Tag: Future Dances

ARTISTS
Freya Björg Olafson
Johnny Forever
Laura Taler
Lee Su-Feh
Margaret Dragu
Nova Bhattacharya
Ravyn Wngz
Ronnie Clarke

Dancemakers and FADO Performance Art Centre are teaming up in March 2025 for something we’re calling FUTURE DANCES. This is a speculative choreography project in which 8 artists have been tasked with creating a dance for 50 years into the future. We want to know, now, what dance might look like in 2074. What will happen to dance, choreography and stops in between over the next two generations. This is a thought experiment and a real exercise that considers what the role, purpose, form and potential of dance (as well as performance, choreography, movement, or adjacent and related forms such as performance art) might be at this critical convergence of the climate crisis, violent international conflicts and political upheaval.

Participating artists will present a range of responses—a short performance, written score, film, audio-recording, descriptive essay or something yet imagined.

FUTURE DANCES will be shared in-person at The Commons @ 401 on March 15, and afterwards on both the Dancemakers and FADO websites.

ABOUT DANCEMAKERS
Established in 1974, Dancemakers considers the context of how dance is presented. We support independent dance curators through innovative and customized presentation opportunities. By providing flexible and adaptable platforms, various dance practices can be shared with diverse audiences.

Romania/Canada
https://laurataler.ca/

Romanian-born Canadian artist Laura Taler began her career as a contemporary dance choreographer before turning her attention to filmmaking and visual art.  Throughout her career Taler has explored the links between movement, voice, memory, and history by using cinematic and choreographic devices to articulate how the body is able to carry the past without being oppressed by it. Her work has been praised for its unique combination of emotional resonance, wit, and striking visuals. Awards include a Gold Hugo (Chicago International Film Festival), the Best Experimental Documentary award (Hot Docs!, Toronto), Best of the Festival (Dance on Camera, New York), and the Dennis Tourbin Prize for New Performance (SAW, Ottawa). Her new public art audio work MONAHAN was awarded the 2024 Creative City Network of Canada’s Public Art Legacy Award.

Canada
https://www.novadance.ca/nova-bhattacharya

Nova Bhattacharya is an award-winning artist, cultural innovator, and unapologetic trailblazer based in Tkaronto. A Bengali-Canadian and Scarborough rocker with a rebellious edge, she draws on a kaleidoscope of influences to create vivid, genre-defying works that fuse technical mastery with raw, emotional resonance. Fearlessly reinterpreting traditions and reinventing rituals, Nova’s creations challenge expectations and celebrate community.

In 2008, she founded Nova Dance, a diversiform company dedicated to transcending perceived boundaries of form, technique, and culture. From intimate solos to large-scale spectacle, her work reflects a deep commitment to experimentation and inclusivity. Her current explorations navigate the intersections of Bharatanatyam, Butoh, and Burlesque while cultivating her latest creative obsession: a rock opera.

The pandemic brought unexpected silver linings, inspiring Nova to rediscover the totality of her practice. This period saw her embrace visual art, beading and film, expanding her artistic language and reaffirming the power of multidisciplinary storytelling. With an unwavering belief in art’s potential to bridge divides, Nova continues to challenge conventions and reimagine what dance—and community—can be.

Canada
https://www.freyaolafson.com/

Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, animation, motion capture, XR, painting, and performance. Olafson’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally at the Bauhaus Archiv (Berlin), SECCA – SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), LUDWIG museum (Budapest), and The National Arts Center (Ottawa). Olafson has benefitted from residencies, most notably through EMPAC – Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (New York), Oboro (Montreal), and Counterpulse (San Francisco). In spring 2020 Olafson was one of the long-list Sobey Art Award recipients through a nomination by Video Pool Media Arts Center and in July 2021 Olafson’s work MÆ- Motion Aftereffect was selected for the Lumen Prize for Art & Technology long-list. Olafson holds an MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute / Donau Universität. From 2017–2021, Olafson was Assistant Professor in Screendance within the Department of Dance at York University. Beginning in July 2021, Olafson joined the University of Manitoba School of Art as an Assistant Professor in Digital Media.

Lee Su-Feh (she/they) is a dancer, choreographer, performance-maker and teacher of voice and movement. She splits her time between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where she was born and raised; and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm(Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, where she makes her home. Over the past 35 years, she has created a provocative body of award-winning trans-disciplinary work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. As Artistic Director of battery opera performance, (“fearlessly iconoclastic”, “brainy and bawdy”), she has worked both alone and in collaboration with others. Alongside this trajectory in performance-making, she has pursued a lifelong study and practice of Chinese martial arts, Qigong and Daoism, all of which informs her approach to dance and movement. Since 2010, she has been a student and practitioner of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and is currently a certified Lead Trainer of the work. She is a member of the Advisory Group of the Fitzmaurice Institute and participates actively in the international community of Fitzmaurice Voicework® teachers. Some of her current preoccupations involve creating somatic algorithms, and exploring the relationship between voice and movement.

Canada
www.ronnieclarke.com

Ronnie Clarke is a movement and sound artist living and working in Toronto, Ontario. Her work blends elements of choreography, dance, movement, collaboration, video and installation. Clarke is interested in how language manifests, becomes translated and is mediated in the digital age. With an interest in the poetics of digital gestures, spaces and interfaces, she often uses movement to investigate how technology plays a role in our interactions with others. Recent projects include a commissioned public performance work for the Parkette Projects (Toronto, 2021) with Gallery TPW and a group exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin (2023/2024). She holds a BFA from The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

© Johnny Forever, 2023. Meet me at the woodshop.

Poland / Canada
www.johnnyforever.ca

Johnny Forever Nawracaj is a nonbinary Polish-born performance and media artist currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Drawing on personal experiences of labour and loss, their practice builds metaphors around the precarity of social structures. Combining queer femme tropes with construction materials, their most recent work explores the relationship between the labouring body and the built environment.

Over the last fifteen years, Forever has performed and shown work internationally at festivals,  galleries, museums and community spaces. They often collaborate with their partner, sound artist Gambletron, merging FM radio transmission with digital media to conjure surreal soundscapes, installations and performances. Forever’s work emerges from a dedication to research practice. They hold an MA in art history from Concordia University and an MFA from USC Roski School of Art and Design.    

© Margaret Dragu, NEW NORMAL an embodied novel: dusk 2 dark, 2019. Photo Henry Chan.

b. 1953, Canada
https://margaretdragu.com/

Margaret Dragu works in video, installation, web/analog publication & performance art. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist, and community-based practices, she has shown her work in Canada, USA and Europe. Dragu was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts (Canada Council for the Arts, 2012); the designation of Éminence Grise at the 7A*11D International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto. 2012); and in 2000, she was the first artist featured in FADO Performance Art Centre’s publication series, Canadian Performance Art Legends. Margaret celebrates 50+ years as a working artist. Her favourite art-making material is still the body despite or because of her bionic status as a grateful owner of two hip replacements.

Canada

Ravyn Wngz (Lead Choreographer/visionary/producer/Script Director), The Black Widow of Burlesque, is an Afro-Indigenous, 2Spirit, Queer and Transcendent multidisciplinary art maker, curator and empowerment storyteller. Her work is rooted in abolition and expressed through movement theatre, political education, cultural research, DEI consultancy, and many forms of disability justice. She is a Canadian Best Selling Author (Until We Are Free), received the Stratford Festival mid-career artist award in 2021, was named one of the Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada in 2021, and was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee 2021 with Black Lives Matter. Ravyn has lectured widely on topics such as abolition, art & activism, accessibility, LGBT inclusion, leadership, policy, and land-based informed policies at Deloitte Canada, University of Virginia Dept of Anthropology, UCLA School of Architecture and Urban design, McMaster University, University of Toronto School of Law Faculty, Faculty at the Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic School Board, and Canada’s National Ballet School.

© Ravyn Wngz, Jackie Shane, Who Am I?