task of existing atmultiple ages, multiple identities, all at one moment.
Tia Ashley Kushniruk 亚女弟 (Edmonton) · Make Me Cry | a practise: Misinterpretation (a performance)
Tia Ashley Kushniruk (亚 女弟) is a Queer Woman of mixed-race heritage from Treaty 6 Territory of Edmonton AB. Straddling sincerity and mockery, her artistic milieu swings wildly from honesty to parody, indelicately proclaiming the hypocrisies of what it really means to be a person living today. Kushniruk’s adaptable artistry is crafted through an encyclopedic lens of current pop-culture, high risk/high reward style theater making, and her dynamically magnetic stage presence and poetic physical vibrancy.
Make me cry is a solo work inspired by/in response to the durational group work ‘make banana cry’ by Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson. An existential exploration into the psyche of our titular artist (tia), the audience is delved into the horror and ambiguity of what it means to be the end result of a fetish versus
participating in one, and the minstrelsy that accompanies BIPOC artists creating ‘valuable’ work for the consuming public.
Meghann Michalsky · Deep END | Maybe we Land | Exile
Meghann Michalsky is a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and producer residing in Calgary. She is the Artistic Director of Project InTandem and YYC Contemporary Technique Training, two programs that offer opportunities to emerging artists in Canada. She was awarded the 2019 RBC Emerging Artist Award - she is the first Dancer/Choreographer to receive this award. She has rigorously pursued her training in Canada, Europe, and Israel. Her research starts with her trust in the body and investigating how bodily experiences are deeply embedded. She creates highly visceral works that combine intense musculature and athletic physicality. Her movement signature has been described as vigorous, raw, and primal.
Simran Sachar · ACT TWENTY FIVE
Simran Sachar is a South Asian contemporary and street dance artist, choreographer, and actor. She is a captivating anomaly in this industry who consistently works in ground-breaking spaces. Through choreography, text, or XR technology, Simran’s work uncovers distorted memories and how they disfigure us, and our own identity as the mirror.
Simran’s latest film with XR technology, premieres in 2024. Her XR film, BETA बेटा was presented at Luna Arts Festival 2021. In 2020, her first film ‘LUNACY’ was a part of National Arts Centre’s CAPSULE and premiered at F.O.R.M Film Festival and won the Official Selection of the Audience Choice Award. She made her acting debut in Alberta Theatre Projects showing of Bombay Black. Simran is the Winner of 2023’s Release Yourself Whacking Battle in Montreal at Artfulness Festival. Simran’s other credits include Netflix, CW Riverdale, The Vancouver Opera, Dairy Canada, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Dancing On The Edge, OFF-Parcours Danse, F.O.R.M Festival, Apple TV, National Arts Centre, Fringe Manila and more.
Anya Saugstad · Here it is
Anya Allegra Saugstad is a dancer and choreographer based in Vancouver BC, living and working on the unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh’ (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Ssleil-Waututh), and xwməθkwəyə̓ m (Musqueum) First Nations.
Anya Saugstad is the Artistic Director of Furious Grace Dance Theatre. Furious Grace / Anya Saugstad create live ensemble performance works that tell stories through movement. Anya builds vigorous, collaborative, and physical choreography to express stories that encompass urgency, celebration, and yearning. She also creates outdoor works on beaches and in forests that are inspired by nature and aim to bring audiences awareness to the importance of their natural surroundings. Anya is the recipient of the Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer award for 2023/24.
‘Here it is’ is a new duet about endings. It acknowledges our brief existence, and the longing and pain we hold in a world where we leave one at a time.
Elaine Weryshko · DOT | COWS | Post-Britney Practice
Elaine Weryshko is a physical theatre artist and practitioner of live performance from Mohkínstsis||Calgary. Her medium is the poetic body for a Post-Britney world, a practice based out of extensive worldly training in Mask, Clown, Greek Chorus/Ensemble and Puppetry. She writes, performs, produces, teaches, designs and kamikaze live events in alternative spaces all over Western Canada, searching for group catharsis on and off the stage - she celebrates the need for epic ideas and runs wildly towards the exploration of our shared profane experiences with the natural world. She is also the Co-Artistic Director of the Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry.
“I am interested in creating work that is unimaginable and unreproducible. Through this physical and visual lens, I have found my voice as protester, punk and artist; an emotional expression which apart from being anarchistic and slightly chaotic, is essentially visual and poetic. I am trying to work in a way that encourages the untraditional, sparks surrealism and reinvigorates how we gather around story, together.”Land Acknowledgement · AB/BC
Dance West Network gratefully acknowledges that our work is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded Coast Salish territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.
Springboard Performance is based in Moh’kins’tsis, the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) name for the place we now call Calgary, located in the Treaty 7 region and the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (including the Siksika, Piikani and Kainai First
Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Iyarhe Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Goodstoney First Nations). The City of Calgary is also home to Districts 5 and 6 of the Métis Nation of Alberta’s Battle River Territory.