École de danse contemporaine de Montréal
Andrea Peña + Amara Barner + Meggie Cloutier-Hamel + Clémence Dinard
ÉDIFICE WILDER | Espace Orange
Live show
December 10-13, 2025 - 7pm
25$
-
Online show
Livestream
December 13, 2025 - 7pm
Prerecorded webcast
December 15-21, 2025
10/15$
Andrea Peña + Amara Barner + Meggie Cloutier-Hamel + Clémence Dinard
Danses d’hiver
L’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal presents the show entitled Danses d’hiver, featuring its second-year students. For the occasion, the students will be on stage with pieces by Andrea Peña and Amara Barner. Also, to showcase emerging talent, Meggie Cloutier-Hamel and Clémence Dinard, two artists who recently graduated from EDCM, will open the show by presenting excerpts from their choreographic work.
A Sentient Spiral by Amara Barner
The spiral is humanity’s most ancient and prophetic symbol. A turning inward to confront the self, a turn outward to reconnect with the whole. An eternal oscillation between order and chaos directing all living processes. Our mental and emotional patterns as humans move in circular pathways of memory and aspiration. Our solar system travels in spirals through the galaxy. Time is cyclical. The spiral, in three-dimensional form, is a shape held together by some measure of magic and law of continuation. The spiral represents the will to move forward, while also holding the memory of what once was, and the hope of what could be.
Chorus by Andrea Peña
This work weaves together two major AP&A creations: UAQUE, originally conceived for the National Arts Centre and Symphony, and Transmuted Symphony, commissioned by TanzKassel. By merging these two universes, the work explores the intersections of their questions across notions of collectivity, ritual and complexity in dialogue with our evolving relationship to the world in this urgent Anthropocene. In this hybrid landscape, the performers’ bodies, inspired by my Muisca Indigenous Colombian heritage, become vessels that move fluidly between the natural, the ethereal, and the physical. The choreography unfolds through communal actions and embodied rituals at times inspired by Colombian traditional dances, revealing our capacity to stand with and for one another, a value of my people. Through the dancers’ intensely physical and athletic vocabulary, movement becomes a form of insistence, a series of Poetries of Insistence that give voice to both individual and collective presence. Across the stage, vivid gestural frescoes materialize, forming layered landscapes that evoke multiple societies and pluriversal imaginaries. These living tableaux make space for many stories to coexist, overlap, and inform one another. Through these shared encounters, the work invites us to witness how shared vulnerability and insistence weave new forms of futurity, where the collective body becomes both a site of sustenance and a terrain of continual transformation.
Projet Pilote by Meggie Cloutier-Hamel
Projet Pilote is a solo choreographic piece that explores the symbolism of paper airplanes. Objects that bring us back to play, they become silent witnesses to a passage, an inner construction, a subtle link between the momentum of childhood and the maturity of the adult body.
Mercure Rétrograde by Clémence Dinard
Listen to your own rhythm, listen to others. Explore relationships, humanity, love. A single gesture, a single posture can be completely transformed when another body joins in, when another gaze, another piece of music changes its resonance.
Artistic and program direction Lisa Davies
Production manager Alice Renucci
Choreographies Amara Barner, Andrea Peña
Creation and performance advisor Anne Le Beau
Lighting design Stéphane Ménigot
Costume design Roxanne Bédard, Jonathan Saucier
Dancers Niko Alevizakis, Simon Armeni-Crowe, Simone Beck-Haviernick, Marie-Laure Bonneau, Agathe Bouydron, Colette Buttet, Marcela Calandria, Maude Carbonneau, Cloe Comstock, Samuel Duvall, Julia Gauthier, Maëlys Hardy, Julia Henry, Justine Heude, Oleksiy Kioresku, Vincent Lacasse, Béatrice Mathieu, Nora Paquet, Méliane Perreault, Eufémia Pongitore, Renaud Tremblay
Amara Barner is a BIPOC multidisciplinary artist from Minnesota, who currently resides in Montréal. As a teenager she traveled as an assistant to the choreographers of The PULSE on Tour, Intrigue Dance Intensive, as well as Emma Portner. Among these opportunities for professional development, Amara was granted opportunities to perform and teach at workshops in Australia, Mexico, England, and Italy. After moving to New York City at 16, Amara trained locally and worked commercially, such as dancing backup for Sia on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. At 18 years old, Barner was the youngest dancer ever hired for Montréal dance company RUBBERBAND. She performed and toured internationally with the company from 2016 to 2021 in the show Vic’s Mix, as well as the premiere and following international tours of Ever So Slightly. Amara went on to perform the work of artists such as Anne Plamondon, Dana Gingras/Animals of Distinction, and Elon Höglund/Tentacle Tribe. Barner’s versatility allows her to work in both the concert dance realm as well as the commercial circuit. She performed in the Québec version of The Masked Singer in seasons one and two, as well as in music videos such as La Force’s All That I Am, Aisha Bahdru’s Lazy River, Dominique Fils-Aimé’s Mind at Ease, and sickxsense’s Make Believe. Amara was featured in Dance Magazine’s July 2020 issue as an artist “On The Rise”, and has also been interviewed for the podcast Artistic Roots and the digital magazine Black Lights. Amara presented her first multidisciplinary solo entitled mongrel in 2021 and later adapted it for gallery exhibition in 2022, and finally premiered a stage version in 2024 at Tangente’s LABdiff 2. She also won the Emerging Artist prize from Festival Quartiers Danses in 2023 for her multidisciplinary work The Songbird Dreams of Singing. Amara is currently a faculty member at USA dance conventions Intrigue Dance Intensive and Luminous. She is also a contemporary dance instructor at Danse à la Carte, where she shares her personally developed movement practice, Soft Chaos.
Originating from Bogota, Colombia, and having honed her practice in the territory of Tiohti:áke, Montréal, Andrea Peña is a prolific Latinx artist who has built international renown as a designer, choreographer and director of the multidisciplinary company AP&A (Andrea Peña & Artists). With a background in design and fashion, Andrea is a definitively multifaceted visionary who works seamlessly across mediums. Rooted in extensive research and choreographic knowledge, she creates unique living universes that unify bodies and materials in performative, digital and sculptural environments. Andrea’s artistic rigor has been recognized by numerous awards, including the BalletBC Choreographer Award 2024, whilst in 2023 she was the winner of the first international La Biennale di Venezia dance co-production. Complex, vulnerable and raw, her work has been commissioned by TanzKassel, National Arts Centre, Centre PHI, SAT, and Ballet Edmonton. She has presented work at prestigious institutions and festivals across the world, including Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Mattress Factory Museum Pittsburg, Tanz Bremen, tanzmesse, Theatre Freiburg, Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting, Attakkalari India Biennial, Milano Festival, Hong Kong International Choreography Festival, Festival Internacional de Danza de la Ciudad de México, Prisma Festival Panama, AADK Spain, and IONION Arts Center Greece, to name but a few.
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