Joint mentorship: Conseil des Arts de Montréal (CAM)

rayanne fawaz + chanel cheiban

Rayanne Fawaz and Chanel Cheiban are the recipients of the 25.26 CAM + MAI Joint Support Program.

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.

This joint support program offers the selected artist a package of mentorship and support, including a $5000-10,000 stipend and hours at the CAM and MAI rehearsal studios.

The artist is invited to carry out an artistic and technical residency in the MAI studios and to present in season 26.27.

Rayanne Fawaz is a choreographer, performer, and dance researcher from Lebanon, currently based between Montreal and Beirut. Trained in classical ballet in Beirut, she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Bioresource Engineering from McGill University. In 2024, she shifted towards professional dance, developing a practice that explores memory, migration, and the dance forms of the Levant, particularly dabke. She has participated in residencies in Beirut and Montreal. Her work approaches tradition as living matter, intertwining oral archives, everyday gestures, and community dances. Her interest in dabke stemmed from her studies of sustainable agricultural practices in Lebanon, where she rediscovered the repetitive everyday gestures in local dances, thereby questioning the movement’s origins.

Originally from Lebanon, Chanel Cheiban works as a choreographer and performer in a variety of artistic projects in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). She holds a diploma in contemporary dance from Collège Montmorency, a CID-recognized certification from UNESCO in the BIGBANG training program, and is a graduate of the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. Chanel also practices the art of the qanun, an Oriental stringed instrument from the zither family.

In January 2025, she will present her multidisciplinary work El kamar bi zaher at Tangente, which she choreographed and performs, as well as PLAYGROUND, co-created with Maude Laurin-Beaulieu in 2022. She also founded Wholeness Mouvement in 2020, a dance video project in collaboration with Étienne de Durocher, which allowed her to develop her skills as an artistic director, director, and self-taught video editor. Chanel Cheiban explores processes of cultural transmission, interactivity in dance, and the intersections between traditional practices and contemporary languages. She reflects on how to revive rituals and traditions while creating moments of collective unity and individual authenticity.

Buzur is a multidisciplinary project by Fawaz and Cheiban which unfolds through two complementary components: a documentary project and a choreographic creation. This collaboration aims to create a space for co-creation, memory and reinvention, and resistance, in connection with diasporic realities and current struggles, the ongoing genocide in the Middle East, and the colonial past.

 

catch step

Catch Step is the recipient of the CAM+MAI Joint Support 24.25.

Catch Step is a semi-recently formed group (2022) of artists: Anais Chloé Gilles/RISE, Delande “Junior” Dorsaint/Djüngle, and Victoria Mackenzie/VicVersa. They are a group that represent multiple interests and experiences in the street dance scene. Collectively they are well-respected dancers within the Break, Hip-Hop, House, and Ballroom scenes. Following their performance of Never Not Moving, their win at the Montreal Hip Hop Games, and performance at the International Hip Hop Games in Lille, France, Catch Step was invited to perform a full-length show at Theatre La Chapelle for their 2024/2025 season.

For their upcoming full-length work entitled “Catch Step HYA remix feat. Lunice” Catch Step will work with guest choreographer Handy Yacinthe/HYA and compser Lunice. This project supports the interests of various artists from the haitian diaspora as performers and creators. The dance practices of the artists involved are anchored in afro-descent dance forms, particularly from street dance cultures.

cai glover

Cai Glover is the recipient of the CAM+MAI Joint Support Fellowship 2023-2024.


This work will investigate our expressions of movement as they are tasked with turning the complicit actions of spacial language, the mastery of gesture, into the trance of a dancing body. The research will see us manipulate language to pass from the literal to the abstract and back again. What does the word “identity” look like in my signed hand? And now what does it look like in my dancing body? Is there somewhere in between where I might recognize an identity that feels authentic?  Here we apply the science of discerning the way one body makes another body feel as we reorient the subject and object to be in a constant relation devoid of the violence of identity marking that removes the “other”. The creation is here situated in the politics of disability and in passing through the creative act, procures an aesthetics of disability. A decentering of a body that is itself already off-centre. 

Bio: 

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 expression in poetry and 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. 

Photo credit: Sasha Onyshenko

mara dupas

Mara Dupas is the recipient of the CAM+MAI Joint Support Fellowship 2023-2024.

Mara Dupas is a queer multidisciplinary artist of Martinican descent. He relocated to Montreal with his family at a young age, where he took up dance training. Mara perfected his classical ballet and contemporary dance techniques, first at the Académie du Ballet Métropolitain, then at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal (2019-2022). Concurrently, he began learning urban dancing and Haitian folk dances by following workshops. Mara collaborates as a performer with Louise Bédard (choreographic research), Charlie Prince (states of body produced by an emergency) as well as Rhodnie Désir (Symphonie de coeurs).

His choreographic works, which explore the themes of métissage, the Afro-descendant body and Caribbean culture, have been presented in Montreal at Danses Buissonnières (Tangente Danse), the Vue sur la Relève Festival and the OFFTA. His personal writing practice has resulted in the publication of several texts, notably by Éditions Bruno Doucey (Poésie en liberté, 2018), in Zinc magazine (2022) and in the Moveo dance magazine (2023).

Photo credit: Bianka Pierre

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. 

hoor malas

Hoor Malas is the recipient of the joint mentorship with the Conseil des Arts of Montreal for 21-22 in dance.

Hoor Malas is a Syrian dance and movement artist recently moved to Montréal.

Started at the age of eight in the Ballet School in Damascus. Got her B.A in dance from the Higher Institute of Arts in Damascus-Syria and a diploma in contemporary dance from The Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds-UK. She participated in many workshops in Europe and the UK. She has been teaching contemporary dance techniques for ten years in the Art conservatory in Damascus. 

She started choreographing in 2014-15.

In her work, she dives into social matters influenced by personal experiences.  Some of her latest choreographic work Regression (2016), Three Seconds (2018), Hanging (2019), Dust (2020-21) et sa nouvelle pièce solo If my body had a name that are works in progress.  

⇒ https://hoormalas.com/