danceWEB mentors 2023

Clara Furey (CA) in dialogue with Lara Kramer (CA) and Caroline Monnet (CA)

Statement Clara Furey

I’m excited to expand our horizons together.
I’m interested in the different constellations of listening we can develop through physical practices.
Let’s fill our brains and souls and make it not about exhaustion! Find ways to be generators of energy for one another, be in solidarity with each other, to tune, to sync, to desync, to enhance, to interfere with each other and to learn together.
I hope we will come with everything we love and with everything we are in conflict with so that we can deploy our multiplicities, our complexities and shine.
Let’s get porous! A porosity I hope will be seen and felt in the exchange between us all. 

Bio Clara Furey

After completing musical training at the Conservatoire de Paris, Clara Furey, trained as a dancer at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal and worked with choreographers such as George Stamos, Damien Jalet, and Benoît Lachambre. An artist accustomed to collaborative work (Untied Tales with Peter Jasko, showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2016, Ciguë with Éric Arnal Burtschy, Night Will Come with Michikazu Matsune), Furey created her first solo work as artistic director in 2017 with Cosmic Love, a collective piece with minimal gestures, exploring the voids and invisibilities in the interactions between body, song, and space.

As both a choreographer and a performer, Furey is interested in shifting codes within various forms of art by way of an interdisciplinary dialogue. In 2017, she performed When Even The 90 times alongside a sculpture by Marc Quinn as part of the Leonard Cohen exhibit at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She is the choreographer of Rather a Ditch (2019), a solo piece written for Céline Bonnier centering on the permeability of bodies, as a response to Steve Reich’s album Different Trains.

Her works toured in numerous festivals including the Biennale of Venice, Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques in Paris, the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Performance Mix in New-York City, Fierce Festival in Birmingham, and in different countries such as Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Azerbaïdjan, and Bulgaria.

With Dog Rising, Furey concludes her exploration of tension and immobility, freeing previously contained energies in a performance focusing on persistence, groove and pleasure. She insists on the repetition of infinite loops through an extreme physical journey, a mesmerizing, haunting and penetrating spiral.

Statement Lara Kramer

Together can we discover a place for hosting a relational practice? Among this shifting moving landscape where we find ourselves present. How do we transmit our markings and intentions through our heart, body, spirit, and voice? I'm excited to offer invitations for flight, to dream, to play, to ignite, to be curious, and to indulge in the generosity of our imagination. Let us center our agency as we experiment and invent through boundless space, exploring what echoes and transforms. How can we open our senses to mobilize with abundance and humility?

Bio Lara Kramer

Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishnaabe, Oji-Cree and settler heritage based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her choreographic work, research and fieldwork over the last fourteen years have been grounded in intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and the impacts of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada.

Her creations in the form of dance, performance and installation have been presented across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Martinique, the US and the UK. Her practice includes sound, video, and visual art.

Lara’s work expands on her relational practice to express and represent embodied experiences like memory, loss, and reclamation. Her works challenge the Canadian narrative of the colonial project to reconcile and uses storytelling as a form of resistance.

She has received multiple awards, acknowledgments, and prizes for her work both as an emerging and established artist. Lara was appointed a Human Rights Advocate through the Holocaust Memorial Centre of Montreal in 2012, following the national tour of her work Fragments, a performance piece informed by her mother’s stories and lived experience as a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada.

In 2018 Lara was presented with the prestigious Ashley Fellowship with Trent University, as well as received the Jacqueline-Lemieux Prize for recognition of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement in dance. She has collaborated closely with Peter James and sound artists Jassem Hindi on her work Windigo, 2018 exploring the distruction and deconstruction of sculpture/objects, body and land relations, and memory as song. In 2019, the installation and performance piece This Time Will be Different, created with Emilie Monnet co-produced by Festival TransAmeriques denounced the status quo of the Canadian government’s discourse regarding Indigenous relations and criticized the “national reconciliation industry”.

Lara Kramer is a Center de Création O Vertigo – CCOV Associate Artist since 2021.