Editor's Note
Dance Central, Volume 40, Issue 1
Welcoming 2025 – A Year of Renewal and Reflection
As we step into the new year, we also step into a new chapter for Dance Central. You may have noticed a small but significant shift in our title—one that signals our continued evolution alongside the ever-changing landscape of dance. And who can believe it? Dance Central is now entering its 40th year of publication! It is an immense privilege to serve as the Editor for such a well-established and deeply rooted organization as The Dance Centre that continues to meet the needs of our dance community in British Columbia and beyond.
In this milestone issue, we highlight two thought-provoking pieces from artists who participated in Dance In Vancouver 2024. These artists not only shared their works in performance but have also taken the time to reflect and articulate their creative processes in writing, offering deeper insight into their choreographic methodologies and artistic inquiries.
First, Lee Su-Feh’s Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go reflects on the search for collective effervescence through choreographic gestures that blur the line between performer and audience. Su-Feh’s work explores movement as a social practice and offers an alternative to the digital algorithms shaping our relationships.
Our second feature, Claire French’s re:group, takes us into the realm of choreographic sensemaking. Rooted in a desire to create a space for compositional thinking beyond traditional dance-making, re:group brings together a cohort of choreographers including Jeanette Kotowich, Simran Sachar, Virginia Duivenvoorden, Vanessa Goodman and French herself to engage in collective and independent exploration.
This issue marks Part 1 of a two-part reflection on Dance In Vancouver 2024. In our next issue, we will feature additional voices, offering a broader tapestry of reflections from participating artists. We thank all the artists who have contributed, and we welcome new writing and project ideas at any time to make Dance Central a more vital link to the community. Please send materials by email to editor@thedancecentre.ca. Here’s to 2025—a year of movement, renewal, and deepening connections!
Shanny Rann Editor
Lee Su-Feh in Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go © Yvonne Chew
Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go at Dance In Vancouver 2024
In search of collective effervescence1
By Lee Su-Feh
Over the last 10 years or so, I have become less interested in dancing FOR people and more interested in dancing WITH people. This has led to a preoccupation in creating choreographic instructions that can be a shared score for both performer and audience. These instructions can exist in various formssometimes as a set of explicitly written or spoken instructions; more often as strategies embedded in sculpture, poetry, song, dance and storytelling. I think of these instructions as choreographic gestures: gestures that posit dance as social practice; as a practice that can be accessible to everyone and can be a shared experience in the encounter between performer and audience. My latest choreographic gesture is Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go (TMHMLMG), a somatic algorithm that functions as both a performance methodology and an embodiment process. It centres touch as the primary modality for finding a greater sense of the boundaries, sensations, and movements of our bodies.
It came out of a previous choreographic gesture involving a mask carved by Klahoose/ Wuikinuxw artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett. To read more about that process, go here Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go is also the title of the lecture-performance that I performed recently at Dance In Vancouver 2024. In this work, I discuss, teach and perform the algorithm, inviting audiences to DO as well as WATCH. We eventually end up singing and dancing together. It is my humble attempt at creating an experience of collective effervescence, that feeling of unity and transcendence that can happen when people come together in a group and share a collective experience.
1 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Les Formes Élémentatires de la vie religieuses)
Why algorithm, you might ask, I could simply say it’s a choreographic score. I use the word algorithm because I want to put myself in conversations with the more opaque algorithms that are embedded in our digital lives; algorithms that increasingly mediate our relationships to one another. I offer TMHMLMG as a “counter-algorithm” to these algorithms. I offer TMHMLMG as an invitation to connect to oneself and to each other in gentler, more sustainable ways.
Lee Su-Feh in Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go © Yvonne Chew
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Dance Central is published quarterly by The Dance Centre for its members and for the community. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent Dance Central or The Dance Centre. The editor reserves the right to edit for clarity or length, or to meet house requirements.
Editor, Art Director & Layout
Shanny Rann
Copy Editor
Kaia Shukin
Design Layout
Becky Wu
Contributors to this issue:
Lee Su-Feh, Claire French, Virginia Duivenvoorden, Vanessa Goodman, Jeanette Kotowich, Simran Sachar
Photo credits
Front Cover: Lee Su-Feh in Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go © Yvonne Chew
Back Cover: re:group © Simran Sachar
Dance Centre Board Members: Chair
Linda Gordon
Treasurer
Mark Weston
Directors
Yvonne Chartrand, Mique'l Dangeli, Mirjana Galovich, Selim Hasan, Anndraya Luui, Sujit Vaidya, Wen Wei Wang
Dance Foundation Board
Members:
Shaadi Faris, Samantha Luo, Dallas McMurtrie
Chair Linda Blankstein
Vice-Chair Andrea Benzel
Secretary Anndraya Luui
Treasurer Janice Wells
Dance Centre Staff:
Executive Director
Mirna Zagar
Associate Programming Director
Raquel Alvaro
Associate Producer
Linda Blankstein
Director of Marketing
Heather Bray
Digital Marketing Coordinator
Lindsay Curtis Development Manager
Catherine Butler
Membership Coordinator
Kaia Shukin
Outreach Coordinator
Yurie Kaneko
Comptroller
Elyn Dobbs
Interim Technical Director
Jeremiah Hughes
Established in 1986 as a resource centre for dance in British Columbia, The Dance Centre is a multifaceted organization offering a range of activities which is unparalleled in Canadian dance. We present performances and events, building audiences and nurturing public awareness; invest in programs, resources and support for hundreds of dance professionals working in all genres; operate Scotiabank Dance Centre, a cultural hub and one of Canada’s flagship dance facilities which welcomes tens of thousands of visitors annually; and work to promote BC dance. Through programs, outreach and education, The Dance Centre is committed to sustaining a strong and vibrant community through dance.
The algorithm simply asks: What part of my body needs attention right now? What if I ask to be touched or held there? What comes next as a result?
By inviting a practice of noticing the needs of the body, and learning to ask for support around those needs, TMHMLMG serves as a somatic tool to help people have an experience of embodied support. From my experiments over the last several years, I have found that the process of playing with the algorithm can enable greater autonomy and agency, both in dancing and in other modes of communication. As a performance methodology, it can generate emergent choreographies based on the needs and desires of the human bodies practising it.
In 2020, in the isolation brought about by the pandemic, I turned my teaching notes into a set of poems. In the performance, I speak these poems and as I do so, they get written anew, the words get rearranged and reorganised by the needs of my living, dancing body. It is my way of being in a dynamic relationship with the written word. Words that live on the page do not live the same way when spoken by a body that is reorganizing around other bodies, by a dancing body, by a body that has a heartbeat, by a body that breathes and that is breathed. I repeat TMHMLMG as an invocation to dancing with others, a way to ground myself as I guide myself into the chaos, often terrifying, of being in relation with others.
As people enter the Faris Family Studio, I move in and among them, greeting people I both know and don’t know. I practice the first part of the algorithm: openings and obstacles, the yesses and the no’s. I practice moving into my yesses - ah, someone I haven’t seen for a long time, ah, a friend, ah, an open face. I practice honoring my no’s - my social anxieties, my fears by softening around them, yielding around them.
To yield is neither to push into nor to pull away, But to soften around the obstacle
The way your palm might soften around a cactus
In order not to be hurt by the spines.
Yield so that the obstacle is not ignored, But is acknowledged, held with care. Observe the consequences of each action.
- From Openings and Obstacles, Scores for Dancing Across Distances. More here
This notion of yielding comes from the Taijiquan concept of “lǚ”(捋). In Taiji martial arts philosophy, "lǚ" represents a fundamental principle of softness and receptivity. It's not just about passively giving way, but about a dynamic, intelligent response to an incoming force. The concept of "lǚ" involves:
1. Listening and sensing the opponent's energy and intention
2. Neutralizing force by redirecting rather than blocking
3. Maintaining a relaxed, fluid state that allows for quick adaptation
4. Transforming defense into a potential offensive opportunity
Another way of saying this is “sui ji ying bian” (随机应变 ). "Sui ji ying bian" is a classical Chinese idiom that can be translated as “follow, gauge, respond, transform” or “following the occasion and responding to changes".
In this iteration of TMHMLMG, I have invited Sasha J Langford to play live with me, on top of the foundation of a soundtrack made by
Su-Feh’s arrangement of the room into chairs, floor pillows and a gaping dance floor had some of us sitting, with others lying before us, some supported by pillows, others on elbows or on their sides, with the artist standing, first, then moving about, mic’ed. Soon enough, Su-Feh’s instruction that we move about too. For those on the floor, a kind of floating, swimming, spawning…
Photo and words by and with permission from audience member, Michael Turner
my daughter, Junhong McIntosh-Lee. During the prolonged anxiety of the pandemic, I had asked Junhong to make me these ambient soundtracks so I could sing or hum along as a way to regulate my nervous system and feel connected to her.
Singing slows down your breath and has been shown to help your nervous system drop into a parasympathetic state of “rest and digest”, of safety. I invite you to play these tracks and sing/hum along.
Listen to Junhong McIntosh-Lee on Bandcamp:
Track 1-4, Track 2-4, Track 3-4
I have invited Sasha to play live with me so that together, we can better “sui ji ying bian”. Follow, gauge, respond, transform. Sasha brings an acute awareness of the present to her musical interventions. She too is practicing TMHMLMG, listening to the needs of her body even as she listens to the needs of the room. In this iteration, I have also invited lighting designer Andie Lloyd to do the same. And so, all three of us are in a practice of attunement, to ourselves, to each other and to the audience, as we make choices around sound, movement and lighting.
I look out at the audience and I am surprised and delighted at how willing people are to let their bodies drift and spill into more pleasurable
Lee Su-Feh in Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go © Sophia Wolfe
Hold these words these dreams these hopes, these fears Wrap me in your tentacle arms and take me down to the soft bottom of your ocean shapes (floating, swimming, spawning). I see an ocean of bodies in different states of pleasure & comfort, moving in small ways (tiny microshifts) and in big ways (someone has vacated their seat to go have a bigger dance in the back of the room). I move into this ocean of bodies, stepping into the spaces between the bodies. I am in new territory. I have never danced this dance in the midst of so many bodies, with so little space between bodies. Soft murmurs of “Touch my arm”, “Hold my head” and other body parts emanate from this mass of gentle moving bodies, meeting my own voice and body. This part always feels to me like a collective prayer for more gentleness to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet.
The territory between us is the distance between your hand and the back of my neck
This distance that is an ocean and a continent This distance that is your flesh pressed into my bones
Touch my neck
Hold my head
Hold my head
Let me touch the tenderness inside you so that I may touch the tenderness of the world
I dream of your hands fluttering over my skin
like birds fluttering over the water
This water
lapping at my feet
lapping at my knees
lapping at my cock
my clit
my tits my lips
The planet is drowning
The planet is burning
Hold my eyes hold my eyes as I hold my arms above the water
This water rising from my tears falling from the smoke
The planet is burning
The planet is drowning
Birds cannot land on my burning arms
The burning trees
The territory between us is the distance between my knee and the inside of your thigh
This distance that is my bone pressed into your flesh
This distance that is
An ocean, churning, Orcas, singing, Aspens, trembling.
Birds fly over my burning skin
Later we sing together in amateurish abandon, collectively making a song from something I call the Machine Poem.
my spine is the snake and running the ocean is coming up my spine little dolphin jumping out of my open now I'm swimming in the ocean I'm sitting in the show swimming in the ocean I can feel the sand on my feet that comes in I can feel sad I'm touching your feet hold my hand what's the time now how can I touch you.
The Machine Poem is a poem made by Zoom during the early days of the pandemic, out of a moment when the artists I was working with at Dancemakers - David Norsworthy, Francesca Chudnoff, Omar Rivero, Naishi Wang, Supriya Nayak and Nyda Kwasowski - and I were trying to dance with each other across distances even as we were stuck in our respective living rooms. The project with them had begun in 2019 in person. In 2020, with the project forced online, I grieved that we could no longer touch and hold each other, even as touching and holding each other became more necessary than ever. Online, we found it easier to dance to the sound of each other than to small images on our computers. We gathered on Zoom without our cameras on, listening to each other talk about our bodies - what we felt inside us, what we felt around us. We fumbled together towards a series of dances together that, despite being distanced, still managed to have moments of bliss. This whole experiment underlined for me the importance of hearing
each other’s breath and voice as a way to feel each other’s bodies.
As I share this poem in the performance, the audience is invited into what I hope is a similar experience of tuning into their own breath and voice as a way to feel each other in space.
And so, we fumble along in a sort of karaoke sing-along towards an emergent song that is different with each iteration of the work.
We sing together. We dance together.
Swimming turns into flying Swimming turns into flying
Lee Su-Feh Lee splits her time between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where she was born and raised; and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (TsleilWaututh) Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, where she makes her home. Over the past 35 years, she has created a provocative body of award-winning trans-disciplinary work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits.
Lee Su-Feh with group in Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go © Yvonne Chew
re:group
By Claire French from Restless Productions
The idea for re:group was conceived as an extension of my PhD research. In my PhD thesis, I call my research focus ‘choreographic sensemaking’. I draw on philosophical notions of assemblage and the social cognition theory, participatory sensemaking. My practical research explored the making of a framework as a potential choreographic tool inviting emergent, choreographic forms. My current research focuses on emergence through social, collective endeavour at one end of the spectrum and solo creation at the other.
I invited and gathered a cohort of choreographers/dancemakers as willing and enthusiastic as me to engage with composition and share and articulate how they develop their choreographic practices. Realizing that I was providing something that some of my fellow choreographers and dancemakers felt was essential and had recognized as previously missing in their artistic lives validated this direction and intensified my commitment to the idea and to the cohort. The cohort is Jeanette Kotowich, Simran Sachar, Virginia Duivenvoorden and Vanessa Goodman.
Admittedly, re:group is an acquired taste because we are not setting out to make dances. It offers a space for choreographic thinking to be explored independently of dancing. For example, we
might not do any dance or movement steps or phrases, and if we do, the emphasis is not placed on the movement choice but rather on the spatial configuration, temporal relationships, duration, interrelating narratives and intentionsyou could think of this as the containers for content. But this is dependent on the group’s needs each time we meet. We collectively engage in making, and being accountable for, the social contract. At this stage, we are not a dance company or even a choreographic collective working on choreography together. Rather, we approach our re:group time as an alternative option, and complementary to, attending dance technique or dance improvisation classes. It’s an opportunity to work on our craft. We are developing and practicing choreographic tools and skills, exploring scores and frameworks together and participating in the tasks we decide to explore in each session. The physical ideas are borne and accumulated from curiosities, problems, questions, and interests we contribute in the room.
re:group has quickly become an entity unto itself defined by the group members. We meet once a month. We launched our monthly meetings for the first time in July 2024 with the invaluable support of The Dance Centre through their artist residency program. The pilot cohort is expansive and inspirational. Our needs, interests,
re:group © Virginia Duivenvoorden
and contributions co-inform and co-influence the time we spend together, opening space for creative, generative discovery for its own sake, and our sakes, as movers, independent creators, and world-builders. We explore creative possibilities in this social and collective space, sharing resources, networks, and ideas. We take the time to talk, listen, offer support, and respectfully call each other out. We are comfortable sharing physically and verbally and confident in our unique perspectives. We entertain and challenge one another. Discovering our differences and similarities each time is invigorating. We have a social contract to exchange ideas through a co-facilitated practice and stay generative. We do this generously.
regroup
The word regroup is synonymous with recuperation, rearranging, and recovering. All these action words allude to choreographic processes and compositional thinking.
They also connect to the humanness involved in creating—desires, the desire to connect, reflect, find meaning, feel heard/seen, lead, follow, discover, iterate, evolve…
re: group invites reciprocal exchange, relative to the material, the people, the timeframe and the context.
Adaptive and emergent, we define and redefine the sense of group when we meet.
The group work is particular to the group, and, in the same measure, our contribution is specific to each of us. We understand that we each choose how we integrate and subsume the collective's influence into our independent choreographic work.
To acknowledge the inevitable levels of familiarity that accumulate and embed through our collective experiences, we are factoring in ways to offset and unsettle the familiar, seeking new resources and inviting guest participants. DIV was one such rewarding and appropriate off-set, as our first public sharing.
An aside:
Being seen, questioned and confronted by people outside of our group, being seen differently by the re:group members, looking out from within the group context…
seeing and sharing through a re:group lens felt real, fresh, and tightly new as if it were finding its rhythm…
Significantly, our sharing at DIV was our first public acknowledgement of the group. While I felt it was premature, it will likely always feel this way. We are developing our choreographic skills as a group and destabilizing the conditions to maintain a sense of emergence. Our agenda is not to create a unified-looking ensemble or
necessarily achieve synchronicity. We focus on connection to the pursuit of choreographic ideas and each other, responding from and with our choreographic perspectives. We do not expect to explore the same task twice and while we have removed any agenda to produce choreography we are aware that we inevitably constantly produce it.
As default, we do not video/record our explorations. However, the sessions are generative, and we inspire each other. Reflecting, note-taking, considering how we might develop and implement something we discovered in our processes; suggesting, digesting, investing, claiming—our time is spent focusing on our needs.
This DIV publication is our opportunity to contribute through an alternative medium to movement and an alternative context to the studio. I invited the cohort members to design diagrams responding to the prompt “How does re:group connect to you?” The visual context enables us to represent the autonomy that re:group affords. We maintain our different interpretations as the following diagrams display. We hope you appreciate and engage with these for their sense of individuality while simultaneously joining us in discovering our found connecting values.
re:group is a constant catalyst of inspiration, peer support, and gratitude. Thank you!
Rooted in the natural intersection of my Indigenous worldview and my personal perspective; this holistically represents the intentions, values, and activities of re:group. Each of us holds the circle from the outside and from within. © Jeanette Kotowich
create a network
share practices and invite community
build something suited to the group’s needs
as compass/current
catalyst/ incubator
maintain autonomy
share resources/sources/ scores/frameworks/games/ rules/ objectives
co-author survival tactics
indulge in curiosity… “yes, and…”
create and generate ideas with interdisciplinary material
think about… who, why, what, how, what ifs and now whats?
dance on your own terms think choreographically
access multiple lineages
cross-polinate practices
let ensemble practices emerge
strategy
agency
2025 Restless Productions
research
Claire French
Jeanette
Simran
Vanessa Goodman
Virginia Duivenvoorden
re:group
French Kotowich
Sachar
Goodman
Duivenvoorden
facilitation
connection
reciprocal generosity contributing/ enacting/listening to ideas and topics identifying privilege, conßict, abundance, challenge, plateaus, process
diverse voices
peer-to-peer dialogue and exploration
choreographic ideas with and without audience
talking and moving
explore physical ideas collectively, free from pressure to produce choreography
social space and time
rest, recuperate, refuel, rearrange
needs
permission to fail/succeed, move/vent be inarticulate/focused drift/entertain the obvious play out the cliches invest/digest/distill be still
Claire French, PhD
https://www.restlessproductions.com/ https://clairefrench.wixsite.com/2025
Claire is an established choreographer, dance artist, teacher, and researcher and has received multiple choreography awards and academic accolades in Europe and Canada. She is the artistic co-director of Restless Productions, an interdisciplinary project-based performance company (est. 2011) and enjoys collaborating and producing across the arts. Claire has a firstclass BA (Hons) degree in Dance with Inter Arts (Bretton Hall College-Leeds University, UK 1994) and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SFU, Canada (1999). In 2022, she gained her PhD in Dance from the University of Chichester, UK.
Based in Vancouver (on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations), Claire wears many hats and dances many dances. Currently, she hosts The Dance Centre podcast, teaches creative movement, and choreographs and collaborates with Restless and other companies, institutions, and artists. Her newfound passion for tap dancing revolves around developing rhythm as a form of communication and serves as a central inspiration for her current choreographic creations. She is a dance artist-in-residence at The Dance Centre, devising collaborative performances and professional community practices, including re:group. Claire is also developing Creative Influence Facilitation and helping coordinate, create, and produce new ventures. She believes in supporting and learning with other artists of multiple generations and perspectives, complementing her desire to be involved in a vibrant, authentic, and inclusive creative arts ecology.
Jeanette Kotowich https://www.movementhealing.ca/
Originally from Treaty 4 territory
Saskatchewan, Jeanette creates work that reflects Nêhiyaw/Métis cosmology within the context of contemporary dance, Indigenous performance, and Indigenous futurism. Fusing interdisciplinary collaboration, decolonial practices and embodied research methodologies; Jeanette’s work references protocol, ritual, relationship to the natural/ spirit world and Ancestral knowledge. Their practice is intergenerational and vocational; it’s a living and lived experience. Jeanette has self-presented and been programmed at theatres and festivals across Turtle Island and internationally.
Her solo Kisiskâciwan premiered in Vancouver 2022, and has since toured to 11 cities nationally, and to Germany and Australia. Her ensemble work Kwê was presented at Matriarchs Uprising and Dance in Vancouver 2021/22. She is now working on a new ensemble called BOLT, a work for 4 performing artists which will premiere in 2026, at Vancouver International Dance Festival and Festival Transamériques. Jeanette is the Artistic Associate at Raven Spirit Dance, and co-founder of aka collective. She facilitates movement workshops with Indigenous worldview, workshops on decolonial perspectives in the arts, and is a Métis dance and cultural knowledge carrier. She resides as a guest on the Ancestral and unceded Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ/, and Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territories, colonially known as Vancouver.
Illustrating Convergence Point in Collaboration
X= Biorhythm
Y=
Time
Five Artists
re:group © Virginia Duivenvoorden
Axes: The X-axis represents the biorhythms of the artists. The Y-axis represents the time spent together. Individuality and Connection: Each artist is represented by a distinct line, starting at a unique base level. The lines meet over time as the artists converge in community and they experience co:regulation and re:group with slight variations for individuality.
Key Features: A positive slope for all lines, illustrating how being in community promotes wellbeing. Differences in biorhythms among artists emphasize how personal experiences can vary even in a collaborative setting.
Virginia Duivenvoorden https://imageryexercise.com/
Virginia Duivenvoorden is a choreographer, performer, and educator working at the intersection of dance, film, and community engagement. Trained at Arts Umbrella, SFU, and the European Dance Development Centre (now ArtEZ), she has performed with Karen Jamieson Dance Company and in solo works by Serge Bennathan and Cornelius Fischer-Credo. Her current projects include Kite, a dance film she choreographed, Seams, a film by Jerry Trieus in which she is the lead actor, and Echo Chamber, her latest solo dance work in development. She is honoured to be part of re:group with Claire French and the team. Virginia’s practice is shaped by interdisciplinary collaboration, arts education, and an ongoing inquiry into movement and cinematic storytelling.
Vanessa Goodman https://actionatadistance.ca/
Vanessa Goodman respectfully acknowledges that she lives, works and creates on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (TsleilWaututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. She holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University and is the artistic director of Action at a Distance Dance Society. Vanessa is attracted to art that has a weight and meaning beyond the purely aesthetic and uses her choreography as an opportunity to explore the human condition. Her choreographic practice is driven by weaving generative movement and sonic systems into performative environments. Her work creates a sense of intimacy between our surroundings and the body. She has received several awards and
honours, including The Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award (2013); The Yulanda M. Faris Scholarship (2017/18); The Chrystal Dance Prize (2019/18 & 2024/2025); The Schultz Endowment from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2019); and the "Space to Fail" program (2019/20). Vanessa's work has been presented across this continent and in Europe.
Simran Sachar https://www.simransachar.ca/
Simran Sachar is a South Asian dance artist, choreographer, writer, and actor originally from Calgary, Alberta, but currently dedicates time to their artistic practice in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Simran stands on versatility being trained in classical, contemporary, and street dance forms. Mostly known for her work as a contemporary and street dancer, she is a captivating anomaly in this industry who consistently works in ground-breaking spaces. Through choreography, text, or XR technology - specifically volumetric film, Simran’s work uncovers distorted memories and how they disfigure us, the duality of relief and grief, and our own identity as the mirror.
Through battling in street dance, Simran is the Winner of 2023’s Release Yourself Whacking Battle in Montreal at Artfulness Festival, Top 16 at Hotmess 2023 (Montreal), Top 4 at Redbull Dance Your Style (Vancouver), Top 16 at Step Ya Game Up (New York City). Simran’s other credits include Netflix, CW Riverdale, The Vancouver Opera, Dairy Canada, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Dancing On The Edge, Dance in Vancouver, OFF-FTA, OFF-Parcours Danse, Luna Arts Fest, F.O.R.M Festival, Apple TV, National Arts Centre, Fringe Manila and more.
re:group © Vanessa Goodman
