Artists

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    Tiziano Cruz

    Tiziano Cruz was born in Jujuy, Argentina. His interdisciplinary art uses the intervention of public space to subvert oppressive hierarchies. Cruz is the founder of the ULMUS Cultural Management Platform, which is dedicated to cultural exchange among South American communities. His works have toured Argentina, Brasil, México, Suiza and España.

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    Electric Company Theatre

    The Electric Company is based in Vancouver, but it creates works for national and global as well as local audiences. Collaboration and experimentation are the company’s hallmarks; it seeks to expand the possibilities of live theatre and explore universal concerns. Previous PuSh performances include Studies in Motion (2006) and Palace Grand (2009). 

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    Jaha Koo (South Korea / Belgium)

    Jaha Koo is a South Korean composer and theatre artist. Working in the realm where disciplines overlap, he incorporates video, music, text and installation into his works of performance. Jaha Koo’s key achievements include the Hamartia Trilogy, of which Lolling and Rolling is a part, and the EP Copper and Oyster.

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    Smaïl Kanouté

    French-Malian artist Smaïl Kanouté is based in Paris. His work spans the disciplines of dance, graphic design, choreography and cinema. Kanouté is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and has performed at the Basilica and the Institute of Islamic Cultures, among other notable venues.

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    Moya Michael

    Dancer and choreographer Moya Michael moved to Brussels from South Africa in 1997, and has since become a major part of Belgium’s performing arts scene. Michael’s work explores ideological problems through interdisciplinary means.

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    Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen

    Mother, multihyphenate artist and scholar Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen is of mixed Ojibwe/Swampy Cree and English/Irish ancestry. Her work spans the realms of theatre, curation and teaching, and is rooted in Indigenous protocol and anti-colonial methodologies. Ravensbergen is an Associate Artist with Full Circle: First Nations Performance, Playwright-in-Residence at Delinquent Theatre and founder of the Maada’oonidiwag Canadian Anti-Racist Theatre Exchange.

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    Joby Burgess

    Master musician Joby Burgess is equally at home performing with The Who and at Sydney Opera House. His solo projects Powerplant and Pioneers of Percussion have taken him from Berlin to São Paulo, but he is often to be found at Abbey Road and Air Studios. Burgess is the creator of the Virtual Marimba Choir, which brought together 227 percussionists from around the world in 2020.

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    Alan Lake

    Alan Lake is a choreographer, dancer, director and visual artist with a keen interest in the symbolic. He studied at École de danse de Québec and, In 2003, founded the Alan Lake factori(e) in Quebec City. Past productions include Ravages; Chaudières, déplacements et paysages; and Là-bas, le lointain.

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    Adam Kinner & Christopher Willes

    Adam Kinner and Christopher Willes create performances that explore unusual states of sensory awareness. Their work is often staged in public spaces, and informed by an interest in immersive sound, listening, audience perspective and the possibilities of participatory art. Kinner and Willes created MANUAL in collaboration with Hanna Sybille Müller.

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    nora chipaumire

    nora chipaumire is the winner of four Bessie Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours for her work, which includes the live performances portrait of myself as my father and the three-part album Hashtag Punk, One Hundred Percent Pop and Star NIGGA. She is engaged in a long-term research project entitled nhaka; it is an investigation of black bodies and imaginations.

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    Boca del Lupo

    Since its inception in 1996, Boca del Lupo has toured with 60 original creations. The group’s raison d’etre is collaboration, and to that end it works across cultures and disciplines, creating works of live performance but also going beyond the confines of theatre. Boca del Lupo has garnered multiple Jessie Awards for their work, as well as the Critics’ Choice Award for Innovation and the Alcan Performing Arts Award.

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    Rakesh Sukesh

    Rakesh Suresh was born in Kerala, India, and grew up under the influence of yogic practice. A one-time Bollywood dancer, Suresh has also been trained in Kalaripayattu, an Indian martial art. Among other achievements, he has developed a movement method, called IntAct, and worked around the world as a choreographer and performer.

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    Jonathon Young

    Jonathon is a Core Artist with, and Co-founder of, Electric Company Theatre. He has collaborated with ECT on Tear the Curtain! and No Exit, among other works. As an actor, Jonathon has performed in stage productions across Canada, including King Lear and Queen Goneril (Soulpepper Theatre) and Knives in Hens (Coalmine Theatre). Recently, Jonathon has been collaborating with choreographer Crystal Pite. Together they’ve created three productions that have toured internationally: Betroffenheit, The Statement and Revisor.

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    Itai Erdal

    Itai Erdal is an award-winning lighting designer, performer and playwright. He is the founder of The Elbow Theatre, a company created to confront urgent social and political issues. With The Elbow Theatre, Erdal has staged Hyperlink, This Is Not a Conversation and A Very Narrow Bridge. He has won six Jessie Richardson Awards for his work.

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    Ontroerend Goed

    Belgian-based but internationally renowned, Ontroerend Goed stages original productions that blend the ethics of theatre with those of performance art. Unpredictable, provocative and innovative, the group’s works are premised on the idea that each idea deserves its own unique form.

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    ITSAZOO PRODUCTIONS and APHOTIC THEATRE

    ITSAZOO Productions creates immersive, innovative theatre events; its aim is to bring audiences into fully realized worlds, and its core values are community and intimacy. Aphotic Theatre Society is dedicated to producing new plays by non-binary, queer, racialized, trans, and woman writers. Its mission is to decolonize and de-tokenize diversity. 

    Events

    • The Café (Jan 27-29 (In-Person); Feb 2-5 (Digital))
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    Juan Ignacio Tula

    Dancer and circus artist Juan Ignacio Tula is based in Lyon. He is the founder of Compagnie 7Bis, and his special area of focus is the Cyr wheel.

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    Marica Marinoni

    Marica Marinoni has a background in gymnastics, and she applies it to her work in the circus arts. Lontano is her first solo show.

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    Imo Dichev

    Ivo Dimchev works–and plays–at the intersection of performance art, choreography, theatre, images and music. The Bulgarian artist has created over 30 productions, and his oeuvre is a wild and vivacious mixture of forms. Dimchev has toured the globe and recorded three albums of delicious pop music: Trakia, Sculptures and a compilation of live recordings.

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    Race Horse Company

    Established in 2008, Race Horse Company exists to create unique, uncompromising circus performances. The company’s productions emphasize acrobatic skill, dark humour and surprise, and they have wowed audiences and influenced the contemporary circus scene across the globe. In 2016, the founding members of Race Horse Company were awarded the State’s Circus Award for their work.

    Events

    • O’DD (Feb 4-5 (In-person); Feb 2-5 (Online))
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    Émilie Monnet

    At the intersection of theater, performance and media arts, the practice of Émilie Monnet is most often presented in the form of interdisciplinary theater or performative installations. She founded Onishka Productions in 2011 in an effort to foster links between Indigenous performers of different disciplines, and has since created several theatrical performances as well as producing Indigenous Contemporary Scene, a nomadic platform for live arts made by Indigenous artists. Émilie is Anishinaabe and French, and she currently lives in both the Outaouais and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang/Montreal.

    Events

    • Okinum (Feb 2-3 (In-person); Feb 2-5 (Online))
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    NDH / Rouge-gorge

    NDH / Rouge-gorge is a project-based creation production company led by Co-Artistic Directors Robin Poitras C.M. and renowned visual artist Edward Poitras. Launched in 2009, Rouge-gorge is a foundation for research, creation, production and touring. The company produces contemporary dance and performance works by Robin Poitras C.M., Edward Poitras, and guest artists. Traversing between the fields of dance and performance art, Robin and Edward’s work brings elements of visual and performance art into an inseparable arena. Intense collaboration with artists in dance, theatre, visual, music, and performance art is a mark of their creative practice.

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    Robin Poitras C.M.

    Artistic and Managing Director

    Robin Poitras C.M. is one of Saskatchewan’s most prolific dance and performance creators. Creating dance, performance and installation works, she has been actively engaged in contemporary dance practice since the early 80s. For many years Robin has traversed the formal worlds of dance and performance art. She co-founded New Dance Horizons in 1986, with Dianne Fraser where she continues to act as Artistic Director. With an interest in research into diverse fields of artistic and somatic practice she has developed a unique interdisciplinary approach. Robin’s works have been presented across Canada, in Spain, France, Germany, Mongolia and Mexico. She is a recipient of the 2022 Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, 2021 recipient of the Order of Canada, 2016 Lieutenant Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2006 Mayor’s Awards for Business & The Arts’ Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2004 Women of Distinction Award for the Arts.

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    Edward Poitras

    Co-Artistic Director

    Edward Poitras is a member of the George Gordon First Nation and resident of Treaty Four Territory. He is an artist who has always recognized his mixed heritage – Métis/Cree/Saulteaux – as a powerful source of energy, creativity and contradiction. Poitras was born in 1953 in Regina. In 1974 he studied with Sarain Stump at the Indian Art Program at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan where he was introduced to diverse artistic and philosophical approaches that continue to inform his art practice. In 1975–76, Poitras attended Manitou College in La Macaza, Quebec, where Mexican Aboriginal artist Domingo Cisneros imparted an experimental approach to materials and introduced Poitras to the Quebecois performance art scene. Following this time in Quebec, Poitras taught at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College and at the University of Manitoba. During much of the 1980s, he taught at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, University of Regina (now First Nations University of Canada). Poitras worked as a graphic designer for New Breed Magazine in the 1980s. Poitras has since remained connected to his community, exhibiting with and mentoring emerging artists through his involvement with groups including Tribe Inc. (Saskatoon), Sâkêwêwak Artists’ Collective (Regina), and New Dance Horizons (Regina).

    Since the early 1980s Poitras’ “artistic benchmark [has been] his masterful ability to combine seemingly contradictory materials”[1] such as fiberglass, circuit boards and magnetic tape with bone, horse hair and rawhide. His work examines complex issues of history and identity, and their connection(s) with place. As critic Nancy Tousley observes, his “family and regional history are [often] interwoven with references to the story of Aboriginal people in the Americas.”[2] Themes of colonization, assimilation, integration, genocide, displacement, migration, survival, nationalism and transnationalism permeate his work as he explores tensions, contradictions, narratives and interactions.

    Poitras has exhibited extensively across Canada, as well as in the United States and Europe. His selection as the first Aboriginal artist to represent Canada at the prestigious Venice Biennale marks a recognition of his distinctive contribution to the questions of “Identity and Alterity,” the theme of the 1995 Biennale. His other solo exhibitions include: Qu’Appelle: Tales of Two Valleys, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon (2002); RESIG/NATION, Galerie Le lieu, Quebec City (2000); The Politics of Land, an earthwork at Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Saskatoon (1998); Jaw Rez, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau and MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (1996); Marginal Recession, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (1991); Et in America Ego, Art Speak, Vancouver (1989); and Indian Territory, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon (1988). Among group exhibitions, nearly every major contemporary Native art exhibit since 1980 has featured his work, notably: New Work by a New Generation, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (1982); INDIGENA, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau (1992); and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2011). Internationally, his work has been shown in Santa Fe, Paris, Munster, Havana, New York and Tampere, Finland. His work may be found in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, MacKenzie Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, and National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), among others.

    Throughout his career, Poitras has been instrumental in organizing, producing, and participating in performance art, dance, and theatre works. He has created a number of sets, costumes and light designs in collaboration with various artists, including: Floyd Favel Star, Richard Martel, Benoit Lachambre, Jocelyn Montpetit, Bill Coleman, Boye Ladd, Bruce LaBruce, and Robin Poitras C.M. Edward Poitras is a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts (2002), the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan Arts Award for Innovation (2005), and a Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art (2009).

    In November 2020, Edward joined Robin Poitras C.M. as the Co-Artistic Director of New Dance Horizons.

    Events

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