Drawn Below | Ashley Mae Johnston
I realize my body tightens with anger when I think about what society has done to women. Water rising inside my chest, my head floating away from myself. I am linear. I am rigid. Pulsing energy is contained just outside my body. It is stuck. Drawn Below is a practice and experiment of leaning into the pulse and feeling the waves inside me.
The ocean is a terrifying, yet beautiful place.
Credits:
- Choreographer & Performer: Ashley Mae Johnston 미리
- Light Design: Calum Maunier
- Original music composed and performed by: Karl Hirzer
- Dramaturg: Barbara England
- Special thanks to Deirdre Young, Somatic Therapeutic Facilitator
- This project was made possible by the DJD Creative Residency program and the University of Calgary Dance Alumni Choreographic Residency program
Urge | Molly McDermott
An Urge. A duet with a jacket, or maybe a ghost. Playing with gesture, instinct, and physical memory, revealing what lives in the body and what might be passed on to it. The jacket dances, conjuring up images of a ghost or the fragments left behind by someone no longer with us. Together both jacket and performer explore shadows, darkness and absurdity. The two merge and separate allowing both the surreal and distinctly human to appear simultaneously. An oddly specific physicality is shared between the garment and the body wearing it.
Credits:
- Choreographer/performer: Molly McDermott
- Sound designer: Will Scott and music by DakhaBrakha (Vesna and Oy Za Lisochkom)
- Lighting designer: Even Gilchrist
- Outside eye: Alison Kause
- Funders: Canada Council for the Arts, Edmonton Arts Council
Rock Me Real | Sylvie Moquin
Born in the space between exhaustion and resolve as I transitioned into motherhood, I felt the invisible work of becoming where identity unraveled, days blurred into nights, and my body was asked to hold all.
A lived and very real response to my daughter’s presence in the studio, my creative process became a dual act of caregiving and artmaking. Her presence reshaped the work—not as interruption, but as integration. The mental load, fractured sense of self, sleeplessness, and often-unspoken complexities of loneliness, rediscovery, and sacrifice, are all that I cradle in this moment.
Through bold, raw, and physically demanding movement, I trace the terrain of grief and its counterpoint of joy, of depletion and resilience, of solitude and renewal. At times motherhood felt isolating, at times luminous; these contradictions live in every gesture, pressed into the body, held in motion.
This is not a story of resolution. It is a continuation. A soft defiance. An offering to those who have carried much and yet continue—a dance that insists on presence, care, and being continually remade in motion.
Credits:
- Concept & Choreography: Sylvie Moquin
- Performer/Creator: Sylvie Moquin
- Lighting Designer: Calum Maunier
- Music: TBD
- Costume & Stage Design: Sylvie Moquin
- Creative Mentor: Karen Kaeja
- Outside Eyes: Rufi Oswaldo, Mike Czuba, Catherine Hayward
- Supported by: Dancers’ Studio West through the Research LAB and the Special Creative Residency 2024, DJD Creative Residency Program and Evolved Movements Arts.
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