Samantha Sutherland + Charo Foo Tai Wei

Samantha Sutherland is a contemporary dance artist, choreographer, and teacher based in Tkaronto. Her ancestry is Ktunaxa and Scottish. She grew up on Coast Salish Territories and graduated from the Arts Umbrella Graduate Program in 2018.  Samantha has been choreographing dance works since 2021 and has had the pleasure of presenting in festivals across Turtle Island, including the Matriarchs Uprising Festival by O.Dela Arts with presentations both in Vancouver and at the National Arts Centre, Sharing the Stage with The National Ballet of Canada, Night Shift by Fall for Dance North, Dance Made in Canada, and Weesageechak Begins to Dance. Recently, Samantha premiered her first ensemble work naⱡa at the Citadel Spring Mix festival in Toronto. She has performed in dance works by Indigenous choreographers Alejandro Ronceria and Jera Wolfe. She is currently a guest teacher at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre and an Artistic Associate with O.Dela Arts.

Jeff Sutherland (Ktunaxa name kawisqa kiǂq̓aǂǂi, Standing Elk) is an Indigenous musician based out of Vancouver and a founding member of Flint & Smoke, a rock ‘n’ roll band. His sister Samantha and he enjoy collaborating by combining their artistic talents and mediums. The blues is Jeff’s true musical passion. Thumping R&B beats remind him of the pow wow songs with which he grew up. Apart from music, Jeff is an associate commercial banker at TD Bank in their Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Business Banking. He is also an amateur Lego artist, and a lover of science and the humanities.

Emerson Kafarowski (she/they) is a lighting designer and multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto. A graduate of the Toronto Metropolitan University School of Performance Design and Production program, they’ve worked on projects and performances in dance, theatre, opera, and live music. Dedicated to life-long learning, Emerson gravitates towards projects that explore the intricacies of different human experiences, in which voices of the past and present are uplifted. In addition to lighting design, Emerson is a skilled ETC lighting programmer, as well as a technical director and touring production manager, travelling across Canada, the U.S.A, and Europe. She has had the pleasure of working with and designing for many inspiring artists and companies, including BoucharDanse, Citadel + Compagnie, Fall For Dance North, MOCA Toronto, Naishi Wang, Soulpepper Theatre Company, Toronto Dance Theatre, and Venusfest.

slip away is a solo I created to share how I have felt along my journey of learning the Ktunaxa language. It has been a wonderful experience, but also a very scary and difficult one. There are very few fluent Ktunaxa speakers, and many are Elders. When we lose an Elder, we are also losing traditional knowledge of our language and culture.

At times, learning Ktunaxa feels like a race against time. I feel a sense of urgency to learn the language faster than it is disappearing. All of this is an effort to keep Ktunaxa alive.

Trained in Chinese classical dance, Charo Foo Tai Wei attended L’École de danse de Québec for contemporary dance studies. From 2007 to 2013, she acted, danced and choreographed in Robert Lepage’s The Blue Dragon (Ex Machina). In 2015, she discovered butoh with Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Atsushi Takenouchi, and Yumiko Yoshioka. Fascinated by the quest to explore one’s trauma with organic movements, she intertwines classical Chinese dance and butoh to develop her own choreographic language. Her work Jin Gu Bang (The Golden Stick Ritual) was selected for the CanAsian Dance Festival 2019, which was co-presented by Tangente and Festival Accès Asie. In recent years, she has collaborated with Jérôme Bel, Sarah Dell’Ava, Stephanie Fromentin, Brice Noeser, Amrita Choudhury, and Liliane St-Arnaud. Recently, she made her first Stratford Festival appearances as a dancer and actor in Salesman in China and Wendy and Peter Pan.

David Blouin is a sound designer and sound engineer. His practice could be characterized as “sculptural sound environment.” The use of the live sound and other pre-recorded sources (field recordings or music) are the primary matter of his work, not to mention the importance of the creative way of using sound system reinforcement, spatialization, and processing. He has collaborated and toured around the world with Dimitris Papaioannou, Fritz company Bigi/Paoletti, and others. He has also diversified to other creative and technical specialties such as special props design.

Julie Pichette is a multidisciplinary artist who works in the fields of dance, visual arts, and scenographic costumes. She graduated from L’École de danse de Québec and completed a master’s degree in visual arts in creation in 2011. Her work is oriented towards solo choreographic creation from the costumes and landscapes she conceives and crafts. She has been perfecting her butoh Japanese dance techniques with masters since 1995, Bharatanatyam in Chennai since 2003 (Shobana Bhalchandra), and in Montréal with Sattvika Danse since 2008. A teacher and creator at Entr’actes for more than 25 years, a choreographer and a performer, she participates in various artistic events, often tinged with butoh (Québec, France, Italy, Germany, India).

Born in New York, Dulcinée Langfelder studied dance with Paul Sanasardo, theatre with Eugenio Barba and Yoshi Oida, and mime with Étienne Decroux. She learned animation by making flip books, and she learned to sing in the streets of Paris. In 1978, she came to Montréal to join the Omnibus troupe, with whom she worked until 1982, and then briefly with Carbone 14. She has to her credit about 20 choreographies for theatre, musicals, television, and cinema. She founded her company in Montréal in 1985, creating multidisciplinary/multimedia works that have toured extensively: Vicious Circle (1985), The Lady Next Door (1989), Hockey O.K.? (1991), Portrait of a Woman with Suitcase (1994), Victoria (1999), Dulcinea’s Lament (2008), Pillow Talk, an essay on dreaming (2013), and Cheek to Cheek; love with a capital C (2020). Her works, performed in several languages, have won the hearts and minds of many, as well as various awards. Throughout her career, she creates choreographies that question the multiple perceptions of the body and mind, and that encourage the inner force of the individual, mutual understanding, and tolerance between people. Her diversity of talents, her socio-satiric sense and the inspiration she brought to the artistic milieu earned her the honour of being named Personality of the Year by the Montréal newspaper La Presse in 1990. In 2022, she was inducted into the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec.

My bodywork research is inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Garden of Delights, and the teachings of Kazuo Ohno spiritually support my artistic process.

The roots of trees greatly nourish my creative process. Their sinuosity offers numerous possibilities for experimenting with different sensory textures. These resonances engage all the body’s senses. As the exploratory work progressed, different tableaux emerged and were placed in an order for the piece. Despite the different layers of emotion uncovered during the creative process, it remains desirable for the creation to remain raw so as to respect the trauma (e.g., shock, pain, bitterness), which I cling to every day.

Whenever resistance arises, it’s a difficult struggle, but ways have been found to use sound to overcome it. We continue to find the balance between intuitive, organic, and choreographic movements.