Artists

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  Host Olivia C. Davies

  

  Host Olivia C. Davies

  Olivia C. Davies is a contemporary Indigenous artist who creates and collaborates across multiple platforms including choreography, creative writing, film, improvisation, and sound design. Davies’ body of work explores the emotional and political relationships between people and places, often investigating the body’s dynamic ability to transmit narrative, seeking to traverse boundaries and challenge social prejudice by conveying concepts and impressions that open different ways to experience the world.

  Her work has been presented in B.C., Alberta, Ontario and Quebec since 2011. She is the Artistic Director of O.Dela Arts, the Matriarchs Uprising Festival, and is a founding member of the Crow’s Nest Collective (Vancouver), MataDanze Collective (Toronto) and Circadia Indigena Arts Collective (Ottawa). She honours her mixed Anishinaabe, French Canadian, Finnish and Welsh heritage in her work.

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  Guest Aria Evans

  

  Guest Aria Evans

  Aria Evans is a queer, award winning interdisciplinary artist who’s practice spans dance; creation, performance and film. With a large-scale vision, collaboration is the departure point to their work created under their company POLITICAL MOVEMENT. Advocating for inclusion and the representation of diversity, Aria uses their artistic practice to question the ways we can coexist together. 

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  Guest Jeanette Kotowich

  

  Guest Jeanette Kotowich

  Originally from Treaty 4 territory Saskatchewan, Jeanette Kotowich creates work that reflects Nêhiyaw/Métis cosmology within Indigenous performance, Indigenous futurism and contemporary dance. Her creations have been presented at theatres and festivals across so-called Canada, including Kwê at Matriarchs Uprising and The Dance Centre’s Dance In Vancouver. Jeanette’s been creating a series of short experimental dance films during the pandemic. She has been an artist-in-residence at Raven Spirit Dance, NAC Indigenous Theatre, Shadbolt Centre and The Dance Centre. In the summer of 2020, she conducted land-based research in her home province of Saskatchewan, fusing interdisciplinary collaboration, decolonial practices and embodied research towards the creation of Kisiskâciwan.

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  Guest Samantha Sutherland

  

  Guest Samantha Sutherland

  Samantha Sutherland is a contemporary dance artist, choreographer, and teacher based in Tkaronto. Her ancestry is Ktunaxa and Scottish/British Settler. She graduated from the Arts Umbrella Dance Diploma Program in 2018. She has worked as a guest artist with Ballet BC and an associate artist with Red Sky Performance. Samantha has presented choreographic works in the Matriarchs Uprising Festival by O.Dela Arts, the Paprika Festival, and Sharing the Stage with the National Ballet of Canada. 

  Samantha explores what aspects of her culture, history, and traditional knowledge can be pulled into her contemporary dance practice. She questions how she can use a dance practice built with euro-centric training and still honour Indigenous values and the act of decolonization. She strives to keep what she values and loves about classical training and use it to tell the Indigenous story.

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  Guest Sophie Dow

  

  Guest Sophie Dow

  Treaty 1-born Sophie Dow is a multidisciplinary creative inspired by dance, music, film, collaboration and Métis-Assiniboine + settler/stranger roots. An avid adventurer, Sophie exudes passions for busking, yoga and travelling and holds a degree in Dance Performance and Choreography from York University. Sophie presently fulfills roles as creative director of PEC’s Flight Festival, artistic associate of O.Dela Arts & Chimera Dance Theatre, a musician with The Honeycomb Flyers, a licensed practitioner of Traditional Thai Massage and student of BreathWave. 

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