Meggie Cloutier-Hamel + Shirley Gibbs + Glamour Magique + Kluane Peabody + Dahlia Rue Waller

Meggie Cloutier-Hamel first studied at École supérieure de ballet du Québec before continuing her training at École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. She has also refined her practice by participating in intensives in Québec and Europe. Upon completing her studies in 2023, she began working as a dance performer with ZemmourBallet, Grand Poney, and choreographers Béatrice Larrivée, Amélie Duguay, and Marie Lambin-Gagnon. As an emerging choreographer, Meggie took part in the ATLAS – create your dance trails program at the ImPulsTanz festival, where she began developing her first solo Entre mes yeux et ma tête. The piece was later presented as part of the Boomerang – Danses partagées residency, at Festival de danse contemporaine de Sherbrooke, and Festival Vue sur la Relève. She then created her second solo, Projet Pilote, which is featured in the 2025 edition of Danses Buissonnières. She is an artist committed to bridging different art forms and making dance accessible to all.

Gabrielle Martin is a performer and composer based in Montréal. She divides her practice between multidisciplinary creation, contemporary musical composition, film music/sound creation for visual media, and orchestral double bass performance (Orchestre symphonique de la Côte-Nord, Orchestre Fidelio, among others).
She also participates in creative and well-being projects, taking on supportive creative roles, notably as an assistant director alongside Pascal Lefebvre, and as a facilitator for the creative workshops at Espace Transition, in partnership with the Orchestre de l’Agora. Gabrielle maintains a multidisciplinary vision of artistic practice, also working as a graphic designer and social media manager.

The creation of this project was conceived as a trial period, hence the name Projet Pilote. The airplanes only truly landed in the studio after a title had been found for the process. They became the core of my explorations, serving both as play partners and elements of scenography. I became interested in their function, their architecture, and the imprint they leave on our collective memory. I played with manipulating them: controlling them with my hands, my feet, or balancing them on different parts of my body. I immersed myself in the innocence and wonder of a child discovering a new object. I sought to become an airplane, to embrace its movement. From this research emerged a series of images inhabited by fluid, fragmented, and suspended states of the body.

My collaboration with musician and composer Gabrielle Martin supports this proposition. The soundscapes, resonating with my movements, blend concrete sounds, voice, synthesizers and acoustic instruments, all digitally processed.

Shirley Gibbs is a multidisciplinary Franco-Afro-American artist of Central African descent who explores social identities and dives into marginal experiences. Her artistic journey began as a rhythmic gymnast. She later moved to France to study electrical engineering, sound and image processing. Over the years she has explored different approaches to movement through painting, circus, ballet, and contemporary dance. In 2024, during the BIG BANG program, she found a space to deepen the art of movement and to develop several multidisciplinary works, including Absurdité des origines and Organic Revolt.

My father is Afro-American. I have always struggled to accept that heritage because it holds so much pain. The “Afro” in “Afro-American,” the “Gibbs” in Shirley, is a painful bond, a social label that states “descendant of slaves,” a constant reminder of slavery and being stolen from a homeland. I often avoided saying I was Afro-American; why keep the label when we are no longer African? But I guess the real reason was because it hurts to say out loud.

This piece is to proudly hold this heritage, learn to love it and see its beauty despite the pain. By wearing these long braids, I explore the weight of the past and see how it shapes our present. Yet beyond exploring those tensions, through this piece I was looking for self-acceptance and love – ways to reclaim my identity despite generational baggage and social constructs.

Christian Brun del Re is constantly changing his mind. He lets himself be surprised by dance, physical theatre, butoh, life drawing, percussion, and slowness. His path is a constellation of practices and encounters in continuous metamorphosis. He grows alongside his many allies: Glamour Magique, the collective fuit.es, la société mousse, Infinite Parachute and the Grotesque. Together, they weave unruly, queer, ritualistic and radical forms of art. Christian works from the body as a site of knowledge, memory and contradiction, exploring vulnerability, humor, and ecstasy. He stands on the shoulders of so many people to whom he owes gifts he can never repay: mentors, friends, strangers. He looks for ways of dancing that are free rather than performs. He is currently pursuing an individualized master’s at Concordia and slips between academic and experimental stages.

Rafa Tremblay-van Zuiden is a creative impulse in motion. Everything they touch becomes a playground: dance, DIY costumes, scenography, collages, music… They never do things halfway; whatever the medium, they dive in completely. Their path is eclectic: studies in biology, an obsession with mushrooms and birds, followed by a detour into the world of circus arts. Currently pursuing a Master’s in Dance at UQAM, Rafa explores the meeting point between the moving body and costume, where clothing becomes an extension, a metamorphosis, and a form of resistance. Alongside their research, they work as the student life coordinator in the dance department, and co-founded SYMBIOSE!, a laboratory for dance, experimental music and immersive installations born from a deep belief in the radical power of collective play. With Christian Brun del Re, Rafa forms Glamour Magique, a post-queer psychomagical performance duo oscillating between the ridiculous, the erotic, and the sacred.

In our Glamour Magique performances, we’ve long embraced the slow, the ritualistic, and a deep connection to our costumes and materials. But in our personal lives, another force takes ove: wild, spontaneous, driven by the constant need to perform for one another. This project emerged from the desire to bring that untamed side of our relationship to the stage. It all began by turning our twisted humour into music: we created a series of strange, mutant pop tracks. In the dance studio, we embody the characters of these songs. We touch, surprise, climb on each other, and find ourselves in improbable postures. Through imitation, transformation, and contamination, we compose short phrases that we teach one another. The process spills over from the studio; every moment together becomes an opportunity to push our silliness even further.

Kluane Peabody (born in 1999) is a Montréal-based dancer and multidisciplinary creator with roots in British Columbia. A 2023 graduate of Modus Operandi, she trained under Tiffany Tregarthen, David Raymond, Kate Franklin and Maiko Miyauchi, performing works by renowned choreographers and receiving the BC Arts Council Excellence Scholarship. In 2022, she joined Winter Guests/Alan Lucien Øyen as a lead role in Story, Story, Die and has since toured extensively with the company. Alongside performance, Kluane creates her own work, pursues further training, and fosters a multidisciplinary practice. Her choreography is theatrical, exploring power, tenderness, myth, and relationship. She is fascinated by instinct, using movement to explore patterns of interaction with the self, the collective, and the other. Raised in Nelson, BC by a practicing artist and dedicated wilderness educator, Kluane maintains a deep relationship with nature that informs her creative work.

CAROUSEL began with a question: what does it mean to be vulnerable on stage? As both dancer and choreographer, I’m fascinated by the space between performance and instinct, between choosing the way I am perceived and being taken over by something subconscious, sensory.

This work is an attempt to inhabit two parts of myself: the stylized, curated performer and the animal body beneath. Inspired by music icons, surrealist film and the messiness of feeling, CAROUSEL is a personal call to presence. I move through set movements, emotional landscapes and physical states, exploring the tension between control and chaos in rhythm, image, and sensation. This solo invites the audience into a layered world; one of fantasy, privacy, and transformation. At its core, this work is an inquiry into identity, exploring what it means to search for the self in a complex and multifaceted landscape.