Nathalie Claude is a self-described "actress, director, dancer, choreographer, writer, and a sometimes MC, Drag King, clown, artistic coach and musician" [1] from Montreal. She works in French and in English and sometimes creates bilingual performances. [2]
She created her first five solos for Studio 303 in Montreal and toured many of them to Toronto (Buddies in Bad Times Theatre), New York (Performance Mix Festival and Dixon Place), Berlin (Ausland), Florence (Teatro della Limonaia) and Ljubljana (City of Women)." [3] One of her most notable works was Le Salon Automate/The Salon Automaton, in which she shared the stage with three human-sized robots. Created in 2008 at Montreal's Usine C, it then toured Quebec, and was featured in Buddies In Bad Times' 2009 theatre season, [4] all to great critical acclaim. [5] As a member of the theater collective Momentum, she collaborated with such artists as Céline Bonnier and Lin Snelling to generate theatre pieces, including: Les Filles de Séléné (1999-2001), La Fête des Morts (2002-2004), and Limbes/Limbo (2004). [3]
She has been a contributor to two Montreal-based annual queer feminist platforms: Le Boudoir [6] , a lesbian cabaret night which existed from 1994–2006, and Edgy Women , [7] a platform for feminist experimental performance which incarnated annually from 1993 - 2016. In addition to this, Claude was a frequent feature of Toronto's Hysteria: A Festival of Women directed by Moynan King at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. [8]
She has also appeared on screen in Canadian produced films such as Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life , The Orphan Muses (Les Muses orphelines) and Mistral Spatial . On TV, she played for 6 years the character of "Tite-Lène" in the Quebec sitcom Km/h .
Nathalie was a co-designer of an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: JW Waterhouse: The Garden of Enchantment. It was "the largest-ever retrospective of works by the celebrated pre-Raphaelite British artist John William Waterhouse." [4] The exhibition was named in Canadian Art Magazine as one of the top ten exhibitions in Canada in 2009. [9]
Most recently, she toured internationally from 2012 - 2015 with the Montreal-based circus company Cirque Du Soleil, playing Jeeves, the male clown in the show Amaluna. [4]
Claude Gauvreau was a Canadian playwright, poet, sound poet and polemicist. He was a member of the radical Automatist movement and a contributor to the revolutionary Refus Global Manifesto.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is a Canadian professional theatre company. Based in Toronto, Ontario, and founded in 1978 by Matt Walsh, Jerry Ciccoritti, and Sky Gilbert, Buddies in Bad Times is dedicated to "the promotion of queer theatrical expression". It's the largest and longest-running queer theatre company in the world.
Evalyn Parry is a Canadian performance-maker, theatrical innovator and singer-songwriter. She grew up in Toronto, Ontario in the Kensington Market neighbourhood. Her music combines elements of spoken word and folk.
Cirque Éloize is a contemporary circus company founded in Montreal in 1993 by Jeannot Painchaud, Daniel Cyr, Claudette Morin, and Julie Hamelin. Its productions combine circus arts with music, dance, technology, and theatre. "Éloize" means "heat lightning" in Acadian French, a dialect spoken in Acadia and the Magdalen Islands, where the group's founders are from.
The Edgy Women Festival was an annual festival of "short, highly physical works by women, often characterized by a transdisciplinary approach and politicized content." which ran for 23 years from 1994 to 2016. Presented by Studio 303, a dance and interdisciplinary-arts centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Edgy Women focuses on feminist perspectives with workshops and forums, performance events, and socializing. Studio 303's artistic and general manager Miriam Ginestier programmed Edgy Women from 1995 to 2014.
Alexis O'Hara is a Canadian transdisciplinary performer, born in Ottawa, Ontario, and currently living and working in Montreal, Quebec.
Ivan E. Coyote is a Canadian spoken word performer, writer, and LGBT advocate. Coyote has won many accolades for their collections of short stories, novels, and films. They also visit schools to tell stories and give writing workshops. The CBC has called Coyote a "gender-bending author who loves telling stories and performing in front of a live audience." Coyote is non-binary and uses singular they pronouns. Many of Coyote's stories are about gender, identity, and social justice. Coyote currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Hysteria: A Festival of Women was a recurring arts festival in Toronto. It was founded in 2003 by Moynan King of the Buddies in Bad Times theatre company in collaboration with Nightwood Theatre.
Françoise Sullivan LL.D is a Canadian painter, sculptor, dancer, choreographer and photographer whose work is marked by her ability to switch from one discipline to another.
Kim Katrin is a Canadian American writer, multidisciplinary artist, activist, consultant, and educator. She was formerly credited as Kim Crosby and Kim Katrin Milan. She speaks on panels and keynotes conferences nationally, and facilitates radical community dialogues. Her art, activism and writing has been recognized nationally.
Mirha-Soleil Ross is a transgender videographer, performance artist, sex worker and activist. Her work since the early 1990s in Montreal and Toronto has focused on transsexual rights, access to resources, advocacy for sex workers and animal rights.
Valérie Blass is a Canadian artist working primarily in sculpture. She lives and works in her hometown of Montreal, Quebec, and is represented by Catriona Jeffries, in Vancouver. She received both her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts, specializing in visual and media arts, from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She employs a variety of sculptural techniques, including casting, carving, moulding, and bricolage to create strange and playful arrangements of both found and constructed objects.
Joanne Corneau, better known by the pseudonym Corno, was a Canadian artist from the Saguenay region of Quebec. She achieved international recognition for her large-scale paintings of women's faces and bodies in a "post-pop" style.
Dayna McLeod is a Montreal based performance artist and video artist whose work often includes topics of feminism, queer identity, and sexuality.
Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, OC was a noted Quebec-based Canadian tapestry artist who pioneered innovations in the fiber/textile arts during the 1960–80s.
Miriam Ginestier is a Canadian interdisciplinary performance curator living and working in Montreal, Quebec. She is best known for her work as general and artistic director of Studio 303, Montreal's dance and interdisciplinary-arts centre. Between 1993 and 1995, Miriam Ginestier co-founded the long running feminist experimental performance festival Edgy Women in collaboration with Karen Bernard and Paul Caskey.
Karen Bernard is an American choreographer and performance artist. Bernard is the Founder and executive director of New Dance Alliance in New York City. Karen Bernard creates nuanced, movement-based work that explores divergent themes surrounding the female body—from motherhood to sex goddess to murder victim. Using sampled dance styles and episodic scenes, Bernard pits everyday life and current events against perceptions of the feminine mystique and aging. The work is developed in the context of location and an intuitive fusion of costuming, sporadic sound scores, video, and minimal sets. Unpredictable choices from the mundane to the extravagant translate into a form that compels my audiences to look at their own experiences from alternative perspectives which, in turn, can alter their actions and reactions.
Julie Tremble is a French-Canadian artist living in Montreal, Quebec. She has held coordinating positions in a variety of cultural organisations in Quebec and Ontario. Since 2015, she has headed Vidéographe, the Montreal-based artist-run centre focused on moving images.
Clara Furey is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist: singer-songwriter, actress, dancer and choreographer.
Karen Tam is a Canadian artist and curator who focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities through installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. She is based in Montreal, Quebec.