:ACT 2
:ACT 2 was Arts Assembly's second annual fundraiser, our primary fundraiser to support our programming is curated by Alanna Ho for sound and Sasha Kleinplatz for movement. This year's line up features Brady Ciel Marks, Only A Visitor, grand am, Ileana Cheladyn, Daisy Thompson, with a screening by Sydney Southam and DJ sets by Gabi Dao and teku teku. With incredible raffle prizes from Big Joy Barber and Salon, Savio Volpe, Osmics, Pazzo Chow, Lucky's, Cartems Donuts, Plenty + Spare, Gilmour Clothing. Pallet Coffee Roasters, Federal Store, Dance House, OR Gallery Book Store, Faculty Brewing and more!
Alanna Ho
Alanna Ho is an educator and performer based in Vancouver combining deep play, new media, and community engagement. Her current research is protest through play; toy hacking; generative memory; performances regarding liquids; and combining new media with alternative early education.
She has performed/exhibited at Gaffa (Sydney, AU), The Western Front, The New Media Gallery, Big Joy Experimental Music Festival, Tidal~Signal festival, The Anvil Theatre, Digital Carnival at the Richmond World Festival, VIVO Media Arts Centre, The Greater Art Gallery of Victoria, Centre A, Richmond Art Gallery and the SFU Audain Gallery.
As a freelance educator, she is passionate about engaging a welcoming creative space for children to immerse into with an experimental approach. Currently she leads workshops for the New Westminster New Media Gallery, bridging elementary school aged children with contemporary new media art; integrating sound design with Burnaby North Secondary School (Music and Technology program) through the Western Front, Vancouver; and facilitating play sessions in a variety of spaces.
Alanna is the founder of the Rainbow Forecast Project, a non-profit art and community initiative. The project aims to share children’s stories, spirit and generate contemporary art discussions by constructing their own creative ideas into larger scale works.
Sasha kleinplatz
Sasha Kleinplatz is a contemporary dance choreographer living and working in Vancouver. Since graduating from Concordia University she has developed and choreographed a total of 15 works involving some 40 interpreters and other artistic collaborators. Sasha has shown her work in Montreal at Usine C, Espace Tangente, Theatre d’Aujourd’hui, 5ieme Salle, and Studio 303. Her choreographies have also been shown at Kinetic Studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia, The Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival, and at the Fredericton Playhouse in New Brunswick.
Along with partner Andrew Tay, Sasha created Wants&Needs Danse, a company that seeks to bring contemporary dance to a greater variety of audiences, and to find innovative approaches and venues for presenting dance. Together they created the Piss in the Pool, Short&Sweet, and Involved performance series.
Sasha debuted her new full length choreography Chorus II at the Montreal, Arts Interculturels in April 2013.
Sydney Southam
Sydney Southam is a filmmaker, performance artist, and professional pole dancer. She often works with archival 16mm film, exploring themes of nostalgia, death, memory, and identity. Her current work explores the backstage and domestic lives of exotic dancers and how their private and professional lives are defined through ideas of Feminism, objectification, power, and love. Sydney is one of the founding members of Vancouver-based Iris Film Collective, and the curator of the potluck dinner and artist talk series Special Sunday Supper. Her films and artwork have shown across Canada, Europe and Asia, notably at MOCA Taipei and Gabriel Rolt Galerie (Amsterdam). She graduated from Central Saint Martins with a BA Fine Art First Class Honours in 2011 and from the University of Toronto with a BA in English, Philosophy and Cinema Studies in 2007.
Brady Ciel Marks
Brady Ciel Marks is media artist working with Sound, Light and Kinetics. She holds a M.Sc. in Interactive Arts from Simon Fraser University, with an emphasis on Generative Soundscape Composition, and a B.Sc.(Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She has defined her own role as that of “Cultural Prototyper”, in which the working out and trying out of new cultural configurations are matched, supported or opposed with technological apparatuses (Performance Interfaces, Installation & Performance Systems). In this role she works against the idea that technology determines culture, showing how they are co-created. Her projects have toured international in Europe, Asia and the Americas. She has presented artist talks at the Luminato Festival (Toronto), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich) and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She has served as an external examiner at SFU and guest lecturer guest lectured in Film Department, at SIAT & in the Communications Department. Brady hosts the weekly Soundscape: Cut and Run podcast and radio show (100.5FM), is a member of the Vancouver Electronic Ensemble, host the Coda Live Coding Events and DJs Queer Music.
Only a visitor
Fronted by composer / arranger Robyn Jacob, Vancouver’s Only A Visitor is described as “one of the most fascinating and singular musical projects to come out of Vancouver in recent memory” (Discorder Magazine). The quintet is redefining West Coast avant-pop music with songs that focus on vocal harmonies, as they try to take over the traditionally grounding role of the keyboards, bass and drums. The band is often compared with Bjork or the Dirty Projectors. Jacob’s eclectic songwriting is guided by her decades-long study in piano and her commitment to avant garde new music, as well as her study of Balinese Gamelan. Joined by drummer Kevin Romain, bassist Jeff Gammon, and vocalists Emma Postl and Celina Kurz, Only A Visitor’s newest release Tower Temporary blazes new trails between pop and experimental music, and follows previously acclaimed releases Climb the Glass Mountain (2014) and Of Course the Journey (2012), released under the name Fist Full o’ Snacks. Only A Visitor has performed at festivals such as Artswells, Campbell Bay Music Festival, The Field, and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. In February 2017, the band recorded their full length album Lines, which will be released in June, followed by a tour in Eastern Canada.
Gran Am
gran am is an interdisciplinary artist based in vancouver, bc – unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She combines aural and visual mediums to create improvised experimental performances that utilize cassette tape loops, distant vocals, heavy drones, and oscillating feedback alongside hazy video collages. Motivated by themes of idealized femininity and normalized oppression, gran am performances draw from the dissonance felt within ~ to be loud in a world that has told her to be quiet.
Ileanna Cheladyn
Choreographer: Ileanna Cheladyn is a Vancouver-based emerging dance artist whose practice spans performing, writing, producing, and creating. Despite her tendency to hide in the halls of Simon Fraser University, and in the face of her tumultuous relationship with dance, Ileanna's current projects exist in questions of legibility and illegibility, instances of understanding resistance, mapping embodied citizenship and subjectivity, repetition or when something becomes two things at once, pressuring normative bounds of performance and her performing body, and the unease of being.
Specifically, she is working on how recipes, cartography (and counter-mapping), and embodiment intersect in performative, theoretical, and material ways.
Of course, these things change. Interests and priorities come and go, and it so often depends on context to make things salient. It happens to be that Ileanna is really finding her fire in cooking and baking these days. She's trying to figure out ways she can take what she knows (dancing/dance-making and academic/social theory), and do something else.
Ileanna is thankful for the support and the challenges (so, thank you).
Daisy Thompson
Concept and Direction: Daisy Thompson is a European settler living in Vancouver as a guest on the unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil- Waututh), and xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) territories. As a dance artist who performs, creates and writes, she seeks through her work, to extend ideas of the dancing body as a key site for the questioning of embodied power relations, and considers how the dancing body interrupts cycles of contemporary logics of control in relation to culture and identity. As a performer, Daisy has had the fortune to work with Trisha Brown, Eva Karczag, Emmalena Fredriksson, Ugo Dehaes and Lee, Su-Feh. She is currently a PhD student at Simon Fraser University.
Dancers: Rianne Svelnis is an independent contemporary dance artist and a second generation Eastern European-Canadian settler born and raised in Vancouver, on unceded Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil- Waututh), and xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) territories. Since graduating from Modus Operandi Contemporary Dance Program in 2016, Rianne has continued her technical training with Peter Bingham, Helen Walkley, Justine Chambers, Emmalena Fredriksson and at La Cantera studio in Mexico City. She has danced in works by Justine Chambers, MACHiNENOiSY, Emmalena Fredriksson, Sasha Kleinplatz, Daisy Thompson, Kelly McInnes and Naomi Brand. She has also presented her own choreographic work in collaboration with Kelly McInnes and Areli Moran (Mexico). Rianne also teaches contemporary dance classes at Harbour Dance Centre and All Bodies Dance, and has had the opportunity to lead dance workshops in Mexico and Ecuador.
Zahra Shahab began her practice in contemporary dance at the University of Calgary where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Dance with distinction in 2014 along with a minor in Visual Studies. Since then she has been working as a choreographer, performing artist, and teacher of contemporary dance. She relocated in 2015 to continue her dance training with Modus Operandi in which she received a full year scholarship, and to study at Emily Carr University. Her artistic practice lies at the intersection of contemporary dance and visual arts as she explores how each form illuminates the other through film and costume design. In 2015 she received a professional development grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, which allowed her study under dance artists such as Manuel Roque, Ami Shulman, and Rubberband Dance Group. She has presented choreography at the Alberta Dance Festival, Alberta Dance Theatre for Young People, University of Calgary’s Dance Montage, Mascall Dance’s Bloom residency, New Works Performance, and local alternative performance venues in Vancouver. Recently she completed a choreographic residency at Toronto Dance Theatre under the mentorship of Ame Henderson and Christopher House. She has presented films at the Calgary Underground Film Festival and Company 605’s Festival of Recorded Movement. As an interpreter, she has worked for Sasha Kelinplatz, Emmalena Fredriksson, Daisy Thompson, Sammy Chien, has apprenticed for Out Innerspace Contemporary Dance Theatre (2017), and is currently working with local Vancouver artists Aryo Khakpour and Arash Khakpour in their company The Biting School.
Dramaturge: Laura June Albert is a seventh generation European-Canadian settler based in Vancouver, Coast Salish territories. She works as a producer, curator, educator, and choreographer; seemingly disparate practices collectively rooted in her process-driven community development methodology. Her work in these various spheres is centred around representation, access, and inclusion in the arts, and the role of the artist in society. Laura is currently completing her MA in Contemporary Arts Studies at SFU, and has worked in the arts in over ten cities in North America and abroad.
Websites: www.lauraalbert.ca, www.indiansummerfest.ca
left to right Laura (dramaturge), Zahra (dancer), Rianne (dancer) and Daisy (choreographer)
Gabi Dao
Gabi Dao addresses the structures that influence biography, history and memory. Incorporating sculpture, installation, sound, writing and podcasting, she questions popular narratives of global cultural industries such as tourism, Hollywood, music, museums and retail within the formation of subjective experiences. Dao is a co-organizer of exhibitions, readings, musical performances and other happenings at Avenue (2013-2015) and Duplex studios (2015-present). She has participated in projects and exhibitions at Unit 17, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Western Front, Artspeak, The National Music Centre, 221a, and Spare Room.
teku teku
Brittni Hagen (DJ teku teku) lives and works in Vancouver, BC. Drawing on her background in Arts and Psychology and as an educator, she is constantly seeking to strengthen the connection between the human condition (of her own, and others’), with Mother Nature and the Arts. Influenced by hip hop culture at an early age, her music incorporates a versatile range of cultural beats, rhythm, roots, and rap with sounds from the natural world, fusing both the digital and the biophilic realms to create visceral soundscapes that flow forward and elicit a vast array of raw human emotions. It is in these intersections that Brittni flourishes; challenging the foundations of the mundane to rediscover and creatively manifest an experience of the unusual, the authentic, and the enchanting to help us realize, grow and heal in this otherwise increasingly disconnected society.