Meagan O'Shea (www.meaganoshea.ca) “One of the most engaging artists in Toronto” Toronto Star

Contemporary Interdisciplinary Artist Meagan O'Shea creates and performs dance/theatre/performance work and multi-media interactive installations. A storyteller through movement, improvisation, tactile association, audio samples, choreography, and theatre.

As a creator and performer O'Shea is best known for her self-solo work. She recently completed her third interactive multi-media installation and performance project. something blue examines the physical manifestation of emotional trauma through the lens of ended marriage, and questions the lack of ritual for love lost. Her preceding project, As I Unravel small maps of my spirit , is an interactive Story-Quilt comprised of forty squares featuring the art and audio story of forty participants from across Canada who are victims and/or offenders of serious crime. “the first lady of contemporary character dance" (Toronto Star), Meagan O'Shea gained national acclaim for her self solo Night Stills , which has toured extensively in Canada, and abroad, since its premiere in Toronto in 2003.

Meagan often engages with different communities to feed her art making. She has been guest artist in residence at fabrik Potsdam in Germany, Earthdance in Massachusetts, Le Groupe Dance Lab in Ottawa, Sunshine Coast Dance Society in Sechelt BC, Linda Raino Dance in Victoria BC, The Banff Centre, Dance Base in Edinburgh Scotland, and The Theatre Centre in Toronto.

Meagan has created performance work for IDAC, Loose Confederacy of Newfoundland, Dusk Dances, Dance Ontario, Whetstone Productions, and YMI Dancing. She has created solos for Susanne Martin (Berlin), Megan English, choreography for GirlCanCreate and 22TEOS, and directed Susie Burpee's dance-theatre solo The Spinster's Almanac , and Lisa Pijuan-Nomura's stage show She Said Saffron. Meagan teaches Self-Solo Choreography and Interdisciplinary Movement-based Performance Creation. Originally from Ottawa, Meagan was the first graduate from the School of Dance's Professional Training Program in Modern Dance in 1996.

Meagan is co-founder of HUB 14, a collectively run dance and performance studio created in 2004 with Ame Henderson, Jen Johnson and Jacob Zimmer. They produce Pick 7 , an annual series of seven events, each focused on examining the creative process of two different artists.

collective (gulp) dance projects (www.artengine.ca/collectivegulp) was founded by artistic co-directors, Alexis Kate Andrew and Elizabeth MacKinnon who began working together informally in 2001 and founded collective (gulp) in 2002. collective (gulp) directed and produced the first square zero independent dance festival and SQUARE ZERO - the second edition/la deuxième édition. In all, (gulp) has presented or facilitated the participation and collaboration of close to 50 local, national and international artists in its Ottawa based projects, including dancers, musicians, video and visual artists. (gulp)'s other works include promenades (2002), 16 % (2002), press star (2003), Fresh Hot Dances, Made to Order (2003), and The Poodle, the Crocodile and the Microwave; or How I lived to Tell the Tale (2004). In December 2006 (gulp) premiered TALK SHOW, a full-length performance piece that uses text, movement, visual art and video to create a world where two ordinary women channel Brad Pitt, Jay Leno, Tie Domi, Ron McLean, Dr. Phil and others to face up to their own shadow selves – the fears and fallacies that we clothe, cover and exploit to get through each day. Their most recent work is 6X2, presented as part of Choregraphes d'ICI.

collective (gulp) works on themes relating to public and private spaces and behaviours, language, communication and the impacts of technology on our physicality and relationships. Physical research has examined the intersections of “pedestrian” and “dance” movement, communication between performers and audience, work with props and the use of voice and text. collective (gulp)'s work is primarily improvised and comes out of abiding enthusiasm for this branch of dance investigation and performance. In addition to performing and presenting, the members of (gulp) co-manage a member-run studio, Movement Arts Ottawa, and teach contact improvisation. (photo: Lorne Finley)

Aimée Dawn Robinson is a dancer, musican, writer and visual artist. In collaboration with Barbara Lindenberg, Aimée co-directs the Toronto contemporary dances series, Up Darling and directs the multi-disciplinary performance series A Month of Sundays .

Primarily an improviser, Aimée has collaborated with musician/composers including Jennifer Castle, Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver, Alex Lukashevsky, Martin Arnold, Kurt Newman and Doug Tielli in venues in Canada and the United States. Aimée records and performs music with The Thorpe, Lions, Eric Chenaux and Moth Ring and has composed dance scores for artists Tamara Cosby, Seika Boye, Barbara Lindenberg and herself. Recently, Aimée appeared as the subject of the short documentary film motherdrift , directed by Simone Roper. Aimée has had the pleasure of dancing with artists Motaz Kabbani, Barb Lindenberg, Viv Moore and Terrill Maguire, though she most often performs solo as mother drift.

Aimée holds her Masters of Arts from York University, Department of Dance. She wrote her thesis on the roles of memory and forgetting in the butoh of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. She has presented papers and lectured at University of California, Riverside and York University. Her current research focuses on the memory and forgetting in experimental improvising, Canadian Aboriginal dance and butoh.

Aimée's upcoming performances include: singing in a new work by composer Stephen Parkinson at Mercer Union Gallery's Music in Alternative Spaces and the continuation of her series, mother drift dances to the songs in her head at the June installment of A Month of Sundays. (photo: Renee Lear)

Susanna Hood - Artistic Director of her dance-based interdisciplinary performance company, hum (www.humdansoundart.ca), Susanna Hood is a compelling and virtuosic performer in dance and music. She began her career as a member of the Toronto Dance Theatre from 1991 through 1995. Independently, she has performed the works of various Toronto choreographers, created singing/dancing roles with Autumn Leaf Performance, acted on film for filmmaker Philip Barker, created music for the dance works of Louis Laberge-Côté, Rebecca Todd and Eryn Dace Trudell, collaborated extensively with composers John Oswald and Nilan Perera, and performed widely as an improviser both in dance and music. Her collaborative projects as well as her own choreography and music compositions have been presented throughout Toronto, nationally, and inter-nationally on stage and in film since 1991. In the fall of 1998, she was one of two recipients of the K.M. Hunter Emerging Artists Awards in Dance. In June 2006, Susanna was awarded the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for her performance in her most recent solo work She's gone away.

In January/February 2006, Susanna toured Waking en-dessous to Montreal, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Luxembourg and Cardiff (Wales) as the Canadian choreographer in Dance Roads 2006, also taking part in the Dance Visions 2006 creation workshop in Berlin in January and August 2006. In September 2007, Susanna premiered her first group piece loveloathing on the company members of Dancemakers as part of the Dancemakers Presents Series. In January 2007, she took part in a group creation lab under the guidance of Peter Boneham at Le Groupe Dance Lab.

Both in and out of association with the company, Susanna has been actively involved in collaborative interdisciplinary creation projects exploring the interaction of movement, sound and varying forms of interactive technology. Such collaborations have included feel HEaR SEEcret with performance artist Katherine Duncanson, musician/composer Nilan Perera, and electronics artist Jim Ruxton at Toronto's Free Fall Festival 2002, Spinvolver with composer John Oswald at music festivals in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and Albi 2002/03, and Liminal Projects with musician/composer/visual artist Jackson 2bears and Tom Kuo, and visual artist, Tanya Doody throughout Ontario and British Columbia 2001/02. Most recently she has collaborated with director Jennifer Tarver to choreograph and stage Crave by the late British playwright Sarah Kane for Toronto's Nightwood Theatre as part of their 2006/07 season.