Amelia Ehrhardt
Curator
a. portia ehrhardt (amelia) is a dancer, astrologer, and multidisciplinary artist from and living in Toronto. Their work manifests as solo dance improvisation, group choreography, drawing, painting, and writing, all of which deal with dance as subject matter, drive, and devotion. Their work has been supported across Canada and internationally, including OFFTA (Montréal), SEAD (Austria), Mile Zero Dance (Edmonton), and local residencies at Harbourfront Centre and Toronto Dance Theatre. A dancer with two decades of performance experience, Amelia has appeared in works by Susie Burpee, Willi Dorner, Syrus Marcus Ware, Julia Sasso, Menaka Thakkar, and Suzy Lake among others.
Amelia was the Curator of Dancemakers Centre for Creation from 2015-2019. At Dancemakers they founded the Dance Wrtiers in Residence program, a collaboration with The Dance Current; the Peer Learning Network support program for emerging artists; taught highly sought-after adult beginner contemporary dance class; was recognized for driving the programming towards a more multisciplinary and inclusive lens; and at best guess, worked with close to 200 different artists.
Amelia is also the founder of Flowchart: a Series of performance, and of Queer Ballet Club. They were a 2017 danceWEB recipient and a 2016 Toronto Arts Council Leadership Lab fellow. Amelia holds a Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto where they were an SSHRC recipient.
Curatorial Statement
My artistic vision is rooted in acting as a site for a multiplicity of aesthetics and ways of understanding dance, and artists who are deeply curious, working through dance to investigate essential questions of the form. I program artists who do not hold a prescriptive view of how they choreograph or what dance is, who challenge the formal boundaries of dance (or refine them), and who engage in research-based forms of practice. I work predominantly with artists in contemporary dance or contemporary expressions of a diversity of forms.
I am committed to risk. I believe that by creating space and time for artists to safely question and clarify their practices, the field and audiences for contemporary dance will benefit. By creating a culture of more confident, more literate, more practiced artists in this form, and programming to connect these artists with interested publics, I aim to connect these artists with publics who are equally confident, literate, and curious about the potentialities of dance in all its expressions.
