material stargazer in milton-parc

Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, project lead for the Milton-Parc edition.
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a performer and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of choreography, dramaturgy, curation, writing and community practice. Her works unfold across a range of formats—from stage to gallery to local community spaces—blending high and low-fi aesthetics. Drawing from the structured formalism of art and the stuff of lived experience, Hanako uses delight, subverted logics, sampling, and the spirit of error to put subtle human constructs into poetic tension. Her career as a dancer includes collaborations with both independent artists and major companies, such as Sweden’s Cullberg Ballet (2010–2012) and artists Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson (Make Banana Cry). Hanako’s solo work has been featured at MAI, OFFTA, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, and Galerie de l’UQAM. Radio III, an internationally co-authored dance work with Zoë Poluch (SE) and Elisa Harkins (US) premiered at the MAI (CA) and has since toured to Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States with Canadian dates slated for 2026/27. 

She was artistic co-curator at the CCOV from 2020 to 2023 and initiated Material Stargazer, an experimental curatorial and performance project involving Montreal community centers. Her interdisciplinary tilt, led Hanako to complete a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours in Western Philosophy from Concordia University with a focus on gender studies and performativity, as well as trainings in transformative mediation and contemplative body based practices through which, and in tandem with artistic practice, she seeks opportunities for resistance, newness and unexpected belonging.

Eric Craven, performance and Sound Design
Eric Craven is a musician, composer, and community educator who has been working in Montréal for the past two decades. He has worked with many choreographers including Peter Trosztmer and Ame Henderson. His original music for Dance/Songs was nominated for a Dora award in 2007. As a musician, he is active with many experimental projects including 1/4 tonne, AC/CC, BLD, and Trace Magnette, and he has been a member of many important groups in Montréal such as Hangedup, A Silver Mt Zion, Hrsta, and Shortwave. 

Eric has also collaborated, on record and in concert, with Tony Conrad and Patti Smith. Hangedup was featured in the film And We Made The Room Shine, produced by La Blogothèque in collaboration with the Viennale. Eric has developed a rich, community- facing, creative facilitation practice as the Coordinator of Community Development Programs at Atwater Library in Montréal. In this capacity, he works with all age groups to make creative digital media projects that facilitate non-digital community connections. Eric has a Masters of Library Information Sciences.

Sophie Borowska, performance and  Set Design
Sophia Borowska is an artist and weaver based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Canada. Her practice merges textiles and urban space, asking what a weaver’s knowledge can bring to public art and community. She creates site-responsive installations that combine textile processes with salvaged construction materials like concrete, brick, and steel. Her use of weaving’s carefully engineered interlacements speaks to the logic of architecture. Using tension, suspension, and space, she immerses the audience and activates their senses of tactility and proprioception. Sophia’s works act as feminist revisions of well-known and obscure 20th century architectural and urbanist projects. She investigates women’s contributions to Modernist architecture, mass housing, suburbia, and urban planning. Starting with a case study, which could be a building, area, or movement of interest, Sophia looks for under-represented stories to tell. Her research process involves consulting archives, reading feminist architecture theory, photography, walking, and material salvaging. Her latest works have dealt with Postwar reconstruction projects throughout Europe. She explores how architecture and urban planning strategies often reflected normative social constructions of gender, labour, and well-being in these times of upheaval. Bringing to light the uncomfortable contradictions of the past, and learning from it to move forward, she aims to tell more nuanced versions of these stories. Weaving, with its two sets of perpendicular and intersecting threads, is uniquely suited to communicating these complex, ambivalent positions.

Nien Tzu Weng, performance, Lighting Design and Set Design
Nien Tzu Weng 翁念慈 is a Taiwanese–Canadian interdisciplinary dance artist and lighting designer based in Montréal. Working across choreography, performance, lighting, installation, mixed reality, and emerging technologies, she builds bridges between disciplines through an experimental approach to contemporary performance and a laboratory-based approach to lighting design.

As both choreographer and lighting designer, she explores presence, interactivity, and the relationships between movement, light, space, and new media. Moving between reality and fantasy, her work uses light and multimedia to shift perspective and create dialogues between inner and outer space, where bodies, images, and technologies produce multiple, overlapping experiences of time.

Nien Tzu is the founder and artistic director of Anti–Space, an artist-run space in Montréal dedicated to interdisciplinary research, experimentation, and exchange. Her practice there extends into hosting and curating, creating conditions for artists to gather, experiment, and develop new ways of working together.

She holds a BFA in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University (2018) and received a danceWEB Scholarship (2023), the Mécènes investi·es pour les arts prize and a CAM/La Chapelle residency (2019), and the OFFTA Hybridity Award (2018).

Her projects have been presented internationally at ISEA, Sónar, NODE, Biennale Némo, and Ars Electronica, and in Canada at MUTEK, OFFTA, ELEKTRA, Akousma, Tangente, La Chapelle, and MAI.

Performance: Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Eric Crave, Sophia Borowska, Nien Tzu Weng, Louise Jack, Hanako Brierley
Lighting Design: Nien Tzu Weng
Set Design: Sophia Borowska, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Nien Tzu Weng
Sound Design: Eric Craven, Hanako Brierley
Community participants: names to come 

[partners] 

Co-production : Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Danse-Cité, Le Radeau, MAI – Montréal, arts interculturels
Financial supports: Conseil de Arts de Montréal, Bourse Trellis (ELAN)

Partners: Association Récréative Milton-Parc, Yellow Door