Connections//Collisions
Connections//Collisions
Mile Zero Dance Cabaret | Curated by Josh Languedoc
The January Cabaret is co-curated with Postmarginal Edmonton!
Featuring a variety of artists, this ambitious and unpredictable event welcomes new audiences to experience a series of multiple new art pieces, both experimental and emerging. Now for two nights due to popular demand at the same low cost! This season, we are sharing the curation with Edmonton-based partner organizations.
January 2 +3
7:30 PM
$20 MZD Members/ $25 General Admission
There will be ASL interpretation for both nights
Location:
MILE ZERO DANCE
9931 78 Ave NW
Edmonton, AB
FEATURED ARTISTS
Cui Jinzhe
Emma Schneider
Janita Frantsi
Punit Singh
Emilia Fox Hillyer
Christian Albarran
Sable Boltz
Gabi Stachniak
Mona Sahi
Brooke Leifso
& sound artist Neil Robinson
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCES
Cui Jinzhe presents 人间至好在卿身 / The Nicest Part Of Everyday Is You
Emma Schneider presents My Uncle Died of Aids and All I Got Was This Shirt
My Uncle Died of Aids and All I Got Was This Shirt
is a solo devised theatre piece based in poetry and personal storytelling. This piece centers around the writings of my great-uncle Cam, who passed away from complications related to AIDS before I was born, and delves into themes of family, the arts, queer generational loss, and the importance of independent queer archiving especially in difficult and uncertain times.
Janita Frantsi presents Alternative Endings
Alternative Endings is a work-in-progress dance film journey where the viewer chooses how the story unfolds. The piece is inspired by the idea that different decisions lead to different outcomes, so after each dance short film, the audience chooses how the piece continues. The films in this piece draw from Janita’s personal experiences in Canada and Finland and in different environments, all of which shape her identity.
The music for this piece was composed by an Edmonton drummer, Jon Guenter.
Punit Sin presents SubHuman
Christian Milton Albarran Bernal & Emilia Fox Hillyer present Archivos Perdidos
Archivos Perdidos is inspired by the archival materials of our ancestors, Lucio Angeles, an indigenous grandfather from Mexico in the need of working as ‘brasero’ in the United State & the Confederate veteran Riley Terrell Kenimer. Our forefathers have left behind objects which swirl around and dictate our lives. Archivos Perdidos is a performative conversation regarding these objects which our two American predecessors left behind in relationship with the God we still worship: Capital.
During the first portion of the performance, there are three gradients of liveness on display: pre-filmed/edited video and sound presented on a large projector screen; performance live streamed in Mexico City presented on audience cell phone screens; and live puppetry/object manipulation within the performance space.
The pre-recorded media is the result of a series of physical improvisations we explored with Christian’s grandfather’s razor and Emilia’s collection of Confederate States of America bills, former belongings of Kenimer. This film comes from our interest in the ritual positioning of the objects, resulting in obsessive categorization/maintenance, creating a mask of money for a transformative duration, and staging the objects in dynamic relationships to the body of the descendent. The soundtrack was created using the words from our forebearer’s lives we feel echoing in our head, an attempt to elucidate, complicate, question, and obscure the relationships we have respectively to an Indigenous man crossing imposed national borders to feed his family, and another man, a white settler who put his life on the line in the creation of new national borders to preserve the evils of antebellum slavery. The vocal elements are manipulated nearly beyond recognition in an experiment inspired by the auditory mediation of the voice in both Marie Brassard and Laurie Anderson’s performance work.
The live puppet performance uses Confederate bills as scenery with a hooded figure in white walking through the halls of days gone by, rubbing itself on the money (and damaging it) in sexual ecstasy. After some time, the stand-in puppet for Kenimer, a man understood to have connections to the KKK, is torn to shreds by Emilia. She discovers, despite her attempted refusal of her ancestor’s wrongdoings, that her very skin is made of Confederate bills.
To add to the auditory palimpsest of the live puppet’s sound and the recorded media, Christian will be narrating his livestreamed grooming in Spanish, discussing the life of Lucio Angeles, and his journey living in America to obtain money for his son -Christian’s father-Christian’s father had a trimmer that Lucio gave to him. Only Christian knows the story of that object and the moment the trimmer was given to his father by his grandfather Lucio. The relationship with this object becomes the metaphoric narrative of the story, specifically how Christian relates to the object as a phantasmagoric reconfiguration of his indigenous ancestry. The object -the trimmer becomes the subject in which past, present and future reconfigures Christian’s embedment of his mestizo identity.
Emilia will finish the puppet show and as Christian ends his narrative, she will grab the scroll of the archive, unravel it for the audience to view and become buried by it, coiled in the snarl of white paper/supremacy. Despite the destruction of Kenimer’s body in the puppet show, despite Emilia’s transition to using her current name, the connection will always remain, heard scratching in the dark recesses of the mind, or felt within the alive archive, the speaking/rustling papers and scrolls of the Kenimer family history. Despite Christian’s intentions to connect with the trimmer as the incarnation of his indigenous ancestry, he realizes that either his grandfather and father are gone and the only reminiscence of his ancestry is not only that object but the knowledge he carries over. Christian acknowledges the responsibility of his ancestry and he becomes aware of it. Such realization would conclude as simply lying down in the grass, looking at the sky, absorbing, and assimilating his male indigenous lineage as part of his life journey knowledge .
Archivos Perdidos examines the evolving role of the audience consuming filmed media on a large screen given the prevalence and precedence of doomscrolling, hence the addition of phones with the live recorded performance. The performance is also fascinated by the opportunity to splinter character as well as the archival objects by exploring different locations to appear within, both in the digital and physical worlds. We wish to perform a consideration of the archive’s tension, not only in relationship to content, but also to form. We are interested in how the past becomes like viewing puppets through the mediation of memory; how to combine and juxtapose the archive of the pre-recorded video and the material lost-and-found archives of our ancestors.
Sable B. Boltz and Gabi Stachniak present fold.
fold. is an object dance theatre piece centered around clothes and laundry. It explores personal and cultural relationships to clothing and textiles through speech, movement, and puppetry using pieces from our own closets. Exploring the mundane tasks of day to day life with the heightened quality of performance, our clothes become dance partners and characters of their own as we fold, pile, mend, and discard. On an otherwise empty stage, it is just us and the clothing. We do not anticipate any technical needs at this point in time.
When developing this piece, we asked ourselves questions like: How many clothes does one person realistically need? Will I ever get around to mending all these socks? If I keep this shirt forever, will the great pacific garbage patch be one shirt smaller? How do my clothes make me who I am? Or not?
Mona Sahi and Brooke Leifso present The foundation of the random questions and stories
Two women sit facing each other across a table in a dark room. A single spotlight shines on the center of the table, where a small container rests of random questions on strips of paper.
Questions start off as polite exchanges and get more and more intimate or intrusive. Questions are related to difficulties and marginalizations they face, immigration, and disability.
When the questions end, they begin to tell their stories of their safety, belonging and acceptance in a colonized world —both at once, in their own languages. Their voices overlap, forming a cacophony of sounds, a mixture of situated, intersectional stories. As they speak, they reach for the container, drawing the mixed sand back into their sacks, their hands moving in sync with their voices. The stories continue as the colors mingle again, inseparable.
When their stories end, they stop moving. They sit still, looking at each other in silence. The light goes out.
Performance will be translated and open captioned. Accompanying recorded soundscape will be provided by Hozan Hashempour.
This piece blends our performance styles, lived and learned experiences. We speak to the urgent and personal and political matters of disability culture, immigration, integration and multiculturalism. We aim to exemplify the nuances of the daily lives that develop under a multicultural society. If we are a mosaic, a patchwork quilt or stained glass window, what is the grout, the stitching or soldering that keeps us together? How do we talk to each other and co-exist?
Neil Robinson is the feature sound artist for the Cabaret!
Featuring
Cui Jinzhe
Cui Jinzhe is a multidisciplinary artist who was born and raised in Dalian, China. In 2008, Jinzhe moved to Canada to continue her studies and work as an independent artist in Edmonton. Her work explores the integration between visual art, poetry, and interdisciplinary practice, often within an interactive public context.
Emma Schneider
Emma Schneider is a recent graduate of the University of Alberta’s English and Drama programs and an emerging queer and neurodivergent writer, performer, and theatre maker.
Emma’s artistic practice spans from TYA to Shakespeare, and their work often explores her own queer &; autistic experience, both onstage and on the page. Recent performance credits include Celeste in Celestial Being (Concrete Theatre), Esther in Act of Contrition (New Works Festival), and Chloe in the short film Nemesis (coming 2026).
Janita Frantsi
Janita Frantsi is a contemporary dance artist from Finland based in Amiskwacîwâskahikan. During her time in Edmonton, Janita has worked as a dancer with companies such as Mile Zero Dance, KO Dance Projects, and Edmonton Opera, and created works for performances in Western Canada and internationally, most recently the Czech Republic. She is also an emerging filmmaker and excited to explore the intersections of live dance and dance on screen.
Punit Singh
Punit Singh is a first-generation Indo-Canadian dance and theatre artist based in Surrey, BC, whose practice spans contemporary and street dance forms. He has trained with artists including Sophia Sosa, Natasha Gorrie, Marissa Wong, Arash Khakpour, Deanna Peters, Lesley Telford, Shion Sky Carter and Josh Martin.
His work integrates movement and voice to explore themes of mental health, masculinity, and identity within contemporary life, framed by fictional and surreal narratives. Punit’s recent professional collaborations include projects with Nasiv Sall, James Olivo (Jamey Wamey, UK), The Falling Company, Mutable Subject/Deanna Peters, and Christopher Bonus. He has created original works with organizations including New Works Dance, Dance West Network, Up In the Air Theatre, Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre and Method Dance Society, and has received a Canada Council award for dance research.
Emilia Fox Hillyer
Originally from Massachusett and Wampanoag land, colonially known as Eastern Massachusetts, Emilia is a first-generation settler on Treaty 6 territory. She is the proud recipient of five (or six, tough to keep track) ear surgeries performed by ENT surgeons all over so-called Northeast Florida. Nowadays, Emilia is a performer, puppeteer, educator, multi-instrumentalist, and founding member of Boston's Fork & Shoe Theatre Cooperative and the band pUbeRtykiDs. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Theatre Practice at the University of Alberta.
Christian Albarran
Originally from Mexico, Christian has a long trajectory of theatre and performance in Mexico and in Canada. He has participated in PostMarginal workshops with Soheil Parsa in Toronto. He has performed in Toronto in English and French and in Spanish in Mexico for over 20 years. He currently works on his PhD degree at University of Alberta. His research areas include Violence in racialized communities in the LGBTQ+2S, trauma and body memory as well as new dramaturgical approaches from indigenous artists in Canada.
Sable Boltz
Sable B. Boltz is a trans artist and performer originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, who has been living in Amiskwaciwâskahikan since 2021. Currently in his 4th year of the BFA acting program at the University of Alberta, Sable has developed interest in all kinds of performance including dance, drag, physical comedy, and clown. You may have seen Sable in The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale (University of Alberta), White Christmas (NUOVA Vocal Arts), Lemon (ReadyGo Theatre), or performing with frequent collaborator Gabi Stachniak in Wanna Dog? at the Off-The-Cuff cabaret and That’s The Spirit! at NextFest. Offstage, you can find Sable writing and reading poetry, taking photos, and making recycled crafts.
Gabi Stachniak
Gabi Stachniak is a multidisciplinary theatre artist residing on Treaty 6 Territory, currently in her 4th year of the Bachelor of Fine Arts Acting program at the University of Alberta. Growing up in the dance world, her love of the arts has expanded into devising, producing, teaching, and performing. She’s had the honour of performing in festivals such as the Edmonton Fringe Festival, NextFest, Common Ground Arts Festival, and New Works. Recently she co-created the clown show, That’s The Spirit! with frequent collaborator Sable B. Boltz and the dance piece, what falls out of our brains and into the pockets of strangers with Tori Kibblewhite at NextFest in the show Dimensions. Other select performance credits include The Moors (Studio Theatre), The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard (University of Alberta), Cats and Other Miscellaneous Pleasures (Common Ground Arts Festival).
Mona Sahi
Mona Sahi (she/her) is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist working across interactive sculpture, installation, performance, sound, and video. She earned her bachelor's degree in visual arts from Guilan University and is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Alberta. Rooted in political and social concerns, Sahi's art is grounded in activism, resistance, and a deep commitment to social justice. Drawing from personal experiences growing up under a patriarchal and dictatorial regime, her work confronts systems of oppression including censorship, fascism, racism and systemic inequality. Her art challenges viewers to confront uncomfortable truths, reflect on their own complicity, and engage in conversations about power, control, and responsibility.
Brooke Leifso
Brooke Leifso (she/they): is a Disabled/Crip performance producer, Expressive Art Practitioner and academic. She has performed with mindhive collective (Dwelling, Held, A Wake, s/kin), Edmonton Actors Theatre (Faerie Queen, Burning Bluebeard), Moon At Midnight (ensemble member, Dance Prairie Circuit). She is an accessibility consultant for: Edmonton Poetry Festival, Citadel Theatre, CKUA, Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival, SkirtsAFire). She is a Research Chair in workplace inclusion and accessibility (NorQuest College), an alumni fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) and Art Quarter Budapest (Budapest, Hungary) creating an Arts-based research performance on disabled contemporary dance (BODYwork) and audio description, and the artist's relationship to income.
Neil Robinson
Neil Robinson is an Electronic Dance Music producer, DJ and artist. He has been making music his whole life and electronic music since 2015. With his music he hopes to inspire others and to offer positive experiences through listening. His music is inspired by modern electronic dance music, hip-hop, rock and experimental genres. Neil enjoys experimenting with different genres and styles and tries to keep an open mind when it comes to music.