Nina Willywonka Chati + Tia Ashley Kushniruk

Nina Chati, also known as Willywonka, is a French dancer and choreographer rooted in street dance for over 15 years. Born into a Franco-Algerian family, she first discovered dance at family gatherings through non-codified traditional forms from Western Algeria, then through hip hop in 90s and 2000s music videos. A graduate of the Juste Debout School (Paris, 2016), she has collaborated with Bruce Ykanji, Nasty, Princess Madoki and Mel Charlot, and has performed in campaigns for brands such as Lancôme, Sony, and Caval. In 2019, she joined RedSauce, an all-female hip-hop company made up of women from diverse cultural backgrounds. Since relocating to Montréal in 2022, she has developed her first solo, IN NA, focused on gender identity (touring with Futur Danse), followed by Mon corps le sait, a solo exploring bodily memories of migration. She currently performs in Créatura by Forward Movement.

Maucina Soné is a self-taught French music composer born in Paris. Rooted in hip-hop culture and raised in a culturally rich family, he blends cinematic textures and emotional soundscapes to create a singular musical universe. Guided by instinct, his compositions break boundaries, fusing genres and rhythms to channel raw energy. Since 2022, he has been developing the musical score for IN NA, a solo dance piece based in Montréal. In 2024, he became co-director of DreamBallad Agency, a production and distribution company based in France, where he continues to support emerging artistic voices through original and boundary-pushing sound design.

Joanna Gourdin is a set designer for theatre, dance, and events. A graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada, she also studied visual arts, spatial design, and theatre studies in Paris. She designed the set for Catastrophe et autres dramatiques cultes at Monument-National in 2020, co-founded the collective Les Déferlantistes in Rivière-du-Loup, and collaborated with Multicolor for the Bridgerton Queen’s Ball in 2021. Her approach blends sculpture, props, immersive atmospheres, and visual poetry. For her, theatre is a sacred springboard that shelters dreams.

Mecdy Jean-Pierre, aka Mystic Rootz, is a Montréal-based choreographer and performer of Haitian descent, active in the dance scene for over 15 years. Specializing in popping and contemporary dance, he blends Afro-American influences, drumming, mantras and meditation to craft a grounded, therapeutic and deeply rhythmic dance practice. An international representative of Canada, he has been a mentor and pillar of the Montréal dance community since 2005. He has collaborated with Cirque du Soleil, Tentacle Tribe and Blueprint Dance Company, and appeared in films such as Step Up All In and Sur le rythme. His powerful style weaves together breath, geometry, and a philosophy of movement.

Tiffanie Boffa is a lighting designer, scenographer, and performer. She works to create sensorial and visual atmospheres informed by her background as a contemporary dancer. As a lighting designer, she collaborated with multiple artists in theatre, dance and the performing arts, like Gabrielle Lessard, Guillermina Kerwin, Jon Lachlan Stewart, Hanna Sybille Müller, Simon Renaud, La Tresse, Véronique Giasson, Marie Béland, 100Lux, the company We All Fall Down, and Sébastien Provencher.

Born from a Franco-Algerian and Franco-Polish heritage, I grew up in a silent in-between, where family history remained fragmented. The body became my language, my field of investigation, where memory takes shape beyond words.

Shaped by modeling, I initially inhabited a stylized, frozen body-object, excluded from normative standards. This solo starts in that Eurocentric catwalk cage and unfolds toward an instinctive, emancipated physicality, where the pelvis comes alive as the centre of my cultural heritage.

Popping, rooted in the black living experience of the US, is my tool for survival and expression. I weave my own tensions there, blending control and release, funk and raï (gasbaray, allaoui, passed down through my family).

I do not represent a single culture. Rather, I explore the blurred zones between memory, heritage, gaze, and belonging.

Tia Ashley Kushniruk (亚 女弟) is a queer Chinese-Ukrainian dance artist based in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) Treaty 6/Métis Territory of Edmonton, AB. She creates performative fantasies grounded in theories of interculturalism, new materialism, digital futures and individual mythos by weaving dance, buffoon, performance art, physical theatre and text with collaborative engagements based in devised methodologies. She has had the pleasure of performing the works of Antony Hamilton (CHUNKY MOVE), Celia J. Green, Heidi Strauss (adelheid), Christopher House, Shay Kuebler (SK/Radical System Art), Rock Bottom Movement, Christianne Ullmark, and Susannah Haight. Her work has been presented by Festival Internacional Nomada, the Beijing International Dance Festival, Dancing on the Edge, Fluid Festival, Common Ground Festival, Found Festival, and Mile Zero. She is a 2023 EATF recipient, a mentee of Toronto-based performance artist Bridget Moser, and holds an MA in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Toronto (2025).

Philip Jonah Logan Geller (they/them|he/him) is a Jewish (Ashkenazi) and Red River Michif (Métis) artist, educator and scholar who is focused on decolonizing their process by listening to and dialoguing with ancestral and cultural knowledge. As a storyteller, they have worked across Turtle Island as an actor, director, dramaturg, producer, clown, creator and community worker with companies, including Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Native Earth Performing Arts, Stratford Festival, Centre for Indigenous Theatre, Theatre YES, and Citadel Theatre. They hold a BFA in Acting (University of Alberta) and an MFA in Directing (York University).

Trent Crosby is an Edmonton-based artist and arts enabler with a specialty in activating non-traditional performance spaces. A graduate of Grant MacEwan’s Theatre Production program and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Trent has spent the last 15 years as a lighting designer, production manager, technical director, and entertainment programmer.

Erin Hayes is thrilled to be working with Tia Kushniruk and Trent Crosby again on Make Me Cry. She is a graduate of the BFA in Technical Theatre Stage Management program at the University of Alberta and has been herding cats professionally since 2017. Erin is a dresser,  stage manager and arts administrator based in Alberta. She has a passion for paperwork and supporting artists through her work. Some of her previous credits include The Candidate/The Party, The Color Purple, 9 to 5: The Musical (Citadel Theatre, apprentice stage manager); Christmas Carol, The Three Musketeers, Sound of Music, Goblin Macbeth, Legally Blonde (Citadel Theatre, dresser); Legally Blonde (Theatre Calgary, wigs team).

Claudia Kulay (she/they) is a queer and francophone playwright, producer and multidisciplinary performance artist based in Amiskwaciwaskahikan, colonially known as Edmonton, AB. At the centre of their practice is a curiosity for cross-disciplinary collaboration and utilizing philosophies of surrealism and clown as driving forces for creation. Select works include Headhole (Found Festival, 2025; Edmonton International Fringe Festival, 2023), The Hubble Space Telescope Dance (Expanse Festival, 2025; Nextfest, 2024), GOOD GRIEF (Nextfest, 2023) and happy now (New Works Festival, 2020). Their play happy now is the 2020 winner of The Wildfire National Playwriting Competition as supported by the Major Matt Mason Collective.

Max Hanic is a queer Amiskwaciwâskahikan-raised dancer, actor, singer and instructor who graduated with distinction from the University of Alberta Fine Arts Acting program, studied contemporary dance at La Faktoria Choreographic Centre in Pamplona (Spain) for the 2021-2022 period and at Modus Operandi in Vancouver in 2024-2025. Max has been given training scholarships by EDAM (Vancouver), The Good Women Dance Collective (Edmonton) and Circuit-Est (Montréal), as well as trained at Tic Tac Art Centre (Brussels), Espacio Tiempo (Madrid), and the One Body One Career Countertechnique intensive (Amsterdam). He has performed with the Edmonton Opera, Firefly Theatre and Circus, Amoris Projects, Catch the Keys Productions and in his own choreographies. as well as worked with choreographers Molly Mcdermott, Francesca Frewer, Lin Snelling, Alexis Fletcher, Minggao Zhang, Susanna Hood, Jennifer Mcleish-Lewis, and more.  His solo piece premiered at Mile Zero Dance in 2025.

Make Me Cry is a solo piece in response to the idea of a work that I have never seen. In 2023, I encountered an advertisement for the show make banana cry by Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson, a durational fashion show that parades around progressively more exaggerated East-Asian stereotypes.

Now, what caught me off guard was not the minstrelsy being shown, but rather the horrifying realization that this is what is expected of other Canadian artists who are East-Asian: the reproduction of a palatable stereotype that reinforces and politely rejects the pervading culture of whiteness we live within. With all of this in mind, I set about creating a work that interrogated East-Asian diasporic identity politics from my own positionality: a working class queer female mixed-race Albertan.

This work is proudly Albertan. Embedded deep in its bone marrow, icy expanses, isolated remarks and almost-American contradictory beliefs, Make Me Cry inevitably becomes a hypocritical ouroboros desperately asking how we may be complicated and loved when it’s easier to be simple and venerated?