The Conseil des arts de Montréal is proud to announce the first funding recipients under the brand new support program for artists who are D/deaf or have a disability. The program will provide grants of up to $20,000 per recipient, enabling 22 artists and artists’ collectives to carry out an artistic project.
Take a look at the wide range of projects to be funded this year!
- Les silences infinis des requins pèlerins is a play performed both in theatres and on the radio. It explores the realities of people living with chronic pain. Drawing on personal accounts from artists living with chronic pain and from medical and paramedical specialists, creator Marie Ayotte of Théâtre Déchaînés seeks to understand this type of pain and the societal issues it raises.
- The dance show À qui? À moi? is the first work created by Corpuscule Danse for children. It is also the very first integrated dance show created for young audiences and designed to spur creative synergy between dancers with and without disabilities. It deals with limitations: those imposed by the body, those imposed by oneself, those imposed by others and those imposed by our different functional capabilities. The project showcases the expertise of director Guillaume Chouinard, playwright and choreographer Georges-Nicolas Tremblay and dancers Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Maxime-D. Pomerleau and Jérémie Desbiens.
- Combining painting, photography and digital media, Dana Edmonds will explore climate change and its devastating effects on our physical and psychological environment.
- Cai Glover, a hearing-impaired professional dancer, combines dance and American sign language in a personal choreographic interpretation of Franz Kafka’s short story “Eleven Sons.” The project is a collaboration with D/deaf actors Elizabeth Morris and Hodan Youssouf, and six dancers.
- In his choreographic work Thunder in the Heart, Azalia Kaviani conveys how dance allows him to forge relationships with other people while developing his physical abilities. The project was created in partnership with choreographer and dancer Emmanuelle Martin and videographer Aude Simon.
- Charlotte Jacob-Maguire will carry out a multi-pronged research project entitled La diversité capacitaire au sein des artistes de la collection du MAC. It will focus on identifying artists in the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s collection who are D/deaf or have disabilities, identifying emerging artists with disabilities in Montréal, creating a webinar, and writing two critiques for the magazine Vie des arts.
- The collective composed of Jennifer Parenteau-Manning, Marie-Pierre Petit and Hodan Youssouf will continue creating and then present Le Mythe de la main rare with assistance from stage manager Stéphanie Veilleux. Written and produced entirely by D/deaf artists, the work deals with issues of diversity, inclusion and accessibility in a humorous manner and aims to raise audience awareness of the D/deaf experience.
- In partnership with the National Theatre School of Canada, the Les Muses performing arts centre is rolling out a creation project that brings together five emerging artists and five professional neurodivergent artists. The goal is to encourage the artistic processes of artists with different abilities and imaginations and to spark emerging artists’ desire to embrace practices that are more inclusive.
- The members of the artists’ collective Percepto drew on their different backgrounds and perspectives to launch the Technologies de la fête project, consisting of various interfaces for collectively composing electronic music using the software of the Société des arts technologiques.
- Multidisciplinary artist Maxime D.-Pomerleau is undertaking a research and creation project focusing on the personal documentary process as a dramaturgical technique executed by an individual with disabilities. The narrative takes the form of a performance installation and showcases the central place held by the artist’s body, its staging and its meaning in the public, cultural and media spheres.
- SalimaPunjani interrogates the way people’s worth is considered through a scale of functioning. The High functioning project is the artist’s exploration of living with invisible illness through the development of laser engraved acrylic photographs.
- Cambodian-Canadian artist Chan Ravy Puth will produce a portfolio of illustrations to be submitted as potential models for murals. Her project is inspired by her own experience of reappropriating her own identity and recounts the intergenerational trauma left behind by colonialism and the effects of systemic racism in her community.
- Overseen by Visions sur l’Art Québec, this residency aims to create a space where differently abled artists (deaf, disabled, neurodivergent and psychodivergent) can come together to share, create and develop new projects. On tap are multidisciplinary co-creations and discussions of crip, deaf, autistic and mad art. The residence will take place from May 23 to May 25, 2022 at the Afromusée and will close with a public cocktail.
Congratulations to everyone on these varied and inspiring projects!
