May 14 – 17
7pm
Multi-Disciplinary and Dance Performance
Sliding scale $20 - $40 plus GST
Sam San Se features works authored by three artists from across disciplines. The evening is comprised of two performances: a puppet extravaganza created and performed by Jaewoo Kang in collaboration with Romi Kim and Rhye McCorkindale, and a duet co-created and performed by Shion Skye Carter and elika mojtabaei الیکا مجتبایی.
Hearts & Boots is a queer puppet performance retelling the myth of Korean goddess Mago using Bratz dolls, miniature sets, and irreverent humor. Blending pop culture with ritual, it explores themes of creation, bodily sovereignty, and ancestral memory, transforming mythology through playful subversion and richly detailed, absurd theatricality.
Jaewoo Kang is a queer Korean-Canadian interdisciplinary artist working with film, animation, textile and performance. Recently he was part of a durational fashion performance project, Returns. With the support of Canada Council and BC Arts Council, he is currently in post-production for his first animated feature film, Primavera. Rhye McCorkindale is a queer/trans Canadian (turtle island) performer in the realms of dance, clown, theatre and puppetry. They are interested in building community around play and connection and working with themes of myth, death and transformation.
Keepsakes marks the first collaboration between multidisciplinary artist elika mojtabaei الیکا مجتبایی and dance artist Shion Skye Carter. Rooted in childhood, joy, and language, the piece explores the desire to hold onto objects and memories: all the things we can and cannot carry with us.
Special thanks to The Biting School and Odd Meridian Arts for providing studio space for our creation process and ellis cheadle for providing our third partner, the cassette player.
Shion Skye Carter (they/she) is a contemporary dance artist originally from Gifu, Japan, based in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples. Through a movement language of sensitive intensity, hybridizing choreography with heritage art forms like calligraphy, and interweaving materiality into performance, Shion’s artistic practice peels apart layers of identity and reflects on the complexities of the human experience. Recent presentations include VIDF (BC), Tangente (QC), Art Gallery of Ontario (ON), Live Art Dance (NS), b12 free radicals (Berlin), and L’AiR Arts Atelier 11 (Paris). Performances and touring with local companies include Action at a Distance/Vanessa Goodman, Furious Grace Dance Theatre/Anya Saugstad, Wen Wei Dance, and Odd Meridian Arts/Ziyian Kwan. Shion's choreography has been recognized internationally through the Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award (2021), the Chrystal Dance Prize (2023), and most recently, their solo Cobalt was shortlisted for the Rose International Dance Prize at Sadler’s Wells, London, UK (Bloom category, 2027 edition).
elika mojtabaei الیکا مجتبایی is an Iranian-born writer, costume designer, and dramaturg working in performance, film, and installation art. Through colour, texture, surrealist gestures, and the poetry of the unsaid, her work interrogates how language and apparel have been weaponized to marginalize, control, and erase. The movement and stillness of bodies, the power and limitations of fabric, and the joys and failures of words inspire her. She wrote, designed and produced the short film “a film about a uterus”. Her poetry has appeared in SAD Mag. She has collaborated with vAct, Jin-me Yoon, Theatre Conspiracy, Company 605, Alexis Fletcher, Studio 58 and others. Her installation/performance TechniCowlour was exhibited at Centre A Gallery. She is currently developing a new play, Draw Me a Home, based on children’s experiences of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), exploring the interconnectivity of oral, visual, and haptic storytelling. elika co-leads the experimental multidisciplinary company The Biting School and co-founded No Small Feat Collective.
