Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal is pleased to welcome a new group of artists to the Interdisciplinary Writers’ Lab.
Curated and led by dramaturg Sarah Elkashef, the Interdisciplinary Writers’ Lab is an opportunity for artists with diverse practices to share processes of creation and development. Aimed at fostering conversation and collaboration across disciplines, the Lab meets every six weeks to share work and feedback. In addition, one-on-one dramaturgy, exploratory workshops and residencies are integrated as the individual projects evolve over a sustained period of time. Disciplines have included visual arts, circus, performance art, theatre, puppetry, dance, playwriting, animation and astrophysics.
Find more information about the participants below.
THE PARTICIPANTS
Claudel Doucet
Claudel is an artist whose career was fostered in the culture of contemporary circus. She researches risk in bodies and presences to weaken facades and explores the forces that stretch, between violence and tenderness. She looks at the ineffable, the delicate and the vertigo which in turn unites us or confines us to solitude. Co-created with Cooper Lee Smith and Félix-Antoine Boutin, her latest project “Se prendre” is an apartment performance that blurs vertigoes, voluptuousness and bitterness. She collaborates as a director at the National Circus School of Montreal and in various projects including Zip Zap Academy (Cape Town) and Uniarts (Stockholm). In 2017, she created QUE NOUS SOYONS, a collaborative in situ project co-produced by the 7 Fingers and LA SERRE – arts vivants. A graduate of ENC (Montreal, 2004), she is the co-founder of the Cie du Poivre Rose (Brussels).
Burcu Emeç
Burcu is a performance maker and live artist. Her approach is discovery-based and sensorial, frequently playing with collage and searching for transdisciplinarity. Her work interacts with fields of social commentary, movement, theatre, installation and active listening, and often uses an image, object or memory as a departure point for creation. Burcu’s collaborative and independent works have been presented in Montreal, Toronto and Germany; at OFFTA, SummerWorks, MAI, Eastern Bloc, Never Apart, Studio 303 and ZH Festival. Recent accolades include the Grolsch Hybridity Award, MainLine Creativity Award, Frankie’s Best English Production nomination, and 5 META nominations. Burcu is also a coordinator at the artist-run centre Articule.
Soleil Launière
Pekuakamiulnuatsh originaire de Mashteuiatsh sur les rives du lac pekuakami, Soleil Launière vit et œuvre à Tiöhtià:ke (Montréal). Artiste multidisciplinaire alliant le chant, le mouvement et le théâtre tout en passant par l’art performance. Elle entremêle la présence du corps bi-spirituel et l’audiovisuel expérimental tout en s’inspirant de la cosmogonie et l’esprit sacré des animaux du monde Innu. Elle exprime en actes une pensée sur les silences et les langages universelle.
Clea Minaker
Clea is a performer, director, designer and interdisciplinary artist who trained at the International Institute of Puppetry Arts in Charleville-Mézières, France (2002-2005). Clea explores an interest for shadow, light, live projections, object creation, as well as the poetics of manipulation, and corporeal gesture. She works in theatre, live music, opera, dance, film, visual art, and community arts. She has created works for the N.A.C Orchestra, The Banff Centre, IF! Istanbul, Festival Casteliers; and collaborated with Feist, Atom Egoyan, So-called, Kid Koala and more. Clea was awarded the 2009 Siminovitch Protégé Prize for Theatre Design by prize laureate and puppeteer Ronnie Burkett.
Helen Simard
Helen Simard is a Montréal-based choreographer, rehearsal director, and dance researcher. After working with Solid State Breakdance for 12 years, an artist collective that combined street and contemporary dance, she switched gears in 2012 to lead her own artistic projects. Her current choreographic research explores the codes and aesthetics of rock music, creating lively, interactive, performances that challenge the conventions of stage dance forms: her most recent work, REQUIEM POP, premiered at Agora de la danse in April 2019. She is currently writing her first play When your baby dies. Helen holds a BFA (2000) and MA (2014) in contemporary dance.
The Lab is led by Fatma Sarah Elkashef
Sarah est artiste de théâtre, principalement en dramaturgie, qui se spécialise en développement de nouvelles pièces et en création interdisciplinaire. Au sein du PWM, elle pilote le Laboratoire d’écriture interdisciplinaire ainsi que divers autres projets. Elle travaille régulièrement à titre de dramaturge, de créatrice et d’enseignante dans le cadre de différents programmes à l’École nationale de théâtre du Canada et a reçu le prix Bernard Amyot pour l’enseignement en 2016. Sarah a récemment co-créé un spectacle de cirque pour public familial intitulé Eat Sweet Feet et continue de travailler au développement de High Z, une installation immersive pour planétariums basée sur la découverte de l’expansion accélérée de l’univers qui a remporté le prix Nobel en 2011. Avant de s’établir au Canada, elle a été lectrice principale au Soho Theatre de Londres, au Royaume-Uni. Parmi les nombreux postes qu’elle a occupés à New York City, Sarah a également été réalisatrice associée, gestionnaire de compagnie et associée littéraire. Elle est diplômée de l’Université de Warwick en littérature anglaise et théâtre (Royaume-Uni) et détient une maîtrise en théâtre du Hunter College (CUNY, NYC) ainsi qu’un diplôme d’études supérieures en communications de l’Université Concordia (Montréal, Canada).
