Avery Smith is a dance artist living and working on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh First Nations of Vancouver, BC. Avery has danced in site specific and multimedia pieces for artists including Company 605, Compagnie Vision Impure, Farouche Collective, Emmalena Fredriksson, and others. She completed her professional training at Modus Operandi Contemporary Dance Training Program under the direction of Tiffany Tregarthen and David Raymond. Here, she was fortunate to work with artists including Crystal Pite, Justine Chambers, Wen Wei Wang, Serge Bennathan, and many others. Avery was associate artistic producer for Company 605 through 2018/19 and was the company’s artistic intern through 2017/2018. She is a recipient of EDAM Dance’s training scholarship and was a selected participant in The Banff Centre’s Creative Gesture Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance 2019.
Avery uses her artistic practice to explore differing gradients of effort and ease. She’s interested in subverting ratios of structure and freedom within physical tasks, creative processes, and already existing dance infrastructure. The ability that dance has to connect us has invigorated Avery to create new spaces and projects that foster this capacity for connection. Questioning creative process as space for collaboration and community fuels her practice. In recent years, interdisciplinary collaborations have become central to Avery’s voice as an artist and have inspired her to reimagine alternative ways of making.
