Meet the 2019 Youth Academy

December 17, 2018

We’ve thrilled to welcome a new team of all-stars for the 2019 PuSh Youth Academy. The Youth Academy is a unique opportunity for a small group of professionally minded young people who hope to pursue a life and career immersed in and around the performing arts. The Youth Academy provides a platform to experience, examine and engage in the professional contemporary performing arts community through workshops, discussions and shows, leading up to and during the PuSh Festival in January. Like a book club but for the live performing arts, the Academy meets on a bi-weekly basis.

Marie-Pascale
I am a multidisciplinary visual artist from Quebec, candidate to the MFA program at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. My works aims to counteract the negative effects of the current representation of feminine bodies in pop culture on young womxn’s mental health, by producing images depicting an authentic and flawed experience. If I were to curate a show for PuSh, my focus would be on experimental practices and I would try to turn the spotlight towards underrepresented voices.

Dominique Hat
My name is Dominique Hat and I am an interdisciplinary theatre maker. If given the opportunity to curate the PuSh festival, I would search for joyous and heartbreaking clowns. And because I probably couldn’t curate only clowns, I would further continue PuSh’s explorations into artists blending sound, film/projection and movement.

Shannon May
My name is Shannon May and I am a contemporary dancer.  I am interested in developing work that incorporates narrative and text with movement.  I would curate a show that uses movement, spoken and written word to tell the story of someone, past or present, that I find compelling.

Caitlin Main
Caitlin Main is an emerging theatre artist and scholar. Her practice centres around issues of subjectivity, mental health, and trauma as well as the co-existence of the poetic and the everyday.  If Caitlin could curate a show for the PuSh Festival, it would be a dance-theatre hybrid piece about shame.

Marina Buston
Marina is a theatre maker whose primary interests are writing form-breaking theatrical texts and creating original work through collaboration and devising. She’s currently completing her BFA in Theatre Performance at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts. If she were to curate a show for the Push Festival it would seek to define tragedy in a contemporary context.

Amanda Sum
Amanda Sum is a student in SFU’s Theatre Program. Her interests lie in music, movement and multimedia. If she were to curate a show for PuSh, it would investigate shame using rigour, vigour, and figurines.

Santana Berryman
I am an emerging actor and director from the Hamlet of Mt. Lorne, a mountain community south of Whitehorse, Yukon. As a graduate of Cap U’s Acting for Stage and Screen program, I am passionate about social justice, language, and working with children. If I could program for PuSH, I would seek to interweave new media and live theatre, delving into the modern co-existence between intelligent technology and traditional storytelling.

Krys Yuan
Being a theatre-artist and anthropology graduate means being constantly balancing two sides of a brain, but I enjoy finding unexpected intersections between both. Born and raised in Singapore, and now based in Vancouver, I continue to think about multitudinous impact of colonialism and migration across different lands, as well as the intercultural relationships that keep us evolving. I were to curate a show for PuSh, it would feel like getting a warm hug and being stabbed at the same time.

Kimberly Ho
Kimberly Ho is usually found eating some sort of carbohydrates or a family-size amount of hummus but beyond her well known food indulges, she is a second generation Chinese-Canadian theatre artist, collaborator and performer based in Vancouver BC, the Unceded Coast Salish Territories. Her work often explores the intersectionalities of culture and identity with acute interest relating to Asian diaspora and queer identity.

Dayna Hoffman
Dayna Hoffmann is an interdisciplinary theatre artist whose current focus is circus arts and clown. She practices and teaches aerial silks, hoop, trapeze and (most importantly) juggling at Vancouver Circus School. She wishes to one day combine the practice of acrobatic juggling with contemporary dance and mathematics. If she were to curate a show for the PuSh Festival it would explore the intersection between narrative theatre and circus performance.