Studio Salon Series: Spring 2023
Our Studio Salon Series returns, featuring works in progress by four local artists. This event will be live at What Lab (#202-1814 Pandora St, Vancouver) on April 28 & 29, 2023 @ 5 PM, both evenings. In-person audience capacity is limited to 30 people.
VISIT EVENTBRITE FOR TICKETS AND MORE INFO
Friday, April 28, 2023 @ 5 PM:
VOLT24 (Alyssa Favero) with Justin Calvadores
Sophie Dow with Amanda Testini, Vitantonio Spinelli & Laura Reznek
*Join us for our AGM before the performances on Friday!*
Saturday, April 29, 2022 @ 5 PM:
Juan Villegas
Kristen Lewis
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
ALYSSA FAVERO is a queer multiracial dance artist currently based on unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. They are a dancer, choreographer, teacher, facilitator and artistic director of VOLT24. Alyssa is interested in dismantling hierarchal systems and using artistic exchange as a meeting point for transformation. This Spring has been a time of creative momentum for Alyssa. In January at The Dance Centre’s 12 Minutes Max they choreographed and performed a work in progress solo called Vibrate. Then in February at What Lab’s Exquisite Pressure went into the first phase of research for a duet with Audrey Sides and Anna Lamontagne. For Co.ERASGA’s Studio Salon Series they are ecstatic to be researching another chapter of their work with Justin Calvadores.
@volttwentyfour / @alyssafavero / alyssafavero.squarespace.com
VOLT24 will be sharing two works in progress SHIFT and Gigil at this Spring Studio Salon Series. SHIFT is a 15-minute dance theatre score birthed at What Lab's Exquisite Pressure II in February 2023. Gigil is a new solo collaborating with performer Justin Calvadores and sound designer Dino. Choreographer/artistic director Alyssa Favero will also been finishing the creation of their own solo Vibrate during this residency which premieres at Nextfest in June 2023. VOLT24 is incredibly grateful for the support of Co.ERASGA and is excited for the opportunity to share a gilmpse of the creative process with the public!
Gigil credits
Performer/Collaborator - Justin Calvadores
Sound Designer - Dino
Director/Choreographer - Alyssa Favero
Outside eye - Arash Khakpour
SHIFT credits
Performers/Collaborators - Audrey Sides & Lamont
Director/Choreographer - Alyssa Favero
Outside eye - Kate Franklin
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Treaty 1-born SOPHIE DOW is a multidisciplinary creative, inspired by dance, music, film, collaboration and Métis-Assiniboine + French/Ukrainian roots. An avid adventurer, Sophie exudes passions for busking, yoga and traveling on top of holding a degree in Dance Performance and Choreography from York University. Sophie presently fulfills roles as: a creative director of PEC’s Flight Festival, artistic associate of O.Dela Arts & Chimera Dance Theatre, musician with The Honeycomb Flyers, a licensed practitioner of Traditional Thai Massage, a trained facilitator & student of BreathWave, a freelance dancer/choreographer/sound designer and a puddle jumping trickster.
Sophie Dow on Facebook
Amanda Testini (she/her) is a performer, choreographer and director based on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. For more information visit www.amandatestini.com.
Vitantonio Spinelli is a performer and filmmaker based on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. He holds a degree in film and various accolades through his company: Vero Films. For more information visit www.vitantoniospinelli.com.
A self-professed observist and avid people-watcher, Laura Reznek’s music takes up issues of humans and humanity - spinning the ‘why’ of people and what we do through insightful lyrics, swelling chords, and poignant melodies. Although her classical training is apparent in her technique and arrangements, Reznek’s interest in perception is her guide in her upcoming project - a collaborative effort using the ‘found sounds’ of life that the rest of us take for granted. For more information visit www.laurareznek.com.
“Agrimony” is a new, cross-disciplinary performance, honing in on the choreography of Sophie Dow & composition by Laura Reznek. The show features a full-length album of live music on stage, while 4 dancers in paper-maché masks weave a layered, danced narrative around the musicians and in tandem with the content of the lyrics. After 3 years of dreaming + 2 residencies, we are excited to begin sharing excerpts as we lead up to the world premiere in early 2024.
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JUAN VILLEGAS is a Colombian-Canadian artist who works in dance, visual art, and video. He holds a degree in Contemporary Dance from Simon Fraser University and in Industrial Design from Emily Carr University. Juan is currently based in Vancouver, BC and has performed and toured throughout Canada. His choreography has been presented in Toronto, Saskatoon, and Vancouver. Juan is also a movement teacher both in the city and abroad.
This is a 20-minute contemporary dance piece with me as the solo performer. I have invited two other artists to work with me on this project; Vanessa Goodman as collaborator and choreographer and Scott Morgan AKA Loscil as composer. Vanessa and I are using my family story and ancestry to create movement. The story is about my Sephardic Jew ancestors who, following the Alhambra Edict of 1492 and the persecution of Jews by the Spanish Inquisition, sought refuge in Colombia, and eventually were forced to convert to Catholicism. These traumatic events inspired the title of the piece ‘Edictum’ which is Latin for order or command. Twenty years ago, after having experienced trauma myself, I left my family in Colombia for Canada, I was searching a better life for myself. My ancestors and I are centuries apart, yet we left our homes to find the ‘promise land’, intergenerational traumatic events that took different forms centuries apart. Through contemporary dance, I am exploring how I connect to that past, so I can also connect deeper to myself in the present and my hope is to inspire others to do the same.
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KRISTEN LEWIS, JD, LLM is a dance/performance artist, first and foremost, but also a movement educator, and legal advocate. In all of these overlapping and intersecting roles, she is interested in how embodied approaches to storytelling can open up information-saturated Human Persons to more nuanced, beautiful, peace-generating alternatives to the divisive narratives that govern our status quo. She is the artistic director of Gull Cry Dance, and the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Men and Families (Vancouver). Her current cycle of work unfolds between and through the never-ending dance of tension between opposites that forms the warp and weft of this reality we live in and that lives in us:
discipline and freedom;
focus and wide-open listening;
practice and surrender;
trying and letting go;
discovering and losing;
arriving and departing;
being born (continually) and dying (continually);
what is hidden and what is revealed.
These great pairs of opposites contain each other; each finds itself and hides itself in the face of the other. Currently, Kristen’s approach to dance is rooted in careful, ongoing observation of—and surrender to—the dance of these opposites.
Bounded Freedom: Explorations in Possibility and Limits
This work emerges from a long period of work and meditation on the ways confined space, from the womb to the prison cell, shape subjectivity, and on the possibilities for freedom that exist within conditions of extreme constraint. The work juxtaposes 1) the choreographic patterning of our “natural” conditioning, which takes root in the time spent in the confines of the womb with 2) the ways in which we relate to, are conditioned by, resist, submit to, and re-imagine “authority,” for instance as embodied in the legal institutions whose ultimate sign of power is, arguably, the prison cell.
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Thank you for your continued donation and support that helps Co.ERASGA’s annual arts programming and provides economic support to all participating artists.
We humbly acknowledge that most of Co. ERASGA's work, including the Studio Salon Series, takes place on the traditional and unceded lands of the Coast Salish people including the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations, the original stewards and caretakers of these lands.
Our Studio Salon Series is a recurring series featuring local artists sharing works-in-progress with the community in an informal setting.
These events are free to the public in an effort to create more communication between artists and the community while their works are still in development. After short excerpts are shown, the featured artists engage in conversation with the audience around the topics presented in the work, creation, and development.
What Lab is wheelchair accessible by a set of doors leading from the alley between Pandora St. And Franklin Ave. The front entrance has a flight of stairs.
