The MAI team is thrilled to announce the recipients of the CAM + MAI Joint Support Fellowship 2023-2024: Mara Dupas, for their project Moonlight x Moonshine and Cai Glover for his project Pulses of Being.
Open to professional choreographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, the mentorship program offered annually by the Conseil des arts de Montréal and MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) aims to foster the development of dance artists living in the territory of Montreal and to support them in a process of research, creation, and production of work.
A partnership between the Conseil des arts de Montréal and the MAI, this joint support program offers the selected artist a package of mentorship and support, including a $5000-10,000 stipend, hours at the CAM and MAI rehearsal studios and an artistic and technical residency in the MAI studios.
Mara Dupas
“As a Franco-Canadian artist who grew up in Quebec, my approach is informed by a variety of influences.
I strive to create choreographic works that are both poetic and engaged, with writing and dance as my main mediums. Historical research, reading and note-taking are an essential part of my creative process. I wish to deepen my knowledge of folklore and further engage with new performers.
For several years now, I’ve been exploring Antillean storytelling and popular culture, as well as related dance styles such as bèlè. I draw inspiration from Afro-Caribbean literature and folk dances to better understand my own cultural background. As a queer person, notions of the body and gender are also a key focus of my current research efforts. Through writing and dance, I try to challenge binary gender stereotypes in order to propose new ways of conceptualizing one’s own identity.” — Mara Dupas
© Bianka Pierre
About Moonlight X Moonshine
The proposed choreographic research, which combines contemporary dance, urban dance and Haitian folk dance, aims to challenge the gender stereotypes present in the popular Afrobeat musical genre. The three to five performers all have different cultural and dance backgrounds, as well as strong improvisational skills. Having worked on solo performances thus far, I’m interested in exploring the notion of collectivity and the power dynamics associated with gender. By drawing from drag culture and a music industry characterized by vibrant colours and characters, cross-dressing and dance become tools of dialogue to construct a landscape of bodies with fluid roles in an atmosphere that is sometimes festive and sometimes oppressive.
Cai Glover
In an ever-going discovery and study of dance, Cai Glover has been training, performing and creating in the art form for over 25 years. From 2012 to 2022 Cai was working as a dance interpreter and choreographer for Cas Public and has been a part of 8 creations for the company. Most recently Cai has been developing his own expression in poetry and in a language of movement putting the dancing body to task in a search of an embodied expression of poetics through the transposition of language into movement under the name of his company, A Fichu Turning. Cai has had the great privilege, over the course of his career, of working with creators Helene Blackburn, John McFall, Simone Orlando, Lauri Stallings, Edgar Zendejas, Mathieu Murphy-Perron and many others.
He never tires of the search in finding ways to affect audiences through this art form and to appeal to the varied and countless emotional experiences of the human being. As a hard of hearing artist, hearing differently has become a driving force of his artistry and originality as a mover, interpreter and choreographer.
© Sasha Onyshenko
About Pulses of Being
In Pulses of Being we witness the disorienting experience of an individual becoming confronted by the disabling allowances of his world after losing his hearing. The story reminds us that the force and the construction of one’s identity are not just the result of a putting in place of scaffolding that is built from within; it is a psychic event but a fixing in place as much from an exterior force as an interior one. Information for self-formation is flowing outwards and inwards, afferent and efferent; a becoming that projects onto one a sense of self. In this case, it comes from the commanding presence of others, far from the interior workings of self-hood.
This work was grown from the planted seeds of an ASL (American Sign Language) base, used to develop and discover the emotional complexity of its dance vocabulary. As a hard-of-hearing choreographer, Cai is very interested in beholding an expression that intends towards a purity of language. Through the use of literal words and literary poetics, I wish to ascend to meaning that may hover somewhere outside of the text. I wish to draw focus to the communicative grips of the signing hand in gesture and movement. I want to highlight the clarity of this poetics of the body in how it is an evocative and emotional language, one that often doesn’t require a translation to be understood.
This project is the depiction of an engaged relationship between two that, because of distance, space and loneliness, has become exacerbated by a current of life that has pulled them unwillingly away from one another and in directions they did not choose.
This project is produced with support from the Government of Quebec and the City of Montreal as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada Council for the Arts.