Discipline: performing arts

Ülfet sevdi

Ülfet Sevdi is the recipient of the Joint Support Fellowship with Playwrights Workshop Montreal (PWM)+MAI for 2023-2024.

Ülfet Sevdi is a writer, theatre director, dramaturge, visual artist, and Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner based in Montreal. She graduated in Fine Arts and Theatre in Türkiye in 2001. She holds a Research and Creation Master in the INDI program at Concordia University. She is now a PhD candidate in the INDI program at Concordia University. Her work deals with oral history and social narratives. Her approach is highly conceptual, and experimental, and is theoretically grounded in the critical social sciences. She was the co-founder and artistic director of nü.kolektif (2008-2014), an Istanbul-based collective of multidisciplinary artists involved in performances dealing with political topics. She continued this line of work with Thought Experiment Productions (2015-) since coming to Montreal, a production company she also co-founded and that she co-directs. Her past work has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Montreal Council for the Arts, and the Cole Foundation. It has been presented in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Ireland, Türkiye, and the USA.

Motherhood, by Ülfet Sevdi

In the moment of my artistic and academic mid-career, less than two years ago, I became a mother. I had just finished a Master’s thesis. It was still during the Covid pandemic. They say having a child changes your life. But you do not understand it until it happens to you. It is a deep, advantageous but also very demanding existential state. How do we continue, what can be done? When will we be able to regain our normal artistic life? Our performer’s body? Our capacity to focus on reading and writing? After almost a year of pregnancy follows the first months, the first year. The body has changed; physical, emotional, and psychological constraints are everywhere. Time flows outside, and life continues. This performance will be based on the technique I developed in my last performance, Numbers Increase As We Count…, a technique I have called “Performative Acting”. It is a technique that involves specific tasks and dramaturgically framed open structures. I have sketched the framework for this technique in my Research and Creation Master Thesis in the INDI program, and am currently developing it further in my current PDH studies in the same program. For this project, I intend to carry this work with different artist-mothers/mother-artists from different performative artistic disciplines.

Credit photo: Mustafa Hacalaki

adjani poirier

Adjani Poirier is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who sometimes likes to experiment with sound art and radio. She is interested in creating work that explores the beauty and the ugly of the human experience, and is drawn to stories that reveal the complexity of navigating a world where systemic inequalities oppress yet love and connection still seep through the cracks, strong and fierce, giving us life. Their writing uses magical realism to explore ideas of home, queer desire and how the subconscious influences our relationship to each other and our physical surroundings. 

Recent plays include Sinkhole (or six ways to disappear), the second-place winner of the Playwrights Guild of Canada Tom Hendry Emerging Playwright Award; Scorpio Moon, which was featured in Centaur Theatre’s 2022 Queer Reading Series; and Celebrity Dogs, part of Boca del Lupo’s national project Plays2Perform@Home. 

With the support of MAI’s alliance program, Adjani will be developing their new play One Spectacular Moment. Historical fiction meets magical realism in this piece that explores the connections between the historic Black community of Africville, urban renewal, Black feminism, the current housing crisis in Canadian cities and QTBIPOC activist movements of the 2010-20’s.

Adjani is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada where she studied playwriting and has a BFA from Concordia University in Theatre and Development. They currently live and create in their hometown of Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Photo credit: Alex Tran

charles gao

When I (Charles Gao) moved to Montreal in 2018, my goal became to develop my method for creating more narrative-based work from my perspective as a breaker. The idea was to use the artistic tools I had developed in my years as a breaker in tandem with the theatrical tools I was studying, to discover my form of Hip Hop theatre. 

In 2019, I started working on what would eventually become “Welcome to the Digital Desert”. In 2020 during the pandemic, I staged an impromptu outdoor version of the play, where I cast Johnny Abilach – an actor as well as fellow street dancer. We’ve stayed in touch since, often dancing and exchanging together. His dedication to his practice as a popper as well as an actor mirrors my practice as a b-boy and playwright, where both disciplines feed each other. This has given us our common artistic language when working together.

Photo credit: Vickie Grondin

nico contreras

Nico Contreras is an Ecuadorian Canadian interdisciplinary artist working between movement and text in theatre, contemporary dance, and film. Honoured to have learned with mentors across the Americas, from Quito’s Teatro Malayerba to Toronto’s Aluna Theatre, Nico has spent the last decade exploring the curious relationships between identity and abstraction in artmaking on a personal and community scale. Founder of the expresARTE program for Panamerican youth, he has most recently led research and creation processes bringing together artists from a variety of diaspora to critically reflect on the roles our practices play in our life and work. 

Nico is currently working on ñaño, a play exploring the relationship between brothers in connection through absence, grief and loss. It is a farewell letter and a collection of ephemeral reminiscences, an exploration of how the moments we have shared make us who we are, and a testament to the power of memory to freeze, distort, and perhaps reveal those who we have loved and lost.

Photo credit: Naïma Contreras Tejpar

dani carter

Dani Carter is a Tkaronto-born, Tiohtià:ke-based writer and performance artist.

Project Description: TIPS is an interdisciplinary exploration of Blackness, desirability, the internet, and the hidden erotic underbelly of labour. It follows the myth of the Black body into the noise of cyberspace.

The work is an aggregation of data—an absurd, burlesque, corrosive archive—collected from imageboards, message boards, Reddit communities, TikTok live streams, and the artist’s lived experience. How does the internet and its content, pornographic and non-pornographic, affect the shape of fetishization? Can a text that dehumanizes be radicalized by the dehumanized? As Gayatri Spivak writes, can the subaltern speak? These are questions that TIPS is interested in asking—if not answering, given their vastness—in the context of writing, performance, and their intersection.

Photo credit: Dani Carter

natsumi sophia bellali

Natsumi Sophia Bellali was born in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, and raised by a Japanese mother, and a Moroccan father. She graduated from The Ailey School in New York, where she
cultivated her love and respect toward modern dance, amongst other styles the city showed her. She has performed with MICHIYAYA Dance and Ping Chong + Company,
and has been an understudy for the Mark Morris Dance Group. Bellali utilizes every platform directed her way as a vessel to share the wonders of her roots; from short works for competitive events, to large entertainment productions, to her own solo work Salam Tata currently in creation. She further shares her practice, and her passion to make people feel empowered in their bodies, by teaching in different settings such as wellness centers, yoga studios, pre-professional schools, and by supporting athletes of other disciplines through dance training. What is it to be a child of immigrants in Montreal? Salam Tata illustrates this unique and complex identity through telephone conversations with an aunt living in Morocco. The work addresses the themes of beauty standards, marriage, religion, and womanhood, through dance and theater.

mona el husseini

Open to professional choreographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, the joint support is offered annually in partnership with the CAM,Conseil des arts de Montréal. This support aims to foster the development of a dance artist living in the territory of Montreal and to support them in a process of research, creation, and production of work. The selected artist will be offered the opportunity to present their work in the MAI spaces as part of the official program during the 23-24 season.

Mona El Husseini is an Egyptian Contemporary Dance artist based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal. She completed her dance education at the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center in Egypt and studied International Business and Contemporary Dance at Concordia University. She teaches barre, Pilates, and contemporary dance in Montreal and Cairo. Mona is currently working on Monday or Tuesday: a solo search, and a mother-daughter duet titled Creatrix. In her creative process, Mona goes beyond the dance and traces the thread that weaves the different art forms she practices including Martial Arts, painting, and writing. In un-layering questions of personal identity and heritage, Mona is interested in how stories are transmitted, shared, and told through the body across generations. She finds the dance in the place where the inner and outer meet, the traditional and the contemporary converse, and in the encounter between the intimate and the collective. 

Creatrix started as an invitation to co-create a dance duet with her mother, Hala; a doctor, science teacher, and a mother of three who is not trained in dance. In this process, they dance through their genealogy in an attempt to get to know themselves and each other by meeting those who preceded them. Using tokens, photos, and letters passed down through generations, they reflect on their past; where they come from, and where they now find themselves. Mona and her mother visit home in their fluid memories and vivid childhoods. Mona tries to touch all that is fleeting and step on the intangible rhythms that animate their heritage. They bring their opposing worlds to one another and search for the common denominator in art and science, motherhood and girlhood, past and present. Her mother always wanted to write her memoirs, in return, this dance may count as a prelude to achieve this goal. 

nicole jacobs

Member of Curve Lake First Nation and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal based dance artist, Nicole Jacobs trained in ballet, jazz, tap, acrobatics, and musical theater prior to graduating from Concordia University with a BFA in contemporary dance, and a minor in psychology. Nicole is an experienced contact improvisation dancer and facilitator, having studied the dance form intensely through traveling, teaching, and assisting in the organization of contact improvisation festivals in India, Thailand, Portugal, and Germany. Nicole has participated in numerous projects both as a performer and facilitator throughout Quebec with Theatre Junction, St. Ambroise Montréal Fringe Festival, Take Up Space Dance, Chantiers Jeunesse, and Le Gros Orteil. Her teaching repertoire includes developing workshops that she has facilitated at BIGBANG, Extravadanse studio, Collège Sainte Anne, and private training. She also develops accessible dance classes for neuro-diverse populations that she has shared across Canada and England. Nicole’s current research is focused on the meeting points between contemporary dance, floorwork, acrobatics, and interpretation. She is interested in the merging of disciplines and drawing from her training in theater and circus arts to create work that is experiential and poetic in nature.

Photo credits: Robert-Majewski

marbella carlos + chloé seyrès

Marbella Carlos and Chloe Seyrès, are the queer performing arts collective Kozmic Joy –a collective which focuses on merging interdisciplinary practices, elevating marginal art forms and marginal artists.

Marbella Carlos is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Manila, Philippines. In her practice, she uses burlesque to explore her experience as a racialized Canadian. Her work has led to multiple awards and performances including Bagel Burlesque Festival, Fierté Montreal 2019, Teaser Festival in New Orleans. She was the winner of the Best Debut category at the top burlesque competition in the world, the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

Chloé Seyrès is a French queer roller dancer. A former high-level athlete, 4-time world champion, and ex-member of 2 national teams, she is now a movement artist and coach. She has performed in a variety of cabarets, corporate events and festivals, on-screen doing motion capture for the Rollerchampion video game, as a support dancer for TVA’s Les Chanteurs Masqués, and in music videos for The Sloe Gin Fizz, Raphaël Dénommé and Mike Clay. Most impressively, she has been contracted to showcase her skills in performances with Cirque Éloize, Montréal Complètement Cirque, and Fierté Montréal 2022.

f.k.a. art club

F.K.A. Art Club Collective Bio

Favielle Petit Clair, Kathleen Charles and Awa Banmana form the newly founded collective: F.K.A. Art Club. With a co-conspirator relationship, the artists trace similarities between Fav and Kat’s Haitian heritage and Awa’s Senegalese heritage. Together, they form a powerful artist collective focused on how multidisciplinary creative expression can be used to build community resilience and resistance in the face of systemic oppression, for individuals who live at the intersection of racialized and homophobic violence.

Born in France, Spanish-Senegalese artist Awa Banmana’s is an Queer Afropean emerging artist. Their work is centered around multidisciplinary. In 2020, Banmana was involved in the creation of the Black Lives Matter mural «La Vie des Noir.e.s Compte» and was selected to be in residence for Moebius magazine. Banmana’s video clip «KICKER», co-directed with musician Kaya Hoax, was also featured in the Melbourne Midsumma Festival 2021.

Favielle “Fav” Petit Clair, is a Queer woman from Haitian descent. Having grown up in such a rich and crowded city her proximity to people and the social bonds she formed tainted her approach to art. With an Afrocentric artistic practice, Favielle obtained her first exhibition in 2017 for FOVA during Black History month. 

Kathleen Charles is a queer Haitian writer, songstress, performer, therapist in training and community organizer. Their poetry explores the power that art has to heal communities. Their art, whether it be music or poetry is made to heal themselves and to heal others by providing validating imagery to move through the traumas of systemic oppression.