Dancemakers to Present Double-Bill with New Resident Artists in January 2015

Dancemakers' Curators Emi Forster and Benjamin Kamino have announce the first two Resident Artists (RA) of the new Dancemakers Incubation Production House (IPH) model.

Montreal-based Dana Michel will serve as a Dancemakers Resident Artist from 2015-2017. "I have slowly come to realize that what I am doing is trying to situate life by using the most familiar (to me) proof of life there is, which is the body."

Splitting her time between Berlin, Montreal and Toronto, Zoja Smutny will serve as a Dancemakers Resident Artist from 2015-2016. "During my residency I'll be creating a practice of collective writing and music making, situated within a choreographic lens."

This first series of performances consists of two major productions:

In Touch, a double bill featuring work from Michel and Smutny. Dana Michel will reprise her subversive work 1976, a 20-minute character-shifting hyper-personal solo performance of desired femininity and perceived masculinity. Alongside it, Zoja Smutny will re-imagine her short film Recent Future (co-created with Guntar Kravis), which recently screened at Gallery TPW in Toronto and at Mousonturm in Frankfurt, as a solo choreography that lives at the intersection of live and cinematic performance.

In the second week, Michel will present 1976, have several. Throughout her first four weeks in residence she will work with the Dancemakers company to revisit, transmit and blow apart 1976, making a group piece from the rubble.

Dana Michel is a choreographer and performer based in Montreal, internationally renowned for her intelligent, witty and unconventional solo performances. Before entering the BFA in Contemporary Dance program at Concordia University in her late twenties, she was a marketing executive, competitive runner and football player. Her latest solo work, Yellow Towel, premiered at the 2013 Festival TransAmériques in Montreal to critical acclaim, was named among the top dance moments in 2013 in Voir and The Dance Current Magazine, and singled out as one of the most remarkable productions at the 2014 American Realness Festival (NYC) by the New York Times. In Vienna, Austria, Michel was awarded the ImPulsTanz Award in recognition for artistic excellence after presenting Yellow Towel at the ImPulsTanz International Dance Festival.

Zoja Smutny recently completed her Masters, Solo/Dance/Authorship at UDK in Berlin. Smutny's choreographed work deals with questions of captured time, real time and still time. Her main body of research involves a collaborative practice with Toronto visual artist Guntar Kravis. Smutny's live and video work has been presented at international festivals in both Europe and Canada. Her dance video between time, which she created with Kravis, screened at the Court Metrage at the 64th annual Festival des Cannes in 2011 and again in 2012 as part of a screening of fashion films curated by Portable.com in New York City. Her live solo and group work has been presented in Prague, Athens, Berlin, Vienna, Montreal, Halifax, Toronto, and Mexico. Currently she is working on a conceptual album entitled Rosé Porn, and a collaborative practice with four interdisciplinary artists called a Choreographed Conversation.

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