Outreach
Building alliances to create closer ties by engaging the community through education, feedback and moral support.
Public Outreach
We assess the impact of our programming through feedback from our many interactive and creative exchanges with the community at home and on tour.
Artistic presentations, special projects, dialogue sessions and workshops allow us to interact with youth, adults, seniors, professionals and the general public. Through these activities, we build alliances with loyal individuals that follow our artistic aspirations to create closer ties by engaging them through attendance, education, feedback and moral support.
By supporting and developing partnership with artists, institutions and other communities, we are continually learning different ways to access more opportunities for audience development, understanding and locating different populations and weighing the pros and cons of harnessing changing and growing audiences.
EXchanges Series Program
An artist exchange program supporting the local dance community in its pursuit of artistic excellence by engaging with other Canadian and/or international dance artists outside of Vancouver that are contributing to the milieu.
In the development of EXchanges over several years, we have brought artists to share their professional practice through public talks and workshops to exchange ideas with the community at large.
These events are for professional and non-professional artists.
We host these events free of cost to remove financial barriers to participation.
To date the following professional dance artists have facilitated, engaged and participated in the EXchanges series:
2006-2008 – Andrea Nann, Peter Chin, Lydia Wagerer
2009 – Martin Inthamousu (Uruguay)
2011 – Risa Steinbergh (USA), Sarah Chase (B.C.)
2012 – Rafaele Giovanola (Germany)
2013 – Peggy Baker (Toronto)
2014 – Didik Nini Thowork (Indonesia), Pichet Klunchun (Thailand)
2016 – Hiroaki Umeda (Japan)
2018 – Gabriel Dharmoo (Montreal)
2019 – Hari Krishnan (Toronto)
2020 – Mamerto Lagitan Tindongan (Philippines)
2021 – Session 1: Alvin Collantes (Berlin); Session 2: Zab Maboungou (Montreal)
2022 – Alvin Collantes (Berlin)
Community
StudioProcess is an interactive community dialogue about dance and its processes between Co.ERASGA, our artists and our audiences. Often held in informal and studio settings, it provides the public with an opportunity to talk to performers in person, to study the workings of a dance company up close, and to view work in research and development both at home and internationally on occasion.
InterProcess supports the training and development within the professional and non-professional dance community with activities that include discourse, building creative dance projects, and mentoring and hiring apprentice dancers. This provides free access to the discourse of art as well as physical dance work for non-professionals, youth and seniors to promote a wider scope of public participation.
Our Youth & Senior Outreach, a series of free dance classes for youth and seniors, is offered regularly in our yearly programming through our partnership with other organizations and schools- this initiative is also extended while on tour, especially to developing countries in South Asia. Co.ERASGA reserves special $5 tickets for youth 18 and under for many of our self-produced presentations; part of our advocacy for the development of youth audiences to be exposed to contemporary dance.
MigARTion Project
The Arts among the Migrants: Towards a Critical and Creative Empathy in Collaborative Art Making. This project was initiated by Co.ERASGA originally in partnership with Migrante BC (a community-based organization committed to the protection and promotion of the rights and welfare of Filipino immigrants and migrant workers in British Columbia, Canada).
MigARTion aims to create a critical and creative space where professional artists and the Filipino community, along with other migrant workers, and their families create art together. The artistic partners will carry out various phases of creative exchanges. The project starts with community-based research where the community participants and the artists come together to set up a shared environment of planning, integration and eventual execution of the project.
This process will give critical agency among the participants allowing their distinct voices to emerge within a space and atmosphere of free will, joyous participation and critical public engagement. The mobilization of MigARTion project is spearheaded by Co.ERASGA artistic director, choreographer/dancer Alvin E. Tolentino who has worked on this project since 2017; theatre director Dennis Gupa; revered, music and opera trained/singer Jeremiah Carag, with poet/writer Karla Comanda, Christopher Nazaire and visual artist Bert Monterona.
These are Filipino-Canadian artists whose contributions to the arts community are built around inclusive and decolonizing global art practice rooted in Philippine and Asian themes, issues and spiritualities. Their arts will be integrated to approach a series of learning and experiential exchanges within a collective process.
In this initiative, the artists and the migrant participants work together in exploring artistic practices and will integrate critical and empathic discussions on settler colonialism, history of migration, arts and the migrants and indigenous ways of knowing and being. We believe that this critical and empathic process of artistic integration between the artists and the participants is necessary among the Asian and Filipino-Canadian communities across Canada.
In the past, the Filipino-Canadian community had experienced divided political ideologies and intercultural misunderstanding that caused community and ancestral disintegration. Most recently also the growing rise of racism within the Asian community due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been alarming and disturbing. Our Asian migrant community needs to build a strong belonging and collective empowerment. We envision engaging art practices through (dancing, writing, singing and acting) as a social intervention to marginalization and intercultural alienation and a process that nurtures the everyday practice of criticality and empathy. Eventually, we wish to explore how we can fully reflect the notion of informed participation within the diverse and growing cultural, political and social landscape in Canadian communities.
“[EXchanges] took us inside out and let me feel my body…lots of layers were shed.”
— Dose of Pleasure participant