Type de fiche: Artist

mona el husseini

Open to professional choreographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, the joint support is offered annually in partnership with the CAM,Conseil des arts de Montréal. This support aims to foster the development of a dance artist living in the territory of Montreal and to support them in a process of research, creation, and production of work. The selected artist will be offered the opportunity to present their work in the MAI spaces as part of the official program during the 23-24 season.

Mona El Husseini is an Egyptian Contemporary Dance artist based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal. She completed her dance education at the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center in Egypt and studied International Business and Contemporary Dance at Concordia University. She teaches barre, Pilates, and contemporary dance in Montreal and Cairo. Mona is currently working on Monday or Tuesday: a solo search, and a mother-daughter duet titled Creatrix. In her creative process, Mona goes beyond the dance and traces the thread that weaves the different art forms she practices including Martial Arts, painting, and writing. In un-layering questions of personal identity and heritage, Mona is interested in how stories are transmitted, shared, and told through the body across generations. She finds the dance in the place where the inner and outer meet, the traditional and the contemporary converse, and in the encounter between the intimate and the collective. 

Creatrix started as an invitation to co-create a dance duet with her mother, Hala; a doctor, science teacher, and a mother of three who is not trained in dance. In this process, they dance through their genealogy in an attempt to get to know themselves and each other by meeting those who preceded them. Using tokens, photos, and letters passed down through generations, they reflect on their past; where they come from, and where they now find themselves. Mona and her mother visit home in their fluid memories and vivid childhoods. Mona tries to touch all that is fleeting and step on the intangible rhythms that animate their heritage. They bring their opposing worlds to one another and search for the common denominator in art and science, motherhood and girlhood, past and present. Her mother always wanted to write her memoirs, in return, this dance may count as a prelude to achieve this goal. 

nicole jacobs

Member of Curve Lake First Nation and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal based dance artist, Nicole Jacobs trained in ballet, jazz, tap, acrobatics, and musical theater prior to graduating from Concordia University with a BFA in contemporary dance, and a minor in psychology. Nicole is an experienced contact improvisation dancer and facilitator, having studied the dance form intensely through traveling, teaching, and assisting in the organization of contact improvisation festivals in India, Thailand, Portugal, and Germany. Nicole has participated in numerous projects both as a performer and facilitator throughout Quebec with Theatre Junction, St. Ambroise Montréal Fringe Festival, Take Up Space Dance, Chantiers Jeunesse, and Le Gros Orteil. Her teaching repertoire includes developing workshops that she has facilitated at BIGBANG, Extravadanse studio, Collège Sainte Anne, and private training. She also develops accessible dance classes for neuro-diverse populations that she has shared across Canada and England. Nicole’s current research is focused on the meeting points between contemporary dance, floorwork, acrobatics, and interpretation. She is interested in the merging of disciplines and drawing from her training in theater and circus arts to create work that is experiential and poetic in nature.

Photo credits: Robert-Majewski

marc-alain félix

Marc-Alain Félix is a Canadian painter of Haitian origin, living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. The artist’s favorite subject is the human being. Through his work, he explores relationships, as well as the issues of our society. He also describes the impact of the influences of popular culture on our daily lives. In his work, he uses bright colors and outrageous strokes. He paints on impulse with an intuitive approach. His work is a fusion of figurative and abstract art, which reflects his imagination and his perceptions of our times. Marc-Alain wants to convey feelings to the public, he wants to give them something to look at that they will remember. Sometimes disproportionate and dynamic, in order to give them a greater expressive intensity, the characters are placed in the foreground in his works. Navigating between reality and imagination, he makes his paintings speak through signs and symbols.

As part of the Alliance program, Marc-Alain Félix aims to improve his communication plan in order to create significant links with future collaborators, such as gallery managers, and curators. In addition, he will be accompanied by the MAI team and a network of partners for project writing and for professional development in the visual arts milieu.

Photo credits: @noiremouliom

marbella carlos + chloé seyrès

Marbella Carlos and Chloe Seyrès, are the queer performing arts collective Kozmic Joy –a collective which focuses on merging interdisciplinary practices, elevating marginal art forms and marginal artists.

Marbella Carlos is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Manila, Philippines. In her practice, she uses burlesque to explore her experience as a racialized Canadian. Her work has led to multiple awards and performances including Bagel Burlesque Festival, Fierté Montreal 2019, Teaser Festival in New Orleans. She was the winner of the Best Debut category at the top burlesque competition in the world, the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

Chloé Seyrès is a French queer roller dancer. A former high-level athlete, 4-time world champion, and ex-member of 2 national teams, she is now a movement artist and coach. She has performed in a variety of cabarets, corporate events and festivals, on-screen doing motion capture for the Rollerchampion video game, as a support dancer for TVA’s Les Chanteurs Masqués, and in music videos for The Sloe Gin Fizz, Raphaël Dénommé and Mike Clay. Most impressively, she has been contracted to showcase her skills in performances with Cirque Éloize, Montréal Complètement Cirque, and Fierté Montréal 2022.

jongwook park

Jongwook Park, a settler artist from South Korea, approaches drawing as a fundamental tool of his practice. By using it as his voice, while processing pictorial elements from various cultural references such as Korean Folk paintings and graphic novels, he attempts to discover the unique treatment of line drawing for his works within flat, dimensional, and moving formats. His work has been presented in exhibitions and publications in Canada, the United States, Finland, South Korea, and Japan. He will have a solo exhibition at the Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles in March 2023, in Montreal. His project Breathing Words is about developing handcrafting skills with clay to create a series of ceramic sculptures that will be covered with scattered words and imagery. Through symbolic forms, he wants to explore conditions of emotional displacement and create a surreal landscape to evade negative feelings.

f.k.a. art club

F.K.A. Art Club Collective Bio

Favielle Petit Clair, Kathleen Charles and Awa Banmana form the newly founded collective: F.K.A. Art Club. With a co-conspirator relationship, the artists trace similarities between Fav and Kat’s Haitian heritage and Awa’s Senegalese heritage. Together, they form a powerful artist collective focused on how multidisciplinary creative expression can be used to build community resilience and resistance in the face of systemic oppression, for individuals who live at the intersection of racialized and homophobic violence.

Born in France, Spanish-Senegalese artist Awa Banmana’s is an Queer Afropean emerging artist. Their work is centered around multidisciplinary. In 2020, Banmana was involved in the creation of the Black Lives Matter mural «La Vie des Noir.e.s Compte» and was selected to be in residence for Moebius magazine. Banmana’s video clip «KICKER», co-directed with musician Kaya Hoax, was also featured in the Melbourne Midsumma Festival 2021.

Favielle “Fav” Petit Clair, is a Queer woman from Haitian descent. Having grown up in such a rich and crowded city her proximity to people and the social bonds she formed tainted her approach to art. With an Afrocentric artistic practice, Favielle obtained her first exhibition in 2017 for FOVA during Black History month. 

Kathleen Charles is a queer Haitian writer, songstress, performer, therapist in training and community organizer. Their poetry explores the power that art has to heal communities. Their art, whether it be music or poetry is made to heal themselves and to heal others by providing validating imagery to move through the traumas of systemic oppression. 

jamila ‘jai' joseph

Jamila ‘Jai’ Joseph is the recipient of the joint mentorship with Playwright’s Workshop Montreal for 21-22.

Jamila ‘Jai’ Joseph is a Montreal based interdisciplinary artist with her primary mediums being dance performer 20+yrs/choreographer 10+yrs, self taught emerging singer 15yrs/song writer 15yrs, emerging theatre artist 3yrs. A past recipient of Black Theatre Workshop’s Victor Phillips award in 2002 Jamila has continued performing, creating, and learning, telling
her stories, and sharing her expressions throughout her work. In 2015, Jamila started JaiDanse, a dance facilitation/dance performance company and has produced and co-produced shows both for stage and theatre at local venues around the city. Between 2017 – 2019 Jamila has had the pleasure of joining the casts of How Black Mothers Say I Love you, written by Trey Anthony (Black
Theatre Workshop 2019) & Nicole Brooke’s a Cappella “musical odyssey” Obeah Opera (ASAH Productions 2019) in Toronto, with her first stage role being back in 2017 where she portrayed ‘Lady in Purple‘ in the Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls… (McGill University’s Tuesday Night Café Theatre) and again in 2018 as an “Encore presentation…” produced by the cast (Les 6 Productions).
As we all came to stand still in the last 2 years, Jamila used the time to study her crafts, sharpen her creative tools and has added some new skills to her toolbelt. Currently, she is choreographing for theatre (TBD) and is also writing script and song/working on her own Performance Theatre piece entitled Wild Roots. 

sophia wright

Sophia Wright (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and creator based in Tio’tia:ke / Montreal and currently works in a collective with dance and theatre artist, Alida Esmail. Sophia’s artistic practice is fuelled by the desire to bring diverse practices and communities together. Originally hailing from Calgary, Sophia obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University and continued her studies in Cultural Mediation at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, France. In Paris, Sophia became an active member of the collective La Main, a multi-disciplinary collective of artisans, artists, and technicians. It was also in Paris that she first engaged with the Deaf community through the arts, an intercultural and multilingual collaboration that she continues to this day. Parallel to her dance career, Sophia is developing her skills in metalwork with the goal of bringing elements of sculpture and set design into future projects.

Photo credit: Alexandre Quillet 

tondóa

In 2016, five individuals, passionate about the traditions of their country, decided to start a dance project. After gaining experience in other artistic contexts, the desire to do things differently allowed them to embark on an unknown path. Tondóa was born as an experimental laboratory that broke the conventions of a traditional projection folklore company. Reflections on the management, the creation of works and the vision of traditional dances were put forward with an unprecedented openness from its members. The primary members that make up the fabric of Tondóa are: Daniel Diaz, Nicole Speare, Camila Petro, Juan Sebastien Hoyos, and Milena Yanes. 

During the stage of development, the organization set up guidelines to define a way of creating. Putting forward our respect for Colombian traditions, Tondóa would strive to make them evolve. The dancers therefore shared not only their knowledge of dance, but also their personal experiences. Therefore, the diversity in age, gender, sexual orientation and background became the strength of the group.

Today, Tondóa defines itself as a research and creation dance company that allows us to go back to the roots of tradition while making links with the current socio-cultural context. As a learning community, we want to create a safe space for exchanges, ideas and progress to share our vision of the art of movement.

For the year 2021, a restructure of the group is allowing for the creation of two divisions, a semi-professional group and a professional collective, with different but complementary objectives to meet the needs of the dancers and the project.

rouzbeh shadpey

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist and musician based in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal working through sound, writing, and performance. His practice and thought are shaped by an academic background in medicine, psychiatry, and music, the lived experience of a faltering body, and the deep kindness of his grandmother Nargues. His current artistic research explores decolonial grammars of illness and the whiteness of acousmatic listening. His music, under the identity GOLPESAR, has been released on Opal Tapes.

⇒ http://www.rouzbehshadpey.com/