The Bentway has teamed up with Toronto Dance Theatre on our 2023 Artist Residency, with a focus on dance in public space. We selected three artists who focus on dance, movement, and/or embodied practice to participate in an open-ended and research-based project that furthers their practice, provides learning opportunities with dance and public art practitioners, and, in turn, contributes to re-imagining the opportunities of urban spaces. We welcome our 2023 resident artists: Jessie Jakumeit, Charlotte Carbone, and Saysah.
Dance has a long-held relationship with public space. Artists have often looked outside traditional theatres and studios for the site-specific contexts and immediacy of encounter that public space offers. Over the past three years, we’ve seen outdoor urban spaces blossom as vital sites of dance practice. For artists working in public spaces for the first time, there are many considerations, learnings, and possibilities that come with making and presenting in the urban public realm.
“The arts have a unique power to bring people together. By extending our support of Dance in Public Space, we are proud to provide emerging talent with a platform to share their dance works and create connections with their audience. Working alongside likeminded partners such as the Bentway Conservancy makes our program stronger and ultimately more meaningful to the lives of the emerging talent we support,” said Ramin Fazel, Regional Vice President, Downtown Toronto, RBC.
The Bentway Artist Residency is an annual, self-directed onsite program focused on advancing creative research and experimentation around a specified project theme or approach that responds to the features and/or functions of The Bentway Phase 1 site.
Jessie Jakumeit (she/her): Jessie is an award winning Visual Artist and Educator from Vancouver with German, Icelandic, Tsimshian and Gitxsan ancestry. She loves guiding her students through a creative process filled with experimentation and play. Her project will explore the question of how we can dance and move with our four-legged relatives, dogs, to build good relationships.
Charlotte Carbone (they/she): Char is a designer and dancer. They enjoy creating interdisciplinary projects that combine street dance, fashion, and abstract storytelling. Char is dedicated to creating work and sharing knowledge that honours the lived experiences of marginalized people, drawing from their own experiences as a queer diasporic Asian adoptee.
Saysah Hassen (they/them): Saysah is a mover and maker whose practice is ever-evolving, community-oriented, and rooted in the Black Radical Tradition and an Afro-presentist lens. They find the intersections between Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, queer liberation and belonging. They use multi-sensorial mediums as a way to tell stories that centre 2SQTBIPOC experiences and resistance.
The Bentway Artist Residency is presented by The RBC Foundation.
Read about our 2020 Artist Residency here.
Read about our 2019 Artist Residency here.
