Archives des Alliance — MAI | Montréal, arts interculturels

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

lynn kodeih

Lynn Kodeih is the recipient of the Verticale — centre d’artistes (VCA)+MAI Joint Support Program 2023-2025. Lynn Kodeih will be part of VCA’s 2023-2025 programming, 𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒋𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒐𝒊𝒓𝒆, 𝒂𝒎é𝒏𝒂𝒈𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒆𝒕 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒖𝒔 𝒍𝒐𝒄𝒊.

Lynn Kodeih was born in Beirut and has lived in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal since 2020. Her work focuses on the politics of the image and explores notions of space, borders, itinerancy, and belonging in a colonial and postcolonial world. Her art practice interweaves autotheory, video, and installation. Kodeih has a bachelor’s degree in literary studies and a DES and master’s degree in theatre and performance (Beirut, Lebanon). Her work has been presented in several international group exhibitions, including at the Kunstbanken Performance Festival (Norway), the Rotterdam Film Festival (Netherlands), Transart Triennial (Berlin, Germany), as well as Home Works – Ashkal Alwan, Beirut Art Center, and Beirut Art Fair (Lebanon).

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

roberto santaguida

Since completing his studies in film production at Concordia University, Roberto Santaguida’s films and videos have been shown at more than 400 international festivals, including Tampere Film Festival (Finland), CPH: DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Denmark), Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil (Brazil), Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival (United States), Transmediale (Germany), and Message to Man (Russia). He has also taken part in artist residencies in numerous countries, including Iran, Romania, Germany, Norway, and Australia. Roberto is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.

Summary:

I will investigate Methods of Coping — the techniques and processes implemented by artists who are facing personal challenges. I will engage in a form of cooperative dialogue with the consultants, based on asking and answering questions to draw out underlying ideas. An area of interest I will be examining with the group is the idea of bearing witness to one’s subterranean forces instead of attempting to ignore and hide from them.

Photo credit: Yasemin Ergin

cai glover

Cai Glover is the recipient of the CAM+MAI Joint Support Fellowship 2023-2024.

This work will investigate our expressions of movement as they are tasked with turning the complicit actions of spacial language, the mastery of gesture, into the trance of a dancing body. The research will see us manipulate language to pass from the literal to the abstract and back again. What does the word “identity” look like in my signed hand? And now what does it look like in my dancing body? Is there somewhere in between where I might recognize an identity that feels authentic? Here we apply the science of discerning the way one body makes another body feel as we reorient the subject and object to be in a constant relation devoid of the violence of identity marking that removes the “other”. The creation is here situated in the politics of disability and in passing through the creative act, procures an aesthetics of disability. A decentering of a body that is itself already off-centre.

Bio:

In an ever-going discovery and study of dance, Cai Glover has been training, performing and creating in the art form for over 25 years. From 2012 to 2022 Cai was working as a dance interpreter and choreographer for Cas Public and has been a part of 8 creations for the company. Most recently Cai has been developing his expression in poetry and a language of movement putting the dancing body to task in a search of an embodied expression of poetics through the transposition of language into movement under the name of his company, A Fichu Turning.

Photo credit: Sasha Onyshenko

élise ross-nadié

Élise Ross-Nadié is passionate about the links, nexuses and intersections between digital cultures, power and dreams. She also has a marked interest in free software, knowledge decolonization and Afrofuturism. She has had the privilege of bringing her stories and hybrid projects to over fifteen countries. Her experiences have yielded all manner of artifacts: Wikipedia articles, a guide to identifying wild roses, close friendships, an amazing literary tour, a collective work between Canada and Cuba, a collection of feminist texts and numerous dance sessions.

Élise seeks to depart from her usual routine to explore science fiction as a prefigurative tool in the context of a literary project. In a two-part novel—with the first one dealing with the crisis brought on by the excesses of the capitalist political-economic system and the second reflecting on reconstruction—she sets out to follow a group of activists of colour both before and during the crisis, and then in the new reality.

Through alternating between the two sections, a dynamic and non-linear narrative is created during which the audience wavers between moments of dismay, suffering and questioning, and moments of inspiration, hope and renewal. This narrative strategy highlights the paradox of change, which involves destructive and painful questioning, but also makes dreams possible.

Photo : Selena Phillips-Boyle

marwan sekkat

Marwan Sekkat is a Franco-Moroccan interdisciplinary artist living in Quebec. Simulation, the living, subversion, the erroneous and the absurd are at the heart of his practice. Although digital technology is not central to his work, it serves as an ideal ally and tool for questioning our (his) contemporary world. His preferred mediums therefore range from installation to rap, simulation, virtual reality, glitch, VJing, subversion and the creation of real-time visuals. His recent projects involve setting up installations that explore notions of time, modernity and progress. Just as a video game provides us with a simulation of reality, he attempts to create a simulacra of what is real by concealing the digital using techniques such as cabinetmaking, textile work or botany. Fascinated by what is experimental, he hopes his works might provide a moment of sensibility to the public.

Transmission is a summary of his research-creation work around themes of intimacy and intra-familial transmission. By contrasting his artistic practice with traditional Moroccan craft practices, Marwan seeks to question and deconstruct his relationship with his identity. These works explore intergenerational transmission, cultural heritage and the notion of leaving a trace.

Website : marwansekkat.art
Photo credit: Taken during a Jano Lapin residency by Chris Mackenzie

gabriela jovian-mazon

As a child, Gabriela Jovian-Mazon started with Mexican folklore dance in her hometown town Mississauga, Ontario and competed in jazz, ballet and musical theatre dance. When she moved to Montréal to study, she discovered street dance and transitioned towards hip-hop, house, and break and now specializes in whacking. Fascinated by the different dance styles, she trained on her own to pursue a dance career after completing her Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering. She has since performed for commercials, music videos, theatre, musicals and festivals. She also loves the battle scene and was a finalist at the 2021 Creative Boost battle at Place des Arts.

Her work as a choreographer is characterized as quirky, theatrical and funky and is proof of her diversified training. In 2020, Gabriela choreographed for MOON an outdoor digital art installation for the city of Montreal. She also completed #dailygabyj, where she created 365 dance videos between 30 – 60 seconds. In 2021, she presented her first short dance video ‘Playtime’ for Bouge d’Ici and co-choreographed ‘Seul.e.s Ensemble: Club Edition’ as part of the Montreal Fringe Festival.

In her work, she explores mental health and the representation of self with the use of space and objects through characters, humour, storytelling and the dance style whacking. Gabriela is an original, versatile and theatrical emerging artist, and she is excited to continue discovering the world of creation.

INNOCENCE

Innocence is a whacking dance short film project, inspired by board games and ‘murder mystery’ films. It aims to highlight the story-telling, drama and individuality of the characters of Whacking, a late 1960s club-culture style inspired by the Golden Age of Hollywood, cartoons and disco music.

My research explores character interaction and narration through whacking and creating a live game, where dancers and audience members follow rules to find out who is ‘the culprit’. As in a game of chess, each character has their way of moving, and their mannerisms, actions, poses and whacks. There’s tension, drama and a bit of humour.

In 2022, in collaboration with up to 7 dancers, I created a 2-minute dance video, presented a 3-minute piece at Articien and a 15-minute piece at the Art-fullness Whacking Festival on this same theme. Through Alliance, Innocence will benefit from mentorships in vernacular jazz, mime and filmmaking techniques to enrich my whacking and choreographic practice for this project. This support provides access to the desired level of skill and artistry to bring this film to life.

Credit photo: David Jouary

sonia reboul

Sonia Reboul is a French-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. For for 12 years, she has developed a body of self-taught art alongside a career in Communications. In 2019, she will begin a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University to further perfect her skills. Since then, her artistic projects have multiplied: she has won three university scholarships selected for residencies and exhibitions at the Centre d’art Jacques-et-Michel-Auger (Carré 150), La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Art Matters, Art Souterrain, Galerie VAV, Nouaisons, Université de Montréal. His drawings have been selected for several initiatives, including the COVID collection organized by Sale Caractère, l’Organe magazine. Various blogs (Jano Lapin, Yellow Pad Sessions, The Unicorn Factory, The Soul Food).

Project description

Dialogues stem from the exploration of traditional weaving techniques with fine metal chains sourced from second-hand costume jewellery.

These pieces of jewellery have undergone a transformation akin to a ritual tribute to the people who wore them: first washed, dried and then dismantled, the links are reassembled into chains classified by size and colour, then woven to form small rectangular samples.

These chains, which have already had a first life, symbolize multiple personal histories and the diversity of human bonds. The dialogue between materials illustrates the complexity of relationships, fluctuating between flexibility and rigidity, strength and fragility, preciousness and banality. The slippery and elusive nature of the chain emphasizes the subtleties of human interaction. Beyond the ornamental, Dialogues conjures a metaphorical chain mail armour, evoking social interactions in times of confinement. Crafted from inexpensive jewellery, the work questions the value of human bonds in the context of disposable consumer culture, highlighting neglected social and ecological aspects. The piece also has a social and local dimension, as the materials were sourced from Le Chaînon store, whose mandate has been to help women in difficulty since its inception in 1932. In all, over $400 worth of jewellery was purchased from the welfare association.

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This project was presented in a solo exhibition at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse and the Creative Re-use: Ø Waste C.R.Ø.W group exhibition. It was supported by the Fine Arts Student Alliance Grant from Concordia University.

Project status:

To date, a first series of samples has been completed, representing a woven surface area of 3,780cm2 (the equivalent of a 62cm by 62cm patchwork quilt).

My ultimate goal would be to weave a surface area totalling 124cm x 180cm, to be able to assemble them into a large quilt. This would require six times as much material as I currently have in stock. I’d also like to make a full-body cast to serve as a support for the quilt.

More on Dialogues: https://soniareboul.com/Dialogues

Credit photo: Sonia Reboul