As summer bursts into life, the Fund’s season also blooms with new artistic creations. Let’s cheer these artists on as they take big artistic leaps. Let’s be fans of each other and show up ready for delight and a challenge. Let's find our summer art crushes and fall into sweet summer love.
First up: Luminato Festival’s Industry Series! We’re a curatorial partner on this series and three Fund-supported projects are in the pitch session. I’ll be there to cheer on Leslie Ting, Alexis Spieldenner, and Rebecca Lazier (who recently received the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Choreography. YES!!!). Anicée Lejeune, the Fund’s communication strategist, just published an interview with Alexis about Kimiko’s Pearl, the piece she will be pitching. Click here to read more about the rich multigenerational history of this new ballet.
Second: It’s National AccessAbility Week! To celebrate, I’d like to share some of the adventures that our intrepid trio of disability curators are up to outside of their collaborations with the Fund. Shay Erlich is seeding two exciting initiatives: Pushmakers, a wheelchair dance coalition and Ready for Access, a disability experience firm offering training, consulting and co-design (including disability dramaturgy). Syrus Marcus Ware is completing a residency on Fogo Island, where he’s continuing his activist portrait series, this time in collaboration with his mom. After a stroke interrupted the creation of her latest aerial show, Erin Clark is re-writing her aerial dance show into a from-bed-instead show – literally putting a bed on the stage and delivering the text from there while projecting films from when she previously performed the aerial parts. And stay tuned for updates around how the Fund supports accessible performances in the coming months!
Lastly: We have two new investments to share! Both are gorgeous pieces that weave elements from the natural world into works of art. Here’s the scoop.
Créatures
L'eau du bain
The latest creation from Outaouais’s L’eau du bain, Créatures features eleven artists - girls and women aged between 5 and 72, from all different backgrounds - who meet in a flooded theatre.
“A celebration of sisterhood, its shadowy zones and its complexity, Créatures brings together eleven performers from different artistic and geographical territories. Taking refuge in a leaky theatre, they confront catastrophe to thwart it in a thousand playful ways, using the power of imagination and dissent to open up horizons of hope.”
– Anne-Marie Ouellet, Director
“By opting for an all-female cast, the creative team immediately recognized the need to consider, in writing the show, ways to short-circuit any essentialist or binary vision that might result from this approach. Créatures focuses less on the gender of this group of people than on how, in the course of their forced cohabitation, they invent ways of being together that are sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, but always challenging assigned roles.”
– Émilie Martz-Kuhn, Dramaturg
Alongside their collaborators, Nancy Bussières, Anne-Marie Ouellet and Thomas Sinou bring their sensorially-driven practice to the medium of water, diving deep into its aesthetic and dramaturgical possibilities and refining a feminist creation methodology.
Kiuryaq
Akpik Theatre and Theaturtle
Kiuryaq is an immersive circumpolar experience that explores the power and mystery of the northern lights. It’s being created through a rich collaboration between circumpolar communities of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from Northern Canada, Greenland, and Sápmi.
“People born and raised in the north are immersed by the northern lights, and there is a lot of cosmology and story in them that inspires us. In the making of Kiuryaq, we reached out to Elders, story keepers and 'Aurora hunters' and discovered that these stories overlap all across the circumpolar north, including Northwest Territories to Greenland to Sápmi."
– Reneltta Arluk, Co-Producer, Co-Creator and Co-Director
“Akpik Theatre and Theaturtle have commissioned new music from composer Carmen Braden and original visuals of the northern lights from filmmaker Davis Heslep. Solar activity this year and next is creating a generational opportunity to view the lights, and their immense presence is energizing our artistic team.”
– Alon Nashman, Co-Producer and Co-Creator
Our investment is helping sustain the team’s land-based creation practice, facilitating experimentation with immersive projection, and enabling the development of a scalable version of the piece that can tour to performance sites both in the circumpolar region and in the south. Keep an eye out for it in 2025!
What new artistic creations are you looking forward to this summer?
