Samantha Hines aka Sam I Am Montolla
guest artistic curator at the CCOV from 2023 to 2026.
Samantha Hinds aka Sam I Am Montolla is an Montreal artist who explores singing, music production, movement and healing with sound. Through dance, she has traveled internationally for Hip Hop, where she started as a child in the early 90’s and Waacking, being one of the 1st Waackers and teachers of the style in Canada, known as Princess Shayla in the crew The Chapter. In Music, Soul, RnB, Hip Hop, and Funk is where she likes to play, not forgetting her Caribbean heritage. She has been on the Palmarès Adisq Radio Campus list, Canadian Music Week 2021; in 2022 she released music with Potions Music NYC, and was a feature on Boddhi Satva’s album “Manifestation”. As a certified sound healer/therapist, her venture, Sound I Am Sanctuary, is where she shares events with the community and tips for self-care. She has also collaborated with CCOV in the research for wellness programs and social prescribing. Her recent activities were in Sovann Rochon-Prom Tep’s Sam & Angèle as a featured performer. She continues to mentor in Street Dance. She has experience working with youth, mentoring young women in dance and performance. She has taught in schools and at Chalet Kent, a non-profit organization for the ages 11-18. At this time, she is working on bringing movement, music and wellness, presenting them as art and using them as mediums to connect to Community.
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines and Nate Yaffe are guest artistic co-curators at the CCOV from 2020 to 2023.
Click here to read the press release on their arrival at the CCOV.
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines
Photo credit: Caroline Desilets
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a mother, dancer, performance-maker, writer, questioner, enthusiast and organizer born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her work plays with the pleasure, the haunt of the familiar and the process of being and becoming family. She is interested in performance as something that is both mystical and a skill to be learned. Hanako has performed and created alongside many wonderful artists in Montreal and abroad. Amongst them Winnie Ho, Nadège Grebmeier-Forget, Katya Montaignac, Véronique Hudon, Emma-Kate Guimond, Maria Kefirova, Anne Caines, Stephen Quinlan, Stephen Thompson and Andrew Tay, Lhasa de Sela, Tanya Lukin-Linklater, Clara Furey, Socalled, Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Louise-Michel Jackson, Jacob Wren, Katie Ward, Adam Kinner, Frédérick Gravel, José Navas and with the Cullberg Ballet (Stockholm). Her latest dance, Radio III (2019), is co-authored with Elisa Harkins (OK) and Zoë Poluch (SE), and was presented in Montreal, Vancouver and Sweden. Deeply invested in elite-resistant performance spaces in Canada and Europe, Hanako has organized discussion groups, shared studio frameworks, and fundraisers for RECAA (community organization countering elder abuse in ethno-cultural communities). She co-curated Focus on Dance Research conference (Concordia University) and Quantum Fur (Studio 303). Hanako recently graduated with an honors degree in Western Philosophy from Concordia University. She is currently guest co-curator of the Centre de Création O Vertigo.
Nate Yaffe
Nate Yaffe is an experimental artist living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, who researches queer strategies using dance, theatre, and audio/video interfaces to create relational choreographic structures, placing performance as fundamentally a social exchange. What underlies these tactile dances is an attempt to dismantle movement shame by un-correcting the self-censored body.
Nate initiated and curates the residency series, This is actively built, which brings together queer artists to attack the question ‘what is queer dance?’. He is also an artist-member of the dance company Je suis Julio, which works collectively to develop community-centred alternatives for being a dance artist in the face of an uncertain future of global capitalism and ecological collapse.
Photo credit: Emily Han
Andrew Tay has been guest artistic curator at the CCOV from 2017 to 2020.
Andrew Tay
Richmond Lam
Andrew Tay was born in Windsor Ontario where he attended the Walkerville Centre for the Creative Arts. Since finishing his B.F.A in contemporary dance at Concordia University, Andrew has presented his work in dance venues and festivals such as Tangente, Festival Vue sur la Relève, OFFTA, Festival Phenomena (Montreal), the Square Zero Dance Festival (Ottawa), La Rotonde (Québec City), The Festival of New Dance (St. John’s), The Rhubarb Festival, Summerworks (Toronto) and the Performance Mix Festival (New York). His work has appeared in films, installations and multi media projects for companies such as Moment Factory, Bravo! and Dpt.
Residencies have included the Foundation Jean-Pierre Perrault, Studio 303, The K3 centre for choreographic research (Hamburg), sign 6 (Brussels), Skånes Konstförening (malmo, Sweden) and Usine C as part of the Third floor project. He has worked as interpreter for choreographers Doris Ulhich (Vienna) and Marten Spangberg (Stockholm).
In 2005 Andrew co-founded (with collaborator Sasha Kleinplatz) the company Wants&Needs danse. Since then, the company has produced the wildly popular dance events Piss in the Pool, and Short&Sweet which take place in non traditional venues in Montreal. In June 2012 the duo choreographed the Cirque du Soleil show Les Frontieres de Pixels in Quebec City and were nominated for a Quebec Notables award in the Arts&Culture category.
Andrew was awarded the Dance WEB scholarship in May 2012 (Vienna, Impulstanz festival). In 2013. He was chosen to participate in the Rencontres internationales de jeunes créateurs (Montreal, Festival TransAmériques 2013) and 8 Days, an annual intergenerational meeting of dance artists from across Canada organized by the company Public Recordings, He has also participated in The Copycat Academy (as part of the Luminato Festival Toronto) curated by Hannah Hurtzig (Berlin) for the past 2 editions and was commissioned to create work on the dancers of Toronto Dance Theatre as part of their new EVP project launched in Dec 2015. He has served as board member of ELAN (the English Language Artists Network in Quebec) and the RQD – le Regroupement québécois de la danse. Most recently, he received the Risk and Innovation Award from the Summerworks Performance Festival for his latest work Fame Prayer / Eating.