ELLEN FUREY + HANAKO HOSHIMI-CAINES

PROJECT // Chopped Up Mountain 伝承

BIOGRAPHY

Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a dancer, performer, experimental artist, dramaturge, third eye, curator, writer and social engager working at the intersection of choreography, sculpture, curation, and community practice. Her works unfold across a range of formats—from stage to gallery to local community spaces—using delight, subverted logics, sampling, and the spirit of error.

Her work has been shown in Canada, the US, Sweden and the UK. Between 2020 and 2023, she was artistic co-curator at the CCOV. Her interdisciplinary tilt led Hanako to complete a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours in Western Philosophy from Concordia University with a focus on performativity, as well as training in contemplative body rooted practices such as reiki.

Ellen Furey is an experimental dance artist in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Since 2012, she’s worked on collaborative and interdisciplinary processes that insist on a mess of subjectivities, often through explicit co-authorship. Her creations use virtuosity, spectacle and nonsense narratives to create surprising trajectories that include elements of song, bad theatre, scored movement, sacred approximation, disgust, play and solemnity. Her work has been presented in Europe, Canada, in the USA and the UK.

Ellen’s artistic work also extends to emergent caring fields as a death doula and psychic. A graduate student at Queen’s University, she studies the place of spirituality and para materialities in critical theory and art practice. She has been a leadership consultant at Danse-Cité since 2022 and is originally from Unama’ki-Cape Breton, Mi’kmaq territory.

PROJECT DETAILS
This residency supports research for Chopped Up Mountain 伝承, the latest performance project by experimental dance artists Ellen Furey and Hanako Hoshimi-Caines. Together, we explore belonging through myth, autobiographical fiction, diasporic identity, and counter-colonial processes, seeing how two “solos” can be co-authored and presented in tandem. Pulling from noise music, choreography, sculpture, and handmade costume design, we seek aesthetic, experimental ways to honor and challenge our ancestral lineages. Ellen is interrogating non-messianic hope: present regardless of a “betterment” of circumstance, as well as learning to play the bagpipes. Hanako draws on non-dualistic traditions and Tsukumogami—objects that gain a soul and self-awareness after a century of service, and the vulnerability and risk of failure inherent in ritual and identity. Running through both works are intentional engagements with place, gaps in history, sacred clown embodiments and approximation—with reverence and irreverence—for what was lost or ruined.
Artistic consultants are sound artist/performance maker Christopher Willes and textile artist/rock musician Anni Spadafora. The work will be presented in the 2026/27 season of La Chapelle, scènes contemporaines.

PROJECT DETAILS

This residency supports research for Chopped Up Mountain 伝承, the latest performance project by experimental dance artists Ellen Furey and Hanako Hoshimi-Caines. Together, we explore belonging through myth, autobiographical fiction, diasporic identity, and counter-colonial processes, seeing how two “solos” can be co-authored and presented in tandem. Pulling from noise music, choreography, sculpture, and handmade costume design, we seek aesthetic, experimental ways to honor and challenge our ancestral lineages. Ellen is interrogating non-messianic hope: present regardless of a “betterment” of circumstance, as well as learning to play the bagpipes. Hanako draws on non-dualistic traditions and Tsukumogami—objects that gain a soul and self-awareness after a century of service, and the vulnerability and risk of failure inherent in ritual and identity. Running through both works are intentional engagements with place, gaps in history, sacred clown embodiments and approximation—with reverence and irreverence—for what was lost or ruined.

Artistic consultants are sound artist/performance maker Christopher Willes and textile artist/rock musician Anni Spadafora. The work will be presented in the 2026/27 season of La Chapelle, scènes contemporaines.