Simon Portigal
Artist
I’m Simon Portigal, a Montréal-based contemporary dance artist with a research-based choreographic practice. My work adopts a dense, multifaceted structure shaped by my lived experience as a queer, first-generation child of the internet and “third culture kid” raised overseas, as well as my academic training in post-modern Western concert dance. Through these lenses, I investigate the body’s entanglement with identity, borders, thresholds, movement, and digitality, drawing on references that range across 2SLGBTQIA+ and popular cultures, post-internet aesthetics, animation, reality television, cinema, and video games. I situate these influences within the broader choreographic histories and theoretical frameworks that shape my practice, asking how the body negotiates conflict, contradiction, and multiplicity — and how to move through the world at the intersection of cultural displacement, digital technology, and queerness.
I have a concurrent web and graphic design practice under the name of arthr.ca
Adaptation Project
Michael Trent’s response to choreographer Mitchell Rose’s 1974 Following Station Identification
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Apr 19, 2012 – Apr 29, 2012
Love Loss
In loveloss, Michael Trent mines personal experience, investigating the bodily affects of love and loss.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Feb 17, 2013 – Feb 24, 2013
Around
Celebrating Dancemakers 40th anniversary, this new work mines all the ways we encounter ourselves and others in our pursuit of being human.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Mar 26, 2014 – Apr 6, 2014
Hi-Fi: Rumschpringe
In response to Lo-Fi in 2012, Michael Trent has relinquished his fall season and handed it over, along with all the authority, to the resident company dancers.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Nov 18, 2013 – Nov 24, 2013
1976, have several
1976, have several by DANA MICHEL Over her first four weeks in residence, Dana Michel has worked with the artistic team at Dancemakers to revisit, transmit, and blow apart 1976 – making a group piece from the rubble.
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
Jan 28, 2015 – Jan 31, 2015