Connections//Collisions Cabaret

Connections//Collisions Cabaret

Mile Zero Dance’s Cabaret series is curated by Josh Languedoc. Stay tuned for upcoming Cabaret themes, artist line-up and curatorial statement!

Featuring a variety of artists, this exciting series welcomes audiences to experience a series of multiple new art pieces.

$25/$20 MZD Members
7:30 PM

Curatorial Statement | Josh Languedoc

We open up the first Connections//Collisions Cabaret thinking about size and scale. Last year, retrospectively, we saw pieces of varying scale. Some are large pieces with a lot of moving parts. Some smaller pieces that draw us in intimately. Many that explored ideas and themes of various sizes.

For the first cabaret of this season, we invite you to think about Scales. How do creative ideas exist on a sliding scale? How do artistic expressions explore sizes and scales? How can big ideas exist on a smaller scale on the stage? How can smaller ideas be blown up to gigantic artistic proportions on a stage? How do we as the audiences perceive the Scale of an artistic project?

Join us for this exciting first venture back into interdisciplinary arts with new artists and new Scales to be explored!

NOVEMBER 2 | Connections//Collisions Cabaret features artists: 

Anna Pratch
Anastasia Maywood & Krista Lin
Calla Wright
Kelsey Beier
Pardeep kumar
Emilia Fox Hillyer

Musician: Robert Walsh

Upcoming 2024-25 Cabarets
November 2
January 4
March 1
April 5

Featuring

Josh Languedoc

This series curated by Josh Languedoc! Originally called The Dirt Buffet Cabaret, this new cabaret is all about breathing new life into art and our current world. As we navigate a radically rapid changing landscape, art is the best way to respond to the world around us. Often, the body knows the truth. This new cabaret series, with alternating themes each time, showcases new and daring works by a variety of artists. Meant to be an incubation process for artists to explore themes of societal change and embodied empowerment, this cabaret will feature movement pieces, solo pieces, and cross-disciplinary explorations between artists.

Anna Pratch

Anna Pratch has been dancing for the past 20 years, which includes training at schools like the American Ballet Theatre, National Ballet Theatre, Ecole Superieur de Ballet, and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Theatre. Anna completed her high school years with Alberta Ballet. Upon graduation, Anna moved to Edmonton to perform with Toy Guns Dance Theatre. Anna has also expanded into clown, stage combat, intimacy coordination, and stuntwork.

About her performance, Gemini Season: Gemini Season follows the joys and woes of Spring in a neo-buffon piece created with consultation by Christine Lesiak. In this performance, writer and performer Anna Pratch will be exploring adding dance to the monolgue created as a part of the Rookie Cabaret Program through the Play the Fool Festival.

Anastasia Maywood

Anastasia Maywood is an independent choreographer and dance artist based in Treaty 6 territory in Amiskwacîwâskahikan, colonially known as Edmonton. She is currently a Program Advisor at the Edmonton Arts Council. She holds a BA Honors (Drama) from University of Alberta (Edmonton, AB) and an MFA in Choreography from York University (Toronto, ON). She was the recipient of the 2015 Good Women Dance Collective’s New Dance Award. Anastasia has had her work presented in Edmonton, Toronto and Calgary in various festivals, self-productions and Orchesis Dance Society’s annual show, where she has been a dancer and choreographer for over 20 years. She has performed for Brian Webb, Cori Caulfield, Helen Husak, David Flewelling, Peggy Baker, Krista Lin, Pyretic Productions (Bears), Just Breathe Theatre, Jen Mesch Dance Conspiracy, Raena Waddell, Emily Noton and Janita Frantsi. Anastasia’s current creative work mainly focuses on combining contemporary dance, comedy and Pochinko clown techniques. 

About Anastasia Maywood & Krista Lin's performance:  
THE BIRDS is a physical comedy duet exploring and inspired by the movement, mating dances and physical characteristics of birds and their behaviours through a series of various vignettes. 

Krista Lin

Krista Lin is a contemporary artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (colonially Edmonton). A graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Krista has studied with renowned instructors in Israel, Taiwan, and across Canada. Krista has performed in works by Heidi Strauss, Justine Chambers, Good Women Dance, Matthew Mackenzie, Gerry Morita, and Susie Burpee, among others. Krista teaches dance in public and private institutions, and has taught outreach workshops in Ontario, Alberta, and Taiwan. With a diploma in Arts and Cultural Management from MacEwan University, Krista is a part-time arts manager and arts advocate. She is a mom to Andy, Lily, and dog-child Louie.

About Anastasia Maywood & Krista Lin's performance:  
THE BIRDS is a physical comedy duet exploring and inspired by the movement, mating dances and physical characteristics of birds and their behaviours through a series of various vignettes. 

Calla Wright

Based in Edmonton, Calla holds a BFA in Playwriting from Concordia University in Montreal and their work has been staged across the country. Select writing credits include: Binding (Edmonton Fringe Fest, 2024) Madness and Other Ghost Stories (Found Fest 2024) Tiresias, Turning (Thousand Faces Festival, 2024) The Wright Sisters Present: The Wright Brothers (Edmonton Fringe 2023, Edmonton Fringe 2019, Saskatoon Fringe 2020) The Orange Room (EdmonTEN 2023) Sisyphus, Happy (The Thousand Faces Festival, 2022) One Song (co-written with Daniel Belland, Edmonton Fringe 2021) Hair, But No Teeth (EdmonTEN 2021) Spiral (co-written with Michelle Soicher, Montreal Fringe, 2021) Home Again (The Alberta Queer Calendar Project) Home Again (Short Film, Vicarious Playground Productions, 2020) Witts: Ballad of Queer Cowboys (Edmonton Fringe 2019, 2017 Ergo Pink Fest) Christmas Play (Dammitammy Productions, 2018-2020) One Too Many (co-written with Evan Harvey, Montreal and Edmonton Fringe Festivals, 2017) The Blood Harmonic (We Are One, 2016) Pig By Roger (Edmonton Fringe Festival, 2014) and ; the musical (Edmonton Fringe Festival, 2011). They won the 2015 Kit Brennan Playwriting Award for their play The Wind and the Rain, which went on tour to the 2018 Regina, Calgary, and Edmonton Fringe Festivals. 

Kelsey Beier

Kelsey Beier (she/her) is an educator, writer, and artist. She believes passionately in the power of the expressive arts as a way of connecting to others and the self, whether through words, images, sounds, or stories; and she integrates a creative arts approach into her personal and professional practice wherever possible. Kelsey is currently completing her Masters in Psychotherapy and Spirituality with a specialisation in Art Therapy.

About her performance, Errors:
Description: I will be reading a short story titled Errors which will speak to the experiences of chaos and uncertainty that surround loss and grief. The story unfolds in three parts: The End, The In Between, and, The Beginning, and there will be a few short poems sprinkled into each section.

Pardeep Kumar

My name is Pardeep Kumar. I am a trained dancer in various styles like ballet, contemporary, jazz, dancehall and Indian folk and classical forms. I participated in several competitions and performances. Won Conestoga’s Got Talent and Edmonton’s Emerging Talent 2024. I was a part of kingdom of dreams musical “zangoora” and performed bollywood choreo. Currently i am studying in Calgary (Portage College).

Emilia Fox Hillyer

Emilia Fox Hillyer is from Massachusett and Wampanoag land, colonially known as Boston, Massachusetts, Emilia is a first-generation settler on Treaty 6 territory. She is a performer, puppeteer, Action Theatre practitioner, educator, trumpet player, and creator of two solo works: “NAVIGATING DEATH ANXIETY: a how-to guide!” and “Eulogy for Jack Cole.” Her filmed puppetry collaborations with the 13 Pratt Theatre Co were featured on Great Small Works’ International Toy Festival, and on public access television in Philadelphia and Belmont, Massachusetts. She is a proud founding member of the Fork & Shoe Theatre Cooperative and musical groups pUbeRtykiDs and The Goddamn Brass Band.

Robert Walsh

Robert Walsh is an award-winning singer-songwriter, producer, guitarist, musical director, composer/arranger, author and educator. He has released five albums as a solo artist, four as part of a group (including Allez Ouest), and co-written four musicals, the latest of which, “Rubaboo” (with Andrea Menard), he performed in London ON, Vancouver and Edmonton in 2023-24, and won three Sterling Awards (including Oustanding Score and Musical Direction). He is the author of “Sculpting Air - A Whole Person Approach to Songwriting”, and “Bob’s Book of Music Theory “, and taught Songwriting and other subjects in the music department at MacEwan University for thirteen years. He is currently working on several solo projects, including an internet musical and an EP with friend and collaborator Pierre Sabourin. He has been a guitarist-for-hire for many recording projects, pit musicals, operas, ballets, big bands and solo artists, and has been the principal guitarist with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra for two decades. Robert grew up in Montréal, where he got his BMUS from McGill, put ten years into Toronto, and settled in Edmonton in 1996. He performs regularly in English and French.