Studio 303 offers four types of residencies for emerging and mid-career artists. Most of our residencies offer space, equipment, artistic and administrative support, presentations, and a financial contribution. Each can be tailored according to the specific needs of the artist. Beyond the residency, artists-in-residence are considered for networking events (SPARK Studio Series), commission events (REMIX), and other support activities (Salon Labs, etc).
Our artists-in-residence for the 2018-19 season are Thea Patterson, Victoria MacKenzie, Nate Yaffe, Cirque Off, Lara Oundjian, Maxine Segalowitz, Brice Noeser, Lucy M.May, Nien Tzu Weng, Ariane Boulet, Helen Simard.
PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS AND BIOS
THEA PATTERSON (creation residency, Summer 2018)
Silver is a new work which continues my research with materials/objects/sculptural choreographies. Working with (mostly) silver objects of differing textures, weights, plasticities and vibrations, the performative desire of the objects leans towards the emergence of moving landscapes that activate perception and attention. Some curiosities include: can bodies and objects overlap? Can the objects speak…dance…wink? Silver explores an oscillation between interiority and exteriority, between subject and object, or object as subject between, humour, awkwardness, and beauty. The objects are sculptural choreographies, and the body a site for both minimal and highly physical movement. The performers move between, as they layer and slide what could be described as different sorts of bodies… their bodies, and the objects/bodies, the sound/body, the light/body which act as the externalization of shifting sensorial states. The somatic world this proposes lends itself to landscapes of sensation which are navigated, sensed, and danced.
Thea Patterson is a choreographer, performer, dramaturge, and researcher. Her practice revolves around a sophisticated aesthetic and performance practice working with an acute set of questions around the nature of objecthood, perception, vitality, and time. From 2007 to 2015 she was dramaturge, and co-artistic director on seven works including Eesti: Myths and Machines (2011) selected as top dance work of the year by the Voir. She was also co- founder of the collective The Choreographers (2007-2011). In 2016, Thea completed her Masters at DAS Choreography, Amsterdam. Currently she is working on projects in Montreal, Portugal, Amsterdam, and was recently selected to participate in a choreographic residency with Deborah Hay in Austin, Texas.
VICTORIA MACKENZIE(creation residency, Summer 2018)
A/V (audio visual). This work branches out from a simple concept: to create an experience in which movement serves as a visual aid for maximum comprehension of music. Bodies, acting as sounds, inhabit the space to offer visual representation of the music, resulting in the creation of a multi-sensorial moment where the bond between music and dance cannot be escaped. The artists involved come predominantly from the street dance scene. Our collective expertise represents many different styles and specialties within styles. Dancers: Nadine Sylvestre, Marie-Reine Kabasha, Anthony Calma-Burke, Nindy Banks, Kenny Vu, and Maximiliano Hernandez.
Victoria VicVersa Mackenzie is an emerging Canadian dancer and choreographer. She received her formation in dance from École de Danse Contemporaine de Montréal in 2013 and has been breaking since 2008. She has performed in contemporary dance/hip hop theater/commercial shows and festivals internationally, for companies and artists such as Cirque du Soleil, Tentacle Tribe, the Body Slam Collective, Helen Simard, and Alias Dance Project; and for events such as Breakin’ Convention, Summer Dance Forever, PanAm Games, Street vs. Stage (Summerworks), Festival 100Lux, Tangente and Festival Quartiers Danses. Since 2014, she has also worked as a choreographer, with her most recent work including A/V, an ongoing project with a group of Montreal-based dancers, The Three for Rebels de la Soul, Toronto and Hexad Myriad for École de Danse Contemporaine de Montréal. Vic is constantly active and implicated in the Montreal and Toronto dance scenes as a professional performer /teacher/community programmer/event organizer.
NATE YAFFEE (creation residency, Summer 2018)
Innateness is a work-in-progress solo, currently constructing itself through the unconsidered movements that rip through Nate’s body. It is moving relentlessly forward, always embracing its future iteration, dismissing nostalgic lingerings of sense of self, and willingly exposing the splinters of his personhood to the audience. Offering a non-transactional exchange between performer and public, Nate becomes an open orifice teeming with unguarded emotion and fleshy histories.
Nate Yaffe is a Montreal-based experimental artist in dance, theatre and video, whose practice researches uncorrecting the self-censored body. the_johnsons 00:11:56, his dance-film examining privacy and surveillance culture was presented as part of the Cinedans festival in Amsterdam, as wells as film festivals across Canada. The related interactive video-dance installation the_johnsons 00:21:51, was presented in Montreal at the Darling Foundry, Eastern Bloc and Monument National. His most recent work for stage, Dunno wat u kno (2017) lies at the intersection of the sensitive body and our virtual lived experiences. As a performer, Nate collaborates regularly with Montreal choreographers Katie Ward, Dorian Nuskind-Oder, and Audrée Juteau. He received a Helen Hayes award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role he created in Molly Maxner’s play Occupied Territories (2015) which he reprised in the off-Broadway production in 2017. He is also the creator and curator of the residency series ‘’This is actively built”, brings together artists from the queer community into shared space for collaboration and discussion.
MOVEMENT FOR THE LIBERATION OF CIRCUS AND ARTS
(creation residency, Summer 2018)
The Movement for the Liberation of Circus and Arts was born from the collaboration of Lili Bonin and eva-fleur riboli-sasco, following up on the discussions started with Cirque OFF last summer. Hosted by Studio 303 as part of their artists residencies, this event helped bring to the surface current problems and challenges in circus and performance as well as provide a base for the elaboration of a living manifesto for the biodiversity and ecology of a post-acrobatic, queer, feminist, political, underground, non-commercial circus focused on experience, openness, feelings, sensitivity, artistic risk taking and speaking out. By offering them a second residency, Studio 303 renews its commitment towards this project, now self-identified as the positive, inclusive and emancipated Movement for the Liberation of Circus and Arts. From July 6th to 8th, the Movement invites the whole community (circus artists as well as dancers, performance artists and all body nerds, freaks, weirdos, queers interested in body and movement based arts) to contribute to this project by co-writing of a Practical Ethics Guide for Circus and Arts. This 3-day workshop, structured in 3 parts, will combine moments of discussions to mornings of led-games aiming for an embodied, philosophical exploration of the space.
Éliane Bonin, Lili la terreur
A multidisciplinary performer and artist, Éliane Bonin expresses herself mainly through circus since 2000. Within Carmagnole she fights for free art and counter-culture and in all her events she prioritizes artists’ emancipation along with social and artistic community building. She explores with deep interest the art of movement and aerial technics. She considers circus to be a whole way of life that goes beyond the stage. Fed by human experience, it calls for a rage of life, an uncompromising, free expression, an adamant, fortuitous truth, in opposition to the grey, destructive control of a sick, submissive society.
She performs and teaches in the name of peoples and bodies’ connectivity, and morals liberation. She shits on all that limits a person’s development and happiness, including capitalism and patriarchy, which dictate permissions based on gender, race and all those categories invented to divide people.
eva-fleur riboli-sasco
eva-fleur met Lili for the first time at la Caserne, the same place where their training started, maybe a little by chance (if that’s a thing?) and certainly out of curiosity. Silks, trapeze, straps, free rope, acrobatic cycle: eva-fleur loves exploring and experimenting new stuff, even if (or precisely because?) that sometimes means getting a bit scattered, lost and colorfully bruised. Despite being still relatively new to this world, and yet another white settler on unceded territory, this Italo Basque cheeky queer kid is determined to fight for circus’ liberation from its white, colonial, capitalist cisheteropatriarchal straightjacket. Scratching and digging the surface of things, including their body, and transforming shit and trauma into flowers and glitter, is one of their mottos.
LARA OUNDJIAN (creation residency, Summer 2018)
Going through the thing is a hybrid dance performance performed by 3-4 dancers. It is is a visual and sensorial landscape of bright objects and electronic sound score. Built from a study of the materiality of the human body in dialogue with the materiality of objects, we practice unexpected yet intimate ways of relating through the body. We use physical or social negotiation to work on unknown tasks, to propose ways of being together. We are interested in emergent narratives, in the disintegration and reformation of these scenarios, through a surrealist logic grounded in the sensuality of the concrete. We look at strangeness and are worried about agency, without forgetting playfulness. We tried to deconstruct elements of dance improvisation as a tool to reimagine ourselves and each other within all that thirdspace. We are looking to affect ourselves + the stuff we are being with. No matter what, we don’t want to drop or go backwards, we want to go through the thing, whatever it is, all the way until the end, and then look around and see where we are.
Lara Oundjian is a Canadian/American (/Swiss/Armenian) dancer and choreographer. She followed/s a self-driven dance and performance education through various institutions in Canada and Europe (most notably PORCH at Ponderosa and SMASH-Berlin), and received a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Studies and Art History from McGill University. Lara has danced for Eryn Tempest, Nien Tzu Weng and Co. Volte 21. She has created two solo performances, image of thing you blow into at parties, at the Words & [ ] – A Durational Conference on Art & Thought at the Darling Foundry, and holography, hobbyist use, presented by the Phenomena Festival at Theatre La Chapelle. Lara has also worked collaboratively with Kate Ramsden to create dance video projects under the name Project Contrabête. Most notably, she directed Boredom which was presented at Breakthroughs and Christie Pitts film festivals in Toronto.
MAXINE SEGALOWITZ (creation residency, Summer 2018)
“Sexpectations” is a sex work-positive dance and text performance solo by Maxine Segalowitz, in development since 2017. The performance is centered on structured improvisation and aims to challenge the audience to reflect on and to question their understanding of gender roles, emotional labour, objectification, ingrained sexism, stigma surrounding sex work, and money. Through dance and text, the piece transitions back and forth from speaking of performers with audiences to strippers with clients, highlighting their similarities. With “Sexpectations”, Maxine seeks to expand these possible transitions, facilitate the audience’s experience and reflexion, and to look deeper into blurring the edges between performers/strippers and audiences/clients.
Maxine Segalowitz is a queer, Jew-ish, emerging dance artist in Tio’tia:ke, commonly known as Montreal. Since completing her BFA in Contemporary dance from Concordia University, she’s kept gathering skills as an interpreter, facilitator, choreographer, and recently, with Francine Côté, a clown! As an dance interpreter, she’s worked with Karen Fennell, Ingrid Bachmann, Corpus Dance, and more recently Seripop and Helen Simard. With creative collaborator Phoebe Heintzman Hope, Maxine has co-facilitated The Pleasure Model: A voice+movement+choreography workshop series. As a creator, she continues researching SEXPECTATIONS, a piece highlighting comparisons between strip club clientele and theatrical audiences.
BRICE NOESER (creation residency, Summer 2018)
La noèse, a word that denotes the conscious process of the brain, is a fundamental research that takes the form of a sprawling practice composed of thoughts, movements and encounters. Accompanied by different artists, I will propose laboratories that will be punctuated by interventions of other colleagues invited to enrich our explorations, confronting or comforting the axes of research. This project will explore various ways of controlling and losing control in the body, language and roles we have in the studio.
Brice Noeser has been working for twelve years as an artist in contemporary dance. In addition to collaborating on projects with choreographers Harold Rhéaume, Estelle Clareton and Danièle Desnoyers, he has created and presented his pieces in Quebec, Canada, and Mexico with his most recent creation Ruminant Ruminant. By focusing on the notion of language and implementing mechanisms of constraint, Brice Noeser focuses on the exploration of various forms of representation and of the different roles that he occupies in dance, theater, seminars or performance.
LUCY M.MAY (creation residency, Summer 2018)
This summer Montreal-based choreographer Lucy M. May will begin co-creating a solo for and with Vladimir “7Starr” Laurore, a Canadian Krump veteran. Originating in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Krump is a street dance known for its highly intense and precise gesture, storytelling, and raw expression. Inspired by 7Starr’s acuity and invention; by Lucy’s experiences as a rookie in Krump; and the dance’s complex dialogical scores and invisible structures, they will explore the anima and thought-process that inhabit dancers in sessions and battles. “Liveness”—a cathartic energy and animate substance—fills dancers, driving a creative refusal of oppression and loss, and drastically affecting the environment and entourage wherever it is performed. Using the analogy of a photographic darkroom and the ontology of the black box, the collaborators—including Ellen Furey, Jon Cleveland, Patrick Conan, Big Rulez, Alexandra “Spicey” Landé, and Laurence “Solow” Gojit—will explore apparitions and transformations.
Lucy M. May is a contemporary dance artist based in Montréal. Lucy creates performances, such as Esemplastic Landing (2016-17); Vivarium (2014/2017), that ask how geo- and bio-social environments thread their way through human movement. As a dancer she has worked with Marie Chouinard, Margie Gillis, Susanna Hood, Alejandro De Leon, Sasha Kleinplatz, and others. Lucy studied at LADMMI, The Rotterdam Dance Academy, and began studying Krump in 2016. She was recently invited to the “Grouch” Krump family under the title “Ravage Grouch.”
Vladimir ”7Starr” Laurore is a pioneer of the Canadian Krump scene. In 2005, he co-founded the first Krump crew in Canada, Bzerk Squad. He has been a guest competitor/judge on both national and international platforms in major competitions such as The International Illest Battle in Paris, The ARK in Las Vegas, European Buck Session in Germany, The Phitted Talk in the USA, and Royal Rumble in Switzerland. He has worked with Cirque du Soleil, Cirque Eloize, and Moment Factory. In 2017, he received the Victor Martyn Lynch Staunton award, given by the Canada Council for the Arts for outstanding artistic achievement.
NIEN TZU WENG (creation residency, Summer 2018)
Peekaboo Didu is a project that explores the movement of humans and cats within a bouncy space. The process is based around the body’s relationship to different degrees of gravity. We are playing with sensations of gravitational waves, energy transference, and the impact of performers within a bouncy set. The sets refer to celestial objects such as asteroids. They facilitate choreographic movements and propell us with unpredictably and great force in all directions. The unpredictability challenges performers’ expectations of their own movements, creating an alertness and playfulness in the physicality. Didu, the cat in the space, a presence of spontaneity, allows us to draw from the cat’s own special relationship to gravity. The motions in the space are completely indeterminable. This exploration is looking to transfer the bouncing energy on-stage to the audience, engaging them in a physiological reaction to the work that might broaden their sensorial awareness of weight, gravity, and space.
Nien Tzu Weng is a Taiwanese-Canadian choreographer and interpreter based in Montreal. In 2008, she moved to Vancouver to continue her artistic practice. She has presented her choreographies in Montreal at Vous Etes Ici (La Serre), the Art Matters Festival, and Art Crush, as well as at the Taiwan Festival at the Harbourfront Center in Toronto and the SHIFT Theater One-Act Festival in Vancouver. Weng builds bridges between disciplines, pursuing an experimental approach to contemporary dance. She received the James Saya Award in 2015 and Undergraduate Research Award at Concordia (2017). Currently an artist-in-residence at Concordia’s Topological Media Lab where she studies the relationship between movement and new media practices.
ARIANE BOULET (creation residency, Summer & Winter 2018)
The project Mouvement de passage integrates dance into the contexts of a residence for seniors with loss of autonomy and needing end-of-life care. It consists of a choreographic proposal installed within a CHSLD which brings the residents to rediscover and reinhabit this space. It thus proposes a privileged and sensitive contact with their bodies and their creativity. It is the ultimate experience of the present moment that results in ambulatory visits to the rooms, and which is based on the intimate and lived experience of being hospitalized. It is the richness, the diversity and the depth of this lived “material” I have engaged with since 2014 that made me want to create a scenic work that makes visible to the public what is lived in isolation in a CHSLD and thus discover again the stories, gather the essential moments of grace, magic, sad and hopeless moments, our relationship to aging, dementia, and disease.
After earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Dance in 2009, from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Ariane Boulet has performed as an interpretive artist for more than a dozen of choreographers. To support her ongoing quest to define what dance has to offer to those performing and witnessing its expression, Ariane completed a Master’s Degree in Dance in 2014, enabling her to explore the impact of artistic creation within the domain of health and wellness. This experience inspired deep reflections: the importance of faith, doubt, encounter, landscape; the discovery of the human body as an entity that is at once individual and collective. As cofounder of the company Je suis Julio since 2010, Ariane has conceived numerous theatrical dance works, outdoor performance pieces and short films as an interpretive artist, choreographer and co-creator.
HELEN SIMARD (creation residency, Winter 2019)
As Long As I Don’t Think About It, I’m OK is a new choreographic development and the final piece in a trilogy of works inspired by the musician Iggy Pop, that bring together dance and live rock music. The concepts being explored here are the aging body, the injured body, the body confronted with it’s own mortality, and the body that keeps going and growing in face of its limitations, finding new ways to create and commune with music. “I’m exploring the later years of Iggy’s career, who is now in his 70s, using his art and biography as a starting point to question how the body, movement, and art can grow, age, and transform over time. My interest in how this cultural icon has aged in the public eye comes from facing, as a dance artist, the limitations of and new possibilities created by my own aging body.” Helen Simard.
Helen Simard is a Montreal-based dance artist. Her work explores the absurdity of everyday life and the beauty of failure, through an investigation of the interconnected nature of dance and music. Since 2000, her interdisciplinary creations have been presented across Canada and in Europe. Helen has a BFA (Concordia, 2000) and MA (UQAM 2014) in contemporary dance, and studied physical theatre with Francine Coté, James Keylon, and Philippe Gaulier. She won the Mainline Theatre Creativity award is 2014 and was nominated for the Buddies in Bad Times award for Risk and Innovation in 2016.
DETAILS ABOUT EACH RESIDENCE
Summer residencies are intended for research and are offered each year in July and August. We favour work that is collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and/or experimental. We like to see artists who are not afraid to fail and may do so spectacularly. Residencies can be intensive (up to 100 hours) or more limited (40 hours) depending on the needs of the artist and of the research. Summer residencies receive support in the form of space, organizational support (promotion, communication with presenters), some artistic mentoring and technical support, and financial support.
Winter residencies take place late December and early January and offers two artists/groups unlimited access to the studio and its equipment for one week each. These residencies are ideal for refining and working out technical details of developed work.
REMIX
For this fifth edition, Studio 303 continues to explore dance reinterpretation, remixing and covering. The residencies are offered in partnership with José Navas/Compagnie Flak for a total of 40-hours.
Curator-in-residency
With the intention of supporting an emerging curator, Studio 303 offers a residency including mentorship, as well as technical and communication support. The curator-in-residency this season is still to be announced..!