Studio Salon Series: Fall 2025
Studio Salon Series: Fall 2025
Our Studio Salon Series returns, featuring works-in-progress by three local artists.
November 1st, 2025 @ 5:00PM
What Lab
1814 Pandora St
Vancouver BC, V5L 1M5
Our Studio Salon Series returns, featuring works in progress by three local artists. This event will be live at What Lab (#202-1814 Pandora St, Vancouver) on Saturday November 1st, 2025 @ 5 PM. In-person audience capacity is limited to 40 people.
TICKETS: ZEFFY
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Vidya Kotamraju (She/Her) is a dance artist, emerging choreographer, and educator based on the unceded territories of the MST (Vancouver). She is the founder of House of Indian Dance, a platform for teaching and developing culturally rooted movement practice. Her choreography reimagines Bharata Natyam for contemporary audiences, blending classical rigor with global music, storytelling, and emotionally charged performance. Her work has been presented at the Vancouver International Dance Festival, Diwali in BC, and The Dance Centre among others. She is a former Artist-in-Residence at The Dance Centre and a recipient of the Shade of Hope Award.
Photo credit: Erik Zennstrom
IG: @vidyakotamraju
FB: vidyakotamraju
About the work:
She Was Here
What dissolves when a woman becomes a wife? Identity fragments. Boundaries blur. She Was Here confronts the erasure of self within marriage, where pieces of a woman are quietly surrendered to expectation, duty, guilt, and shame, both internal and imposed.
Presented as a work-in-progress, this is the second in a trilogy exploring identity, migration, and resilience through Bharata Natyam and its contemporary expression.
Salome Nieto (She/Her) is recognized for her transformative works and powerful performances. Her individual artistic expression is shaped by butoh, the cultural blending of Mexico, and intersectional feminism. Her artistic journey has been significantly marked by her three-decade collaboration with Kokoro Dance, where she is now Associate Artistic Director. Nieto's solo works have been presented in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua, Thailand, and the US. In 2017, she received the Vancouver International Dance Festival Choreographic Award, recognizing her contributions to contemporary dance as a solo artist. In 2023, Nieto completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at the SCA at SFU.
Photo credit: Donna Hagerman
IG: @kokoro_dance, @mariasalomenieto
About the work:
Methuselah is an experimental butoh opera that will bring together an ensemble of dancers and singers/musicians to create a unique blend of Butoh dance, sound design, music composition, and vocal performance, with the Monarch Butterfly as the flagship species to highlight urgent issues related to climate change and social injustices that drive natural and forced migration. Research for this work began in 2024 thanks to the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. This twenty-minute duet featuring collaborators, Salome Nieto and Jami Reimer, is the first iteration of the work, and it will be showcased at the 9th International Butoh Festival in Amsterdam on October 3, 2025.
Ysadora Dias (She/Her/Ela) is a Brazilian emerging artist based in so-called Vancouver, whose cultural background informs every aspect of her artistic practice, shaping how she moves, creates, and connects with community. Since moving to Vancouver, she has collaborated with many artists and toured with MascallDance across Canada and New Zealand. Ysa has also performed with Coastal City Ballet, Amok Project, Co. Erasga, Inverso Productions, Raven Spirit Dance, and Action at a Distance. In 2024, she presented her first solo work, Raiz, through the Re-Centering Margins Residency. Through her practice, she explores cultural and ancestral memory, guided by a deep curiosity about how what we carry from our ancestors continues to shape the way we move through the world.
Photo credit: Rashi Sethi
IG: @ysadoradiass
About the work:
This choreographic exploration investigates movement as migration, lineage, and collective becoming. It reflects on how ancestral memory lives in the body, inviting us to reimagine the connection between our bodies and histories through the tenderness, resistance, and flight of our ancestors, while honoring what endures through our dances and rhythms and what continues to transform across time, space, and memory.
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ACCESSIBILITY
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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
