je ne vais pas inonder la mer (cam + mai)

David Wong

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.

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

ephemeral artifacts (cancelled)

© Damian Siqueiros

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

     

 

deux solitudes dans une même présence

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

pomegranate (suspended indefinitely)

Angelo Barsetti

[highlight background=”#e2011e” color=”#ffffff”]— Montreal is in red zone since October 01, 2020. The activities of MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) are suspended until further notice. This performance is suspended indefinitely. See MAI’s latest updates related to COVID-19. — [/highlight]

Pomegranate is a solo by veteran Montreal dancer Heather Mah. The performance is an interpretation of her grandmother’s life, a fragmented journey told through stories of family and migration that begin in China in 1895. As a performer Heather has worked with some of Quebec’s most innovative dance companies: Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Lucie Grégoire Danse, and Le Carré des Lombes, to name but a few. In 2005, she obtained a B.A. with distinction (Psychology) and a certificate in coaching. Still a dancer today, she also works as an instructor and coach, employing wellness practices to promote health and balance in body and mind.

Heather Mah is a recipient of the 2018-2019 joint support in dance CAM+MAI.

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

sur ce chemin tu es sûre de te perdre (webcast performance)

© Brenda Jauregui

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.

white [ariane]

White Ariane
© Bas de Brouwer

ARIANE is the daughter that Nancy (a South American woman) never had. Nancy wrote a diary for ARIANE while she was inside her womb without knowing that she would be a boy. 28 years after the birth, Nancy crossed over the Atlantic to reveal the existence of the diary to her son. ARIAH LESTER (Lester Arias) takes the words from his mother’s diary and creates songs out of them. A space of (in)betweenness: monstrosity / beauty, feminine / masculine, light / darkness, concert / theatre, opera / burlesque, ARIANE / LESTER / ARIAH.

fa’addebhou li (dresse-le pour moi)

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.

walking at night by myself (cancelled-covid19)

Walking at night by myself
Nancy Tam - crédits Nancy Tam

Vancouver based performance trio A Wake of Vultures (Nancy Tam, Daniel O’Shea and Conor Wylie) melds together highfalutin ideas and low-fi aesthetics in their new work, Walking at Night by Myself. They present a world of abstraction, distraction, and overlapping patterns through which we slowly examine the plasticity of human perception and open up to questions of how notions of familiarity, difference, and impressions are constructed. Featuring Nancy Tam and Anjela Magpantay, this work explores connections between movement, sonic, scenographic, and conceptual ideas with hypnotic repetitions, twin-like presentation, afterimage, and moiré to transcend the spectacular to the phenomenological; from seeing to experiencing.

real’s fiction\dissonant_pleasures

This dance is a song we sing in order to be together. The song is intentionally simple to open access to even the most musically-timid body. The song needs us to listen to each other, to be sung in search of a semitonal-policality; “how close can we come without consolidating into one-ness?.”

This room is listening to us speak. It captures our whispers and secrets and redistributes them elsewhere and close-by. This floor invites us to lie. This work is almost real. This world we are looking for is not for us.

camille : un rendez-vous au-delà du visuel

Camille : un rendez-vous au-dela du visuel
© Laurence Gagnon Lefebvre

In this immersive work that circumvents our sense of sight, audience members follow the protagonist through a landscape of emotions and memories in which the intimate becomes tangible. This multisensory experience, developed for a visually-impaired audience, is accessible to all; we are invited, directly and delicately, into a space of discovery and encounter. Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Audrey-Anne Bouchard has used her impairment as inspiration for developing a new artistic form. She brings together a reflection on the sensorial experience of dance, begun during her Master’s (Nice/Brussels), and the development of her practice as dramaturge.