Ellen Furey
Photo: ©Do Phan Hoi
Workshop - Lifting the ceiling
Lifting the Ceiling is a creative process workshop aimed at creating a sense of possibility. Our time together will be designed to recognize inspiration and inner desire in order to articulate latent dreamscapes for life, work and art making, as big and as good-feeling as we can imagine. We’ll be stretching the imagination to include the too big, too much, too ambitious, the too idealistic, the impractical.
I’ll be drawing from my current training in conflict management, and spiritual development to specifically explore something other than a precarity mindset. Life is being shaken in so many extreme ways and differences in peoples' experiences are huge. Developing a sense of possibility for different life-giving and sustainable visions of a future begs us to consider what kind of strength we're looking to build to get there.
Exercises will include adapted writing prompts, movement scores, work-outs, short meditations, structured sharings/discussions and working in pairs to reflect back potential and courage. Stretching the application of creativity from the inside out. Lifting the Ceiling is open to anyone who is interested in creative process, choreography or embodiment. No professional dance training or experience is required. .
Ellen Furey​
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Ellen Furey is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal based choreographer originally from Unima’ki/Cape Breton who works in experimental and contemporary dance. Since 2012, she has primarily participated in discursive and collaborative processes emphasizing the messiness and power of subjectivities. Her work solicits the potentials of dance virtuosity and sense of spectacle as materials to create high spirited, oblique openings and debates- all interwoven with a strong dose of ambiguity.
She has worked with, for and alongside artists such as Malik Nashad Sharpe, Dana Michel, Christopher Willes, Dancemakers, Audrée Juteau, Zoey Gauld, Catherine Lavois-Marcus, Paul Chambers, Andrew Tay, Stephen Thompson, Simon Portigal, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Alanna Stuart, Romy Lightman, among others and has danced in works by Daniel Léveillé, Frédérick Gravel, Marten Spangberg (Sweden), Tina Tarpgaard (Denmark), Sasha Kleinplatz and Clara Furey. Her work has been presented in Europe, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. From 2019 to 2022, she was co-curator/artistic advisor for Danse-Cité. She helped envision and implement a 5 year strategic plan for the transitioning directorship and took strong interest in learning about holistic organizational health (tracking congruency with the company’s changing mission and values from the internal dynamics to the external image).
She now works with Danse-Cité as a general consultant to director Sophie Corriveau. Ellen is enrolled in a multi-year training in mediumship/psychic development, Contemplative End of Life Care, as well as in conflict management (Conrad Grebel/University of Waterloo). She’s finding ways that creativity can live through her to support relating in this world in ways that are healing, renewable and multipurpose.