https://www.facebook.com/lorelei.williams2

Lorelei Williams is an Interior Salish/Coast Salish woman from Skatin Nations/Sts’Ailes, Vancouver, BC. Lorelei is an activist advocating for victims and families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Butterflies in Spirit is the dance group Lorelei founded in 2012 with the goal of empowering Indigenous women in her community and raising awareness about her aunt, Belinda Williams, who went missing in 1978 and her cousin, Tanya Holyk, who was murdered in 1996. The dancers are MMIWG family members. Through dance, they raise awareness of violence against Indigenous females.

www.facebook.com/ButterfliesBIS

Butterflies in Spirit is collaborating with Aeriosa to incorporate vertical dance into aspects of their choreography, and Aeriosa is providing training for their dancers to help bring this vision to reality. The two companies are developing a new performance together with Dr. Mique’l Dangeli, co-artistic director of Git Hayetsk Dancers.

Dance, Healing, & MMIWG builds on the years of community healing work Lorelei Williams has done with her dance group, Butterflies in Spirit.

Founded in 2012, Butterflies in Spirit is a dance group consisting of family members of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG). With a mission to raise awareness of violence against Aboriginal women and girls, Butterflies in Spirit has performed at numerous gatherings and events throughout Canada, the US, and has traveled as far as Bogota, Colombia to perform at an International Women’s World Peace event.

www.eaglesongdancers.org

Spakwus Slulem translates as Eagle Song Dancers. The artists are members of the Squamish First Nation. Their performances of traditional Sea-Going Canoe Family songs and dances put into practice ancestral Squamish Canoe (Chiax) Protocol. Composer and artistic director Bob (S7aplek) Baker is a Squamish cultural advisor and educator who is contributing to the resurgence of Sea-Going Canoe Culture in the Pacific Northwest by researching ancestral Canoe history, creating new songs and dances, and gathering Spakwus Slulem Dance Group members together to share Squamish culture with the community and the public.

Aeriosa began collaborating with S7aplek in 2009, when he worked as a Squamish cultural advisor for the Aeriosa winter site work commission ‘Inspired by Place’ celebrating the cultural and natural landscapes of the Sea to Sky corridor between Squamish and Whistler. Since 2011 Aeriosa and Spakwus Slulem have co-created and performed seven different adaptations of their site-specific ‘Thunderbird’ collaboration in Vancouver .

githayetsk.com

Git Hayetsk means the people of the copper shield in Sm’algyax which is spoken by the Nisga’a, Tsimshian, and Gitxsan Nations. Our dancers are bonded by their common ancestry to the Sm’algyak speaking peoples with distinctions in their family ties to the Haida, Tlingit, Haisla, and Musqueam Nations. Our home and ancestral villages are located in Southeast Alaska, Vancouver BC and along the coastline of the Terrace-Prince Rupert area including the Nass and Skeena Rivers.

kerilatimer.com

Keri Latimer is a musician from Winnipeg, Manitoba. With her alt-folk group Leaf Rapids and previous band Nathan she has been touring internationally for 15 years. Aside from crooning about vultures and barbershop stabbings, she plays the theremin and scores music for film.

Career highlights include featured solo performances with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, most notably in 2018 for the Canadian premiere of Bjork‘s composition, Family for strings. She has contributed music for films including Academy Award nominated feature film Frozen River by Courtney Hunt, Only Dream Things by Guy Maddin, and Shelagh Carter’s feature film, Before Anything You Say.

With the help of Canada Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council and the Manitoba Arts Council an album of music for theremin is being recorded to be released in 2020.

www.sarahefuller.com

Visual Artist Sarah Fuller holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Ottawa and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Emily Carr University. Sarah works predominantly with the mediums of photography, video, and installation, and many of her pieces incorporate the theme of landscape, nature, and insects.

Aeriosa is currently collaborating with Sarah on two upcoming shows exploring the disappearing qualities of moths as a metaphor for human belonging and displacement. ‘Habitats & Camouflage’ is a nature-based work set on the West Coast of Vancouver Island and ‘Home/Domicile’ is an urban site work set in Vancouver.

facebook.com/LandonKrentz

Landon Krentz is an ASL performing artist and director, based in Calgary. He is an advocate for inclusive arts and educates audiences to look upon deafness as diversity. He is the founder of Artistic Sign Language Agency, a Deaf-run ASL Interpreting Service supporting Deaf-led artists.

Aeriosa is currently collaborating with Landon on ‘Flocking’, a research project exploring the intersection of dance and Deaf culture. The goal is to allow discoveries and new perspectives in preparation for creating shows bringing together D/deaf and non-deaf artists and audiences.

histerianova.com

Choreographer and dancer Marija Šćekić, is the founder and Artistic Director of Histeria NOVA Artistic organization. She was professionally trained in classical ballet, contemporary dance and butoh. She studied choreography and contemporary dance at Concordia University in Montréal (Canada).

In July 2005, Histeria NOVA was registered as a nonprofit artistic organization to explore dance, choreography and movement theatre where elements of audio-visual are inseparable with performance arts. Her deep passion for biological science, music and nature found its expression through choreography in early 1996 while creating her first choreography Modulations for which she received Concordia Dance Prize.

In 2010, she started to work with mountain climbers and members of Croatian Mountain Rescue Association and created an interdisciplinary dance project, Gates of Velebit, which was the first, pioneering step towards future development of vertical dance in Croatia.

In 2017, she founded Histeria NOVA School for Natural Movement and Dance in Zadar where she currently teaches principles of human anatomy, biomechanics and neuromuscular movement connections for dancers.

www.orchidensemble.com

The Orchid Ensemble is an established Vancouver-based trio that fuses Eastern and Western musical traditions. The ensemble is composed of Lan Tung on the erhu (Chinese violin) and vocals, Dailin Hsieh on the zheng (Chinese Zither), and Jonathan Bernard on marimba/percussion. Orchid Ensemble and Aeriosa have collaborated on tree dancing productions at UBC Botanical Gardens, Tofino Botanical Gardens, and Stanley Park (Vancouver).

In 2019 Orchid Ensemble, Aeriosa and Chimerik, pooled resources to produce the interdisciplinary theatre show ‘Crossing Mountains & Seas’, co-created by composer Lan Tung, choreographers Julia Taffe and Chengxin Wei, and multimedia artist Sammy Chien. Fusing contemporary and aerial dance, original music with Chinese traditions, and interactive multimedia projection, the performance is a journey through an imagined video game that crosses over modern day Canada and a magical world of prehistoric China, as described in the ancient book Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas). Two world premiere performances were presented at the Vancouver Playhouse and the Port Theatre in Nanaimo to audience and peer acclaim.

www.jordannobles.com

Jordan Nobles is an internationally acclaimed Canadian composer and winner of numerous awards including a Juno for classical composition. He is also the artistic director of Redshift Music a Vancouver-based organization dedicated to bringing the music of living composers to the general public through innovative production, site-specific performance, and new media.

Jordan has created multiple original scores for Aeriosa’s dance work including: ‘In Situ’ at Library Square for the Cultural Olympiad, ‘Being’ at The Dance Centre,‘Refugia’ at the Shadbolt Theatre, and ‘Second Nature’ at The Dance Centre.

http://verticaldanceforum.com

The Vertical Dance Forum (VDF) is an artist-driven network with the goal of promoting vertical dance and encouraging international cooperation, along with sharing experiences, creativity, and perspective regarding the art form. In 2014, Fabrice Guillot (former professional rock climber and artistic director of the French dance company, Retouramont) initiated a formal meeting, inviting predominantly established European vertical dance artistic directors. From this meeting, the VDF was born. The Vertical Dance Forum network is comprised of seven dance companies:

• Vertical Dance Kate Lawrence (VDKL) ~ Wales
• Il Posto ~ Italy
• Fidget Feet ~ Ireland
• Histeria Nova ~ Croatia
• Gravity & Levity ~ UK
• Retouramont ~ France
• Aeriosa ~ Canada

www.hcma.ca/about

HCMA and Aeriosa share the aim to foster healthier, more imaginative and engaged communities by activating space through art and design. TILT Curiousity Labs is where HCMA extends their practice of tilting/shifting their perspective in the design process into the world around them by asking: ‘If you tilt your perspective, just for a moment, what would you see differently? How might that change everything?’

As a 2018/19 TILT Artist-in-Residence, Julia explored how to activate various unloved and underused sites in Vancouver. Together, Julia and HCMA used dance to challenge what’s possible for architecture—identifying both natural and urban spaces for performances which could be used for Vancouver’s first International Vertical Dance Summit. Julia’s residency culminated in a series of workshop presentations and artist talks, and a brochure design project with the HCMA architectural and communications design teams. Read the case study at: https://hcma.ca/project/aeriosa-dance-society/