Justine A. Chambers

Justine A. Chambers (she/her) is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals and theatres nationally and internationally. She holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, is currently Assistant Professor in Dance at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre. Chambers is August Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Laurie Young

Laurie Young is a Berlin based Canadian dance artist who focuses on the embodiment of unauthorised histories and their representation and how relationships are choreographed between human and other than human beings in the theatre, museum and city. Young embraces an expanded notion of choreography as a way of observing organisational patterns between bodies, of framing or revealing hierarchies. She has been working in transdisciplinary projects across the fields of dance studies, sensory ethnography and archival practices. Her artistic development continues to evolve, informed increasingly by the politics of the diasporic body, its archival liveliness and its choreography.

Her career as a dancer saw her working with many international choreographers including Sasha Waltz, Meg Stuart, Benoit Lachambre, Eszter Salomon, Nasser Martin Gousset and Hannah Hegenscheidt. Young (with Justine A. Chambers) was named Visiting Dance artist of the National Arts Centre and she was the 2019-2020 recipient of the Tanzpraxis scholarship of the Senatverwaltung für Kultur und Europa. She was also a multiple recipient of “Arts and Science and Motion” fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation. Her work has been presented at the Sophiensaele, Martin Gropius Bau, The Australian Museum, National Arts Centre, The Field Museum, Agora de la danse amongst others. She is currently studying embodied activism in a social justice context. Young is a certified Trauma/Tension Release Exercise (TRE) provider.

Victoria Cheong

Victoria Cheong is a Toronto-based artist working in music, video and performance. She produces and performs electronic music as New Chance. Her work in music also includes DJing, remixing, and a long time collaborative practice in contemporary dance. Recent projects include composing for Aisha Sasha John’s Diana Ross Dream, producing with Picastro’s Liz Hysen and musical collaboration with reggae legend Willi Williams. In 2023, New Chance released an art edition mantra record, Peaceful Mind (Personal Records) and in 2021 she released her full-length LP, Real Time (We Are Time). She is currently developing new modes of personal musical practice as part of a Canada Council-funded research project on the ancient Greek philosophical concept of The Metakosmia.

Emese Csornai

Emese Csornai is a Berlin-based Hungarian artist. She built her practice of dynamic lighting in part by translating filmic and graphic gestures to stage. She has a strong interest in the ongoing examination of colors and the physiology of their perception. Csornai is part of a lighting designer collective formed around Buda, Kortrijk, and participates in the 4-year research project Reflecting Light (2020-25) in the framework of KASK, Gent. She is co-facilitating a Happynest mentorship project of the Superamas. Her recent lighting work is in collaboration with the stage works of Justine A. Chambers, Tale Dolven, Padmini Chettur, and others.

Sarah Doucet

Sarah Doucet is an artist with a career spanning contemporary dance, choreography, rehearsal direction and jewelry design, and for the past decade, costume design and styling, with a strong focus on intimacy coordinating. Her costume work includes projects such as L-E-A-K by Sara Porter (2023), LEAP (of faith) at TOAF (2023), and Juliet and Romeo with Decidedly Jazz (2017), one of 6 full length shows with DJD (Calgary). Sarah has collaborated with artists including Christopher House, Amanda Acorn, Propeller Dance (Ottawa), Animals of Distinction (MTL), Toronto Dance Theatre and Jenn Goodwin, to name a few, bringing a thoughtful and creative approach to each project. With over 30 years of experience in the arts, she continues to explore new ways to merge design and performance in her work.

Neda Sanai

Neda Sanai is an Iranian Berlin-based artist born 1985 in Sweden. Their praxis moves through a hybrid of mediums such as audio, video, performance and sculpture. Usually canalized through the idea of the collective work and the community as a starting off point, Sanai in their work aims to dissemble the “I” –as in one person and the idea of “One”–as in one person to a “We” –as in understanding.

Sanai comes form a background working collectively as an artist in the group Basso and is the founder and curatorial director of the project space S&yM in Berlin.