Discipline: theatre

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

jamila ‘jai' joseph

Jamila ‘Jai’ Joseph is the recipient of the joint mentorship with Playwright’s Workshop Montreal for 21-22.

Jamila ‘Jai’ Joseph is a Montreal based interdisciplinary artist with her primary mediums being dance performer 20+yrs/choreographer 10+yrs, self taught emerging singer 15yrs/song writer 15yrs, emerging theatre artist 3yrs. A past recipient of Black Theatre Workshop’s Victor Phillips award in 2002 Jamila has continued performing, creating, and learning, telling
her stories, and sharing her expressions throughout her work. In 2015, Jamila started JaiDanse, a dance facilitation/dance performance company and has produced and co-produced shows both for stage and theatre at local venues around the city. Between 2017 – 2019 Jamila has had the pleasure of joining the casts of How Black Mothers Say I Love you, written by Trey Anthony (Black
Theatre Workshop 2019) & Nicole Brooke’s a Cappella “musical odyssey” Obeah Opera (ASAH Productions 2019) in Toronto, with her first stage role being back in 2017 where she portrayed ‘Lady in Purple‘ in the Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls… (McGill University’s Tuesday Night Café Theatre) and again in 2018 as an “Encore presentation…” produced by the cast (Les 6 Productions).
As we all came to stand still in the last 2 years, Jamila used the time to study her crafts, sharpen her creative tools and has added some new skills to her toolbelt. Currently, she is choreographing for theatre (TBD) and is also writing script and song/working on her own Performance Theatre piece entitled Wild Roots. 

sophia wright

Sophia Wright (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and creator based in Tio’tia:ke / Montreal and currently works in a collective with dance and theatre artist, Alida Esmail. Sophia’s artistic practice is fuelled by the desire to bring diverse practices and communities together. Originally hailing from Calgary, Sophia obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University and continued her studies in Cultural Mediation at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, France. In Paris, Sophia became an active member of the collective La Main, a multi-disciplinary collective of artisans, artists, and technicians. It was also in Paris that she first engaged with the Deaf community through the arts, an intercultural and multilingual collaboration that she continues to this day. Parallel to her dance career, Sophia is developing her skills in metalwork with the goal of bringing elements of sculpture and set design into future projects.

Photo credit: Alexandre Quillet 

alida esmail

Alida Esmail (she/her) is a Tio’tia:ke/Montreal-based dance and theatre artist born in Burlington, Ontario. She holds a BFA in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University, a Certificate in Movement Arts and Mixed Media from the Attakkalari Centre in India, and a MSc in Rehabilitation Sciences from Université de Montréal. She is also trained in International Ballroom/Latin dance which she currently uses to develop and spread Liquid Lead Dancing, a gender-neutral approach to partner dancing. Alida’s identity as a second generation Canadian-Muslim, bilingual anglophone, and female of colour living in Quebec’s socio-political climate is the backdrop for her choreographic work. As she discovers how to find a sense of belonging, she has also begun to uncover the unspoken loss, erasure, trauma, and privilege from her ancestral lineage passing from India to Africa to Canada.

She has recently created a Collective with Sophia Wright and with the support of Alliance they are building a collaboration with Deaf theatre artist, Hodan Youssouf, to discover her relationship to the above themes. The Collective has also been supported by the Plateau Mont-Royal, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Théâtre aux Écuries, the Maison de la culture du Plateau Mont-Royal and PTC (Playwrights Theatre Centre) Vancouver. Alongside Alida’s performance career she is also involved in innovative Arts and Health research which has been published in reputable peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Photo credit: Douglas Rideout 

⇒ http://www.alidaesmail.ca/

katey wattam

Katey Wattam is a director and creator of mixed English, Irish, Franco-Ontarian, and Anishinaabe ancestry. She is drawn to stories that connect with her ways of knowing while allowing space to explore and experiment with theatrical forms through an Indigenous lens. Through her corporeal based practice, she mines bodies for their blood memory, uncovering experiences and traumas to reclaim and decolonizing bodies, minds, and spaces. She is an alum of McGill University, MAI Alliance Program, and Black Theatre Workshop’s Artist Mentorship Program. Katey is currently a part of Why Not Theatre’s ThisGen Fellowship. Within Alliance, Katey Wattam is developing a theatrical adaptation of Métis poet and novelist Katherena Vermette’s river woman, using language through the body to explore the epicenter of colonial grief through decolonial love.

 

amir sám nakhjavani

Amir Sám Nakhjavani (he, him) is a META-Award nominated multilingual and multidisciplinary Montrealer of Azerbaijani-Iranian origin. As a theatre artist he has worked with the Segal Centre, Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal, Black Theatre Workshop, Tableau d’Hôte Theatre, Teesri Dunya Theatre and Infinithéâtre. He was a member of Black Theatre Workshop’s 2016-2017 Artist Mentorship Program ensemble; and participated in the DémART-MTL program through the Conseil des arts de Montréal, in collaboration with Centaur Theatre. He is currently working on a French-language translation of the Farsi-language classic, Aurash, by Bahram Beyza’ie, in collaboration with Modern Times Stage Company, in Toronto. His participation in the 2020-2021 MAI Alliance program is oriented towards an exploration of human-specific performance.

ahmad hamdan

Ahmad Hamdan is a Montreal-based actor who graduated from UQAM’s École supérieure de théâtre in 2017. He has performed his texts on several stages including La Licorne in the show Foirée Montréalaise. Parallel to his acting career, a storytelling and creation desire leads him to write short theatrical content. Within Alliance, he will tackle the long form to create a show that will explore, among other things, social mobility, the relationship to culture (in all senses of the word) and the conception of identity.