Studio Salon Series: Spring 2026
Studio Salon Series: Spring 2026
Our Studio Salon Series returns, featuring works-in-progress by three local artists.
April 29th, 2026 @ 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 Wednesday April 29th, 2026 @ 5 PM. In-person audience capacity is limited to 40 people.
TICKETS: ZEFFY
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Kay Huang (she/her) is a choreographer, educator, dance artist based in Vancouver, on the traditional, unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She danced professionally with Karen Jamieson Dance from 1987 to 1996 and has been choreographing her own works since 1992. Kay’s choreography explores themes of cultural identity, social justice, and personal narrative. Her creative practice often incorporates interdisciplinary elements, including photography, digital projections, spoken text, and set design, to create layered and immersive experiences.
Photo credit: Dayna Szyndrowski
Website: crossmaneuver
Instagram: @crossmaneuver
https://www.facebook.com/share/1SpdXauZo7/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Facebook: Crossmaneuver
About the work:
This project will use The Salon Series as a period of embodied research and inquiry as the beginning of an interdisciplinary dance work inspired by the Chinese character 基 (ji), the final character of my Chinese name, meaning foundation. This work completes a triptych that began with Yellow and Girl Under, which explored identity, memory, and belonging through solo performance. 基 shifts this investigation into collective territory—toward the shared, negotiated, and often fragile foundations we build with others. The research phase centers on the body as a site of architectural, cultural, and spiritual knowledge. As a dance artist, I am interested in how bodies carry belief systems, inherited values, and cultural memory, and how these are revealed through proximity, weight-sharing, voice, and spatial negotiation. Collaboratively, I will engage in research-based improvisations with 3 to 4 dancers (including myself): Yuha Tomita, Sophia Makarenko, Kaili Che, and Clara Xu (to be confirmed). Each performer brings a distinct cultural and spiritual lens that resonates with, and diverges from, my own. Through movement, voice, and conversation, we will research themes of group-think, compromise, conflict, inheritance, and deviation—how individual choices influence collective outcomes, and what happens when foundations fracture. This phase includes exploratory work with voice and sound under the guidance of Artistic Facilitator Vanessa Goodman, researching choral structures, breath, harmonies, dissonance, and spoken text as architectural elements.
Simran Sachar is a choreographer, dancer, teacher, writer, and actor who currently dedicates time to their artistic practice in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. A captivating anomaly in contemporary, commercial, and street dance, her work, rooted in her lineage and lived experiences, bends W*acking towards the grotesque and the spiritual, using rhythm to carry what endures. She works across TV/film, theatre, XR, and public art. Recent highlights include co-choreographing Today is the evening to strike lightning (Indian Summer Festival, 2025), co-directing These hands are still at work (Surrey Art Gallery), premiering her XR film The Edge of The Underworld (2024), and her live work ACT TWENTY FIVE. Her films BETA बेटा and LUNACY have screened nationally, with LUNACY earning an Audience Choice Award.
Photo credit: Marshall To
Website: www.simransachar.ca
IG: @simziez
About the work:
"Everything that comes to the light." A practice of staying true to not knowing.
Contemporary dance artist, certified Laban Movement Analyst and somatic movement educator Helen Walkley (she/her) has, since 1980, lived and worked extensively in the Netherlands, Germany and the U.S. creating, performing and teaching. She completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts in 1996 and has since been based in Vancouver. Most recently Helen was the recipient of The Dance Centre’s Isadora Award which recognizes an artist’s outstanding contribution to dance in British Columbia and in 2022 she received the Lola McLaughlin Legacy Award.
Photo credit: Chris Randle
Website: https://www.helenwalkley.com
About the work:
It was temperate. - What is the distance between me and you and you don't need to make that decision right now or an ode to Rosie: to hover. This is the first phase of research towards the creation of a solo.
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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.
