Dana Michel
MIKE asserts the nomadic aesthetic that has become Michel’s calling card over the course of her career. In an open space, during three hours, MIKE invites the audience to spend time inside its universe. The piece revolves around work culture and self-respect, and proposes a burning question: Is it possible to live public lives that reflect our inner selves? Put your faith in Michel’s hands, one yes at a time. —Enola Rivière
Artist Dana Michel’s live performance practice interacts with an expanded field encompassing choreography, sculpture and comedy and poetry. Based in Montreal, she is currently touring four solo performance works: Yellow Towel, Mercurial George, Cutlass Spring, and Mike.
In 2014, Michel received the ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) for outstanding artistic accomplishments and was highlighted among notable choreographers of the year by the New York Times. In 2017, she was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. Michel became the first-ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2018, and received the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland) in 2019. In 2022, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded her the Jacqueline-Lemieux prize in recognition of her contribution to dance in Canada. Last year, Michel was selected for the Prix de la danse de Montréal for international touring.
Daniel Barrow
Daniel Barrow brings together a few excerpts from their “digital puppet show”, I Can’t Stop Looking at You. Developed largely during the pandemic, Barrow’s work tells the story of a queer teenager who becomes locked in an erotic staring contest with a painting of a sad clown, hanging in a public museum, and lulled into a deep, drowsy retrospection on love, isolation and mortality.
Daniel Barrow is a Montreal-based artist working in sculpture, collage, installation, and performance, though their practice centres primarily on the practice of drawing. They are best known for using an overhead projector to present pictorial narratives in “manual animations,” merging the methods and cultural histories of cinema, comics, animation, and magic lantern shows. In this window presentation, Barrow will showcase the breadth of work they produced as a “manual animator.” Barrow uses overhead projectors as well as an antiquated, late-1980s AMIGA animation software called “Deluxe Paint,” translating the gestures of cinema to a kind of digital “magic lantern show.”
Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. They have performed at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), MoMA PS1 (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (Germany), the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, and the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival. Barrow is the winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award as well as the recipient of the 2013 Glenfiddich Artist in Residence Prize.
L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres (L’ODHO)
CHAMBRE AVEC VUES
In a three-hour performance, L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres moves around an old metal bed, bouncing music off of tableaux vivants. One action succeeds the next, repeating in loops and responding to the audience’s wanderings. Objects come to life, in their banal splendour, like premonitions of rediscovered memories. Everything crackles, burbles, overflows, like a river spilling over its banks.
Design: L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres
With: Bruno Bouchard, Jasmin Cloutier, Simon Elmaleh, Benoit Fortier, Philippe Lessard Drolet, and Danya Ortmann
Sound: Frédéric Auger
Lighting: Philippe Lessard-Drolet
TRANSCONTINENTAL TRICYCLES
Transcontinental Tricycles is a three-part moving sound installation that sublimates the notion of debris. Each pedal stroke questions beauty and celebrates the useless, from the garbage dump to the concert hall.
Creation: L’orchestres d’hommes-orchestres
Performance: Julie Cloutier Delorme, Maggy Flynn and Chloé Surprenant.
When L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres was founded in Québec City in 2002, the group’s members had no idea they were actually building a springboard for the performing arts. Unclassifiable and bordering on several artistic disciplines, L’ODHO first made its mark with the concert event Performs Tom Waits. Since then, more than twenty original productions created both for the stage and for public spaces have followed, among them Shattered Cabaret, Tintamarre caravane, Les Palais, and Kitchen Chicken. Invited to appear on major stages, both in Québec and abroad, L’ODHO has presented productions in more than ninety cities in some twenty countries across Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. L’ODHO received the City of Toronto’s Glenn Gould Protégé Prize in 2013 (selected by Robert Lepage) and the Prix de la Ville de Québec in 2015.
Nadège Grebmeier Forget
Under the imposing visual structures of the SAT, this sensory experience intermingles light, sound, and movement. Swinging between fascination and repulsion, Me.a.rrymaking asks where individuals fit in today’s society, as its intensity roils and redefines how we see bodies and mental landscapes. Through a multiplicity of gazes, Grebmeier Forget reinvents and reconfigures herself, in a display of almost Saturnian synchronicity. The performance explores the transformative power of abundance even as it reveals the insidious sadness underlying celebration. Between elevating collective bodies and sharing sensations, Grebmeier Forget invites us to see what is hidden in the depths of unconscious desire and disorder.
Nadège Grebmeier Forget explores self-transformation and the performativity of the image in hybrid works that intermix performance, installation, collage, and painting. In her work, she questions the tensions between gesture and gaze, excess and restraint, private and spectacular. Using makeup, the body, and ephemeral materials, she activates metamorphosis rituals in which desire, consumption, and identity construction intersect and clash.
Her work has been presented in Canada and internationally, including at Fondation PHI, Fonderie Darling, the Musée d’art de Joliette, Basement (Berlin), Mains d’Œuvres (Saint-Ouen, France), and Astérides (Marseille), and she is the first performance artist to receive the Prix Pierre-Ayot (2019). She has also had her research published by AWARE (Paris), Routledge (UK), and other platforms.
Audrée Juteau, Zoey Gauld, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Ellen Furey and Marilyne St-Sauveur
In The Mushroom at the End of the World, the recent book by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, we learn that matsusake mushrooms grow only in the ruins of capitalism—where forests have been razed and landscapes devastated by mining, and where one would have believed no life was possible—giving a glimmer of hope. Mystic-Informatic uses the mushroom as a metaphor and offers dance as a force of resistance that can breathe new life into the trash of today: obsolete technological materials.
Through dance and together with bodies, technology is diverted from its primary function, such that we connect with it in a sensory, corporeal, and imaginative way. In a punk, apocalyptic, feminist spirit, we give dance back its power and exorcise our ecological despair.
Audrée Juteau (Rouyn-Noranda), Zoey Gauld, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Ellen Furey, and Marilyne St-Sauveur (Montréal) work with concepts of the collective and transdisciplinary art practices. They create together within L’Annexe-A, an organization founded by Juteau in Abitibi-Témiscamingue in 2018 to express her desire for the decentralization of contemporary dance and performance practices. A similar desire is found in the choreographic process involved in the works that L’Annexe-A produces. Together, the artists co-created Mystic-Informatic and Mystic-Métallic (en processus), in which they explore relationships between the living world, nature, and politics. Each collective member, in her own way, promotes an approach to dance that defies hierarchies, fosters collective intelligence, and questions social and aesthetic norms. Some members also teach or perform research, and one serves as director of the artist-run centre L’Écart.
Laylit
Laylit is a platform and collective celebrating music and artists from the Arab/SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region and its diaspora. Over the last six years, Laylit’s dance parties have carved out a place unmatched in North American and European nightlife, becoming a much-anticipated social gathering and a unique musical experience. With recent features in the New York Times and Pitchfork, and three Boiler Room events in NYC, DC, and Montréal, the party is now active in more than ten cities.
Each party takes you on a genre-spanning journey, highlighting the incredible musical diversity, depth, and richness emerging out of the Arab/SWANA region. Laylit has established its place on the scene with a signature electronic sound, blending shaabi, dabke, mahraganat, Arabic pop, and hip hop with contemporary, boundary-pushing dance music (techno, breakbeat, hyperpop) inspired by New York’s and Montréal’s thriving underground clubs.
Laylit promotes inclusivity and unity across cultures, languages, dialects, religions, identities, and sexual orientations.
le désert mauve
Inspired by the eponymous novel by poet Nicole Brossard, le désert mauve develops a sensitive relationship between sound and image through video works and performances, which shift back and forth between fluid landscapes, infinite horizons, and microscopic dances.
Charline Dally’s abstract paintings, created using 3D modelling and modular analog video synthesis, feature fluid, sparkling lo-fi images that play with our perception. Her inspirations include the pioneering practices of Hilma af Klint, the Vasulkas, Frank Auerbach, and the hydrofeminist movement. Sound artist Gabrielle HB designs minimalist, enveloping spaces using precise gestures and concise systems. Using analog synthesis, voice, and digital tools, she takes inspiration from composers Éliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Pauline Oliveros. Her compositions are supple, luminous, and deliberately slow.
Musician and composer Gabrielle HB moves back and forth between free improvisation and slow constructions. In performance, she finds ways to nurture forms of tenderness, play, and transparency. She holds a master’s degree in sound arts from the London College of Communications (2021) and her most recent solo album, Daily Scores, was released in December 2023.
Visual artist and director Charline Dally merges video art, textile, and glass in films and installations. Interested in the subversive potential of radical softness, she views hypersensitivity as a power. A graduate of Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, France) and the visual arts program at the Université du Québec à Montreal, she presented her first solo exhibition at Diagonale (Montréal) in May 2024.
Gabrielle and Charline form the duo le désert mauve. They have presented audiovisual performances at the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent, the MUTEK festival (Canada, Spain, Argentina), and the Société des arts technologiques, and video works at the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan), the Beijing International Short Film Festival, Les Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma (Montréal), and the Athens Digital Arts Festival.
Jamie Ross
Filmmaker and visual artist Jamie Ross presents Prayer Machine, a kaleidoscopic supercut of the fruit of twenty years of 8mm work, new music, and performance actions. Prayer Machine is conceived in the idiom of Stan VanDerBeek’s utopian expanded cinema experiment, which debuted in rural New York in his Movie-Drome of the 1960s.
Ross is joined by artist collaborators Han Chen and Christos Tejada in adapting Eurypides’ tragedy The Bacchae, in which a xenophobic, sexist head of state is overcome by the forces of the genderqueer god of dance through collective trance.
In Prayer Machine, the advancing frames of the camera’s shutter envelop the audience in an experience that underscores the power, throughout history, of fluidity and coming together whenever the forces that would separate and marginalize us seize power.
Jamie Ross is a Montreal visual artist, filmmaker, and writer. Ross’s recent exhibition projects include collaborations with zoologists and their enormous Victorian mollusk collections, elderly prima ballerinas, and Pagans incarcerated in Québec. Through sculpture, collage, the moving image, and the written word, Ross looks at cultures, codes, and comportments that emerge out of queer hiding. With an academic background in linguistics, the artist’s projects are often defined by language, speech, and song.
For Prayer Machine, Ross is joined by collaborators Christos Tejada and Han Chen, both based in Los Angeles. Tejada is a musician, artist, and mage proudly trained outside the academy who works in tattoo, drawing, painting, and ritual. Chen, a former sergeant in the United States military, is a professional gogo dancer, student of veterinary medicine, and prostitute.
Elisapie and Caroline Monnet, with Hologramme
IKUMAK (LUMIÈRE)
A work by Elisapie and Caroline Monnet
Music revisited by Hologramme
Lighting: Julie Basse
Sound: Alexandre Fallu
Elisapie and Caroline Monnet present an original musical and visual experience under the Société des arts technologiques (SAT) dome. They envisage their work as a fusion of contemporary art elements and bring us along on a profound emotional voyage, in which edges are erased and sensations become visceral. In this intense twenty-minute experience, the melodies from Elisapie’s album Inuktitut are interpreted with Monnet’s emblematic motifs in a 360-degree projection, blurring the borders between deep calm and dancing ecstasy. Elipasie will perform her songs accompanied by electronic artist Hologramme. Together, they revisit new arrangements composed specially for this event.
Elisapie’s unconditional attachment to her territory and her language, Inuktitut, remains at the core of her creative journey. Born and raised in Salluit, a small village in Nunavik accessible by plane, Elisapie is an emblematic Canadian Inuk singer-songwriter.
On Inuktitut, Elisapie’s fourth solo album, the Inuk artist covers ten classic rock and pop songs ranging from the 1960s to the ’90s translated into Inuktitut, her mother tongue. The result is an emotional, autobiographical soundtrack wherein each song is associated with a loved one or an intimate story. Acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, Inuktitut landed a shortlist nomination for the Polaris Music Prize. Its success also earned Elisapie a Juno Award in the Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year category in 2024, as well as five awards at the ADISQ Gala the same year. That same year, she has also been honoured with a Canada Post stamp. At the 2025 Juno Awards, Elisapie was winner of the Adult Alternative Album of the Year category and a nominee for Album of the Year.
Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais. She studied sociology and communications at the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada (Spain). Her work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial (New York), the Toronto Biennial of Art, the KØS Museum (Denmark), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the National Gallery of Canada. Solo exhibitions include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Arsenal Contemporary (New York), the Centre d’art international de Vassivière (France), and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Her work is included in numerous collections in North America and in the permanent UNESCO collection in Paris. In 2020, Monnet received the Prix Pierre-Ayot and was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award. She is also the recipient of the Sundance Institute’s Merata Mita Fellowship and was recently named a Companion of the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec. Monnet is based in Montréal and is represented by Blouin Division.
MUTEK
MUTEK is a festival dedicated to electronic music and digital creativity. Focused on discovery and innovation, this year’s festival showcases an eclectic program bringing together local and international artists for six unique, immersive evenings, indoors and outdoors, and over eighty live audiovisual performances, from August 19 to 24. The Village Numérique, a free digital installation circuit in the heart of Montréal’s Quartier des Spectacles, will enhance the experience for the festival’s 26th edition.
In addition, MUTEK Forum, now in its 11th edition, brings together artists, institutions, researchers, technology professionals, digital experts, and curators from August 20 to 22. Covering a wide range of disciplines, including music, artificial intelligence, extended reality (XR), digital art, gaming, quantum computing, architecture, and design, the Forum explores the intersections between art, technology, and science, fostering the emergence of new ideas and connections.
SPURS with Noël Transcendance Vezina
cowboy angel: Country Line Dancing Workshop
Noël folds their devotion to queer country line dancing [SPURS NIGHT] into the universe of their latest work [tiny angel creatures] to offer this all level, drop-in workshop. through the archetypes of cowboy / angel we will sync up in lock step, in celebration of queer resilience.
Noël Transcendance Vezina is a queer, interdisciplinary, dance and movement artist based in Montreal (Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang). Largely community-taught, their process is highly intuitive and organic. Approaching performance as a tool to connect deeply, to themselves and to others, their work often takes on ephemeral and intimate forms. Their most recent work, tiny angel creatures, premiered in 2024 with support from the Conseil des arts de Montréal and the Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
Based in the history of LGBTQ+ country and western dancing, SPURS is a queer line dance event that combines traditional steps with a range of music—from honky-tonk to new country to contemporary pop. SPURS was created by Canadian-born actor Kathleen Munroe in June 2023. Noël has been at the helm of the Montreal SPURS community since December 2023. SPURS Nights are open to all – with or without experience – fostering a vibrant, inclusive, nightlife space for Queer people and their friends.
