Alexa Mardon

I am a dancer, choreographer and facilitator. My work has taken forms including stage performance, poetry, movement workshops for frontline support workers, dreamwork practices, and teaching professional and non-professional level dance classes. As a dance teacher I am committed to anti-oppressive approaches, unlearning unhealthy relationships to obedience, and creating spaces where agency and rigorous play can flourish. As a queer settler artist living in collapse times, I work towards the creation and sustenance of webs of support, the sensation of enoughness, and relational transformation with my collaborators, neighbours and the more than human entities I source support + wisdom from. I’m currently in training to become a biodynamic craniosacral therapist as a deepening into my creative practice. As an apprentice to life-altering grief, I am committed to my own ritual literacy, creating containers larger than the body to acknowledge loss and transformation. My work has been presented nationally by Western Front, The Dance Centre, OFFTA, PS: We are All Here (Toronto), Kinetic Studios (Halifax), and VIVO Media Arts Centre. In 2022, I completed an MA in Choreography at DAS Choreography, University of Arts Amsterdam, where my research focused on divination practices and queer retellings of ancestral Finnish myths. With Erika Mitsuhashi, I make performances as Mardon + Mitsuhashi. With Rianne Švelnis, I co-facilitate Movement Classes for Support Workers, a monthly workshop series for self-identified support and care workers.

Shapeshifting Together 

In this class we’ll use imagery to access our bodies’ deep intuitive intelligence and fluid animal readiness. With games and scores, we will practice the elastic skill of moving between sensing ourselves as part of a tentacular, ever-morphing group body and grounding in our own systems. Through drawing, writing, dancing and speaking, we will invite our innate capacities to access surplus knowledge in the universe and move it through our bodies. We will use the transformative power of (agreed upon, consensual, or self) touch to deepen into sensation and possibility for easeful pathways. We will practice doing and witnessing as equally important strategies to being-with what is emerging. 

Glistening Web 

How do we make a meaningful life in dance? What are we growing and accessing to support ourselves, our collaborators, and our communities? Where are we willing to place our bodies, or not, in order to live and contribute as artists? What ways of working do we not yet know about, that we can learn and create together? As we approach 2024, multiple intersecting global and local crises are changing ideas of future, belonging, and career. In Glistening Web, we will practice fantastical and practical scores for sensing + enacting choice, possibility and desires for living, making art, and meeting the uncertain future. Cycling between discussion and play/practice, we will sense our discernment, our interconnectedness, and perform bite-sized cycles of somatic completion: tapping into our capacities for taking action, resting, and satisfiability. We will co-imagine containers for staying connected, naming harm, marking loss, and celebrating one another. We probably won’t do all of it in one day 🙂 but it will be a beginning, together.

Andrea Cownden

Andrea Cownden is a dancer of european settler descent living on the unceded territory of the  xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ nations. Since completing training at Modus Operandi in 2018, her dancing has been shaped by the training she has received from Lee Su-Feh, Helen Walkley and Peter Bingham, as well as the work she has done with and for All Bodies Dance Project, Sasha Kleinplatz, Mardon + Mitsuhashi, and The Party (Layla Marcelle and Kyla Gardiner). Andrea’s practice also includes facilitating accessible dance classes for All Bodies Dance Project, and creating audio descriptions of dance films to increase access for blind and low vision audiences. You can hear her words describing works by All Bodies Dance Project, Company 605, Mardon + Mitsuahshi and many solos commissioned by Arts Assembly. She is a co-creator of the imperfect ongoing internet dance archive, WATERFALL FALLING FOREVER AGAIN.

dancer/witness

In this workshop, we will use improvisation to research the relationship between dancing and witnessing. Specifically, we will work on summoning attention, curiosity and creativity with equal commitment on both sides of the dancer/witness divide. In this way, how might dancer and witness be felt in symbiotic service to one another?  What dances emerge from this type of container? Live music will support us as we move and witness together. This workshop will also create an opportunity to practice expressing our experiences, both as dancers and as witnesses, with words. 

Rina Pellerin

Rina’s versatility and artistry has allowed her to perform, judge, and compete across North America and Asia. She has received several scholarships and awards throughout her training, granting her the opportunity to study under the founders and pioneers of street dance. Rina is the co-founder and co-director of eccentric waacking crew, Konichiwaack, and the co-founder co-artistic director of OURO Collective. She is an active member of the Vancouver street dance scene and has made it her priority to grow the local waacking community. 

Waacking class

This workshop begins with a thorough exploration of the fundamental techniques and principles that underpin waacking. We utilize these to create a unique narrative and incorporate them into our own practice. This high-energy class will focus on body and mind connection to open up new pathways and possibilities for self-discovery and play.

Photo by Abishek Joshi

Matthew Tomkinson

Accessibility Support / Live Musician

Matthew Tomkinson is a composer and sound designer for theatre, film, and contemporary dance. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. Drawing upon lived experience of neurodivergence and chronic illness, his work demonstrates an overarching interest in mad poetics and sonics. His debut audiovisual album as Mathoms, The Woe Trumpets, is out with Decaying Spheres, along with an accompanying film that has been presented at Sound Scene Festival (Washington) and Chapeltown Picture House (Manchester). Matthew’s scores have been presented widely by CBC, VIFF, PuSh, Vines Art Festival, Dancing on the Edge, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Tanzmesse, and the Sarajevo Film Festival, among many others. Recent collaborators and commissions include Company 605, Ballet BC, Ace Co Pro, Kinesis Somatheatro, Eric Cheung, and the All Bodies Dance Project. Matthew lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.

Photo by Jessica Wilkie

Michelle Olson

Michelle Olson is a member of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation and the Artistic Director of Raven Spirit Dance. She studied dance and performance at the University of New Mexico, the Aboriginal Arts Program at the Banff Centre and was an Ensemble Member of Full Circle First Nations Performance. Michelle works in areas of dance, theatre and opera as a director, choreographer, performer and movement coach and her work has been seen on stages across Canada. She was the recipient of the inaugural Vancouver International Dance Festival Choreographic Award. She graduated as a Certified Movement Analyst from Laban/Bartenieff and Somatic Studies Canada and is currently teaching at Langara’s Studio 58 Theatre program. She recently received her MFA in Theatre Directing at UBC.

What we carry- Moving Reflections

Our bodies are the manifestation of what has passed and what is to come and the stories that live in our blood and bones are the offerings given to us by our ancestors. Through structure exercises and open ended explorations, we will explore the depth and breadth of our relationship to this legacy and discover how our moving bodies are a part of integrating knowledge, discovering resonant imagery and sparking inspiration. Sounds complicated? It is not if we slow down our breath and take the time to connect to the earth and listen. And then we move.

Andrea Nann

Andrea Nann is a contemporary dance artist, arts educator, founding artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company, and founder/co-creator of Conscious Bodies Methodology, an embodied community practice. Based in Toronto/Tkarón:to on Lands protected by the “Dish With One Spoon” wampum inter-nation peace agreement, Andrea dances to reach across distance and to experience herself and others in celebration of possibility, plurality, imagination, originality, and belonging. A graduate of York University’s Department of Fine Arts, Andrea was a member of the Danny Grossman Dance Company for 15 years and she has contributed to the creation of new works by over 70 dance and theatre creators from across Turtle Island. Andrea has been recognized with awards for choreography, performance, contributions to the performing arts sector and for her work in community actioning. Andrea believes that dance and embodiment can shift attitudes and ways of being, tuning us into what makes each of us distinct, to what we share, and ultimately how we can live together in wonderment and peace.

The Human is a Caring Being.  

This workshop is for any body from any discipline who desires to investigate and engage in practices of embodied relational caring through deepening awarenesses of body, breath, memory, touch, and sound. Supported by Dreamwalker Dance Conscious Bodies practice we will begin with sensory awakening actions progressing into sequences of fluid movement explorations and guided invitations rich with image, sensation and texture. By tuning in to past and present experiences we will extend our perceptual fields, enhancing our capacities to observe and relate to our self, to others, and to the world around us. We will practice safer vulnerability and explore dynamic exchange by activating our physical, metaphorical and acoustic bodies – in both solo and group focussed exercises – cultivating a body better able to be in space in a relaxed way, and response-able to others with a deeper and more open sense of self and connection. We will breathe, undulate, hum, touch, and spiral together, practicing receiving and giving, exchanging kindnesses, and discovering and sustaining our authentic bodies and voices.

Photo by Shannon Litzenberger

Senaqwila Wyss

More info to come…