Event Category: dance

Je ne vais pas inonder la mer is a danced elegy that explores the role our relationship with mothers and our heritage play in the construction of femininity. This solo piece by Mexican choreographer and performer Sonia Bustos, draws from her personal history and search for identity, tinged with the pain of grieving her mother and grandmother. At the crossroads of questions on feminine condition, lineage, and memory, the artist explores the phenomena of reminiscence through theatrical dance, awakening all five senses. Food, music, and an evocation of social norms, beliefs and rituals inspire and inform this visceral creation.

Conseil des arts de Montréal and the MAI partner to offer a range of services to a choreographer (or a collective of choreographers) who encounters structural and systemic obstacles in their artistic practice based on their identities. This partnership provides artists with the means to question, test ideas and techniques, to collaborate and create through a well-supported process that is inclusive of time, space and administrative resources. In 2021, two in process-showing will take place.

Ephemeral Artifacts uses tap dancing and storytelling to explore the histories of tap and jazz, and the connection of these intertwined genres to black bodies. Professional tap dancer Travis Knights draws us in with his signature style, both intimate and intricate, encouraging audiences to listen to the stories, and the bodies, that have been kept alive through dance and oral traditions. The lineage of tap is both a meditation and a metaphor; on rhythm, adaptability, improvisation, and resistance through racialized bodies.

Produced by Theatre Passe Muraille and Anandam Dancetheatre Productions

Sometimes you have to leave home in order to understand your roots and fall back in love with what you’d seen too frequently to appreciate before. Deux solitudes dans une même présence explores the (re-)construction of identity through uprooting and the body in exile. The experience of migration intimately informs this duo piece by Venezuelan choreographer and dancer Ariana Pirela Sánchez, where the body, carrying its ancestral memories, is seen as a vehicle for desire, resistance and resilience. Embracing the form of a confessional narrative, the artist explores themes of forgetting, confabulation and rejection in the face of cultural assimilation in order to exhume her deepest memories.

Conseil des arts de Montréal and the MAI partner to offer a range of services to a choreographer (or a collective of choreographers) who encounters structural and systemic obstacles in their artistic practice based on their identities. This partnership provides artists with the means to question, test ideas and techniques, to collaborate and create through a well-supported process that is inclusive of time, space and administrative resources. In 2021, two in process-showing will take place.

Produced with the support from the Government of Québec and the City of Montréal
as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada
Council for the Arts

This multidisciplinary solo, somewhere between dance, theatre and music, is the fruit of three collaborations between Diana León and emerging creators Paco Ziel, Jeremy Galdeano and Vera Kvarcakova. Their guiding theme is knowledge of the self and the work necessary – amidst social pressures, inner demons and aspirations – to find one’s own voice. With compositions by Alejandro Loredo, Tom Jarvis and Diana León, Sur ce chemin, tu es sûre de te perdre is a powerful evocation of the pleasure in finding one’s own rhythm, in response to those who surround and inspire us. Originally from Mexico, Diana León is a performer and creator and, notably, a dancer for the Grands Ballets Canadiens.

Fa’addebhou li (« Dresse-le pour moi ») is the entreaty of parents whose son is not following what they believe is the right path closely enough – the path of tradition and patriarchal expectations. Choreographer Nancy Naous highlights the unsustainable construction of the male body in Arab society, in the daily lives of families and siblings. She stages two bodies (Nahid Bahsoun, Alexandre Paulikevitch) of men trapped in a straitjacket of inheritance and contradictions. Strong, tough, and idolized, they are moved by capacious desires and hidden insecurity. A dancer and actor of Lebanese origin, and founder of the company 4120.CORPS, Nancy Naous works with gestures from traditional dances and movements anchored in middle-eastern daily lives.