2018-2019 RESIDENT ARTISTS

Lara Kramer, Montréal, Quebec

Incoming Artist-in-Residence, Year 1 of 3

Lara Kramer is of mixed Oji-Cree and settler heritage, and a choreographer and performer whose work is intimately linked to her memory and Aboriginal roots. She received her BFA in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University, Mon­treal (2008). Working with strong visuals and narrative, her work pushes the strength and fragility of the human spirit. Lara’s work is political and potent, often examining political issues surrounding Canada and First Nations Peoples. She has been recognized as a Human Rights Advo­cate through the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.

Said The Globe and Mail, “Kramer is an aboriginal choreographer, but her works have universal resonance…  [she] is a talent to watch. She wears her heart on her sleeve, which translates into dance theatre that is as vulnerable as it is emotional.”

Lara’s works have included NGS (Native Girl Syndrome) (2013) which was met with critical acclaim across the country; her solo work Tame (2015) which she showed in its very nascent stage at Native Earth’s 2015 Weesageechak Begins to Dance Annual Festival of Indigenous Works; and, most recently, Windigo which was performed at Festival TransAmériques, Montréal in May 2018.

Lara will use her first Dancemakers’ residency year as a means to connect with family living in a Northern Ontario Indigenous community, and in the fall of 2018, she will create work in an installation format born of this familial research, showing it as a work-in-progress in late Novem­ber. 

Lee Su-Feh, Vancouver, Canada

Year 2 of 3 in Residency

Lee Su-Feh’s work deals with care on macro and micro levels of choreography and life. For the land it takes place on and the first peoples of that land; for the participants she works with, the audience members who enter - clear rules and boundaries set up an environment where a public can feel free to explore and engage with a work, knowing that the space is safe for doing so.

Credits include Children’s Theatre with Janet Pillai, traditional Malay and contemporary dance with Marion D’Cruz in Malaysia, contemporary dance with Lari Leong in Paris, contact improvisation with Peter Bingham in Vancouver; and many years of Chinese martial arts. Before arriving in Vancouver in 1988, she lived in Paris, London, Indonesia and Malaysia. In 1998, Su-Feh won the Prix de Jeune Auteur of the Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationales de Seine-St. Denis for her work Gecko Eats Fly. She has been nominated twice for a Jessie Award. In 2012, her solo work The Whole Beast won the BOH Cameronian Award for Outstanding Choreography in Malaysia. In recognition of her contribution to the dance milieu through her work as choreographer, dancer, teacher, and dramaturge, Su-Feh was awarded the Isadora Award (2013) and the Lola Award (2014) by Vancouver’s Dance Centre.

In her first 2017-2018 Residency year, Su-Feh connected with the Toronto community and began her research; Dancemakers also remounted her acclaimed installation work Dance Machine – called “A playful, yet also meditative experience.” Festival TransAmériques (2017)

A seasoned senior artist, Su-Feh works specific to the project and location, and next June she will create a new group work born from the relationships, connections, and curiosities that develop throughout her 2017-2018 residency. Dancemakers will also co-present her solo The Things I Carry in partnership with Theatre Passe Muraille, also next June.

Andrea Spaziani, Toronto, Canada

Year 3 of 3 in Residency

Andrea’s work is feminist and critical of the aestheticized female body, and it moves across poles like personal/political, vulnerable/powerful, didactic/impenetrable. She is interested in notions of the west as a colonial structure and as a global construct and precarity of the body.

Andrea Spaziani has been making dances in Toronto for the past eleven years. She generates choreographic scores by moving and talking at the same time in a stream of improvisation. Her movements and words col­lapse into each other, asserting a new kind of attention that distorts the familiar, and challenges perception. Andrea has collaborated with artists across disciplines, and attended workshops and residencies internationally, most recently at HEIMA in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. In 2016, she produced SPACEBODIES II for the Transart Triennale in Berlin, Germany as an experiment in choreography as curation, and in 2017 she co-founded the artist lecture series Archaeology of the Frivolous with Allen Ferguson in Marfa, Texas. Published texts include Nostalgia for the Hadron Collider (2012), www.lonedancer.ca (2014), Exiting, Re-Existing (2015), and Unbecoming Ego (2016). Andrea holds an MFA from The Transart Institute/ Plymouth University.

About her work, The Dance Current said, ”Andrea Spaziani generates a performance situation that holds itself open in its complexity, never indulging catharsis or didactic resolution… [Her] work stands with that of a generation of (mostly female) contemporary dance artists who desire and romanticize a post-dramatic context, rejecting performativity and institutionalized expectations of male choreographic gazes.”

Andrea’s residency to date has seen her present This Desiring Pony (December 2016) and Rafters (June 2017). In April 2017, her group work Silver Venus played as a work-in-progress to sell out houses and audience acclaim, and she brought this work to completion April 2018, again to sell-out houses and audience acclaim. During her 2018-19 Residency, she will develop a new solo born of research from Silver Venus.

Emerging Artists in Residence:

Francesca Chudnoff and Sofí Gudińo

Year 1 of 2 in Residency

Dancemakers Emerging Artist in Residence is a two-year position for artists on the precipice of establishing a career with a newfound maturity in their practice. 

Francesca Chudnoff

Francesca is a Toronto-based millennial, with a BFA in performance. She is a dance artist, illustrator, film maker, photographer, and collector of all things shiny. She began her contemporary dance training working as a company member at Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre. Francesca continued her studies Ryerson Theatre School while also working independently in street dance forms such as breaking, hip hop and house. After graduating, Francesca became Co-Assistant Director of Alias Dance Project until Spring 2017. She has presented her dance work at Dancematters, PS We Are All Here, Dancemakers' Flowchart, Wind Down Dance, and Fresh Blood. Her film work has been presented at Toronto Urban Film Festival, F-O-R-M, ArtSpin, On Common Ground Festival, Rhubarb Festival, Âjagemô - Canada Council for the Arts, and FFDN. Francesca is a member of the multidisciplinary art collective Lost is Found. 

Sofí Gudiño

Sofí is a choreographer and dancer who was raised in the flamenco tradition. She began dancing flamenco as a child, at the Academy of Spanish Dance, and draws from her roots in this form of movement as inspiration for her art. In 2014, Gudiño founded the Inamorata Dance Collective, a collaboration-based dance group with a strong focus on innovating flamenco arts for the contemporary stage. They have worked with over thirty artists in their four years as a collective, experimenting in flamenco’s intersections with film, technology, spoken word, opera, contemporary dance and theatre. From 2014 to 2016, Gudiño premiered a series of fifteen minute works at Too Queer: a Bisexual Visibility Cabaret, with a rotating cast of collaborators. In 2017, Inamorata premiered their full length work, Picaza, at the Toronto Fringe Festival, garnering an award nomination for Outstanding Contemporary Dance. Over the years, Gudiño has worked with the mentorship of Peggy Baker, Christopher House, Katherine Duncanson, Ame Henderson, and many others. Apart from her work with Inamorata, Gudiño has collaborated on flamenco fusion works extensively in both the commercial and fine art sectors. These collaborations have premiered at Nuit Blanche, World Pride, the New Blue Dance Festival, Nuit Rose and Next Stage Dance Festival.

Programming subject to change.