Only 9 days left till Nottdance 2019 gets underway.
Today we focus on artists Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson who will also be presenting the final performance of the festival Make Banana Cry.
Andrew Tay is a hybrid performer, choreographer and dance curator based in Montréal. He received the DanceWEB Scholarship (Festival Impulstanz 2012, Vienna), and has participated in Rencontres Internationales de Jeunes Créateurs (Festival TransAmériques), 8 Days (an intergenerational meeting of Canadian choreographers), and The Copycat Academy (Luminato Festival, Toronto) curated by Hannah Hurtzig (Berlin). In 2016, Tay received the Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation at the SummerWorks Performance Festival for his work Fame Prayer / EATING. He is currently the artistic curator at Le Centre de Création O Vertigo.
Internationally renowned artist Stephen Thompson began his career as a figure skater. Hailed by the New York Times as one of the “best male dancers” of 2014, he worked with such companies as Decidedly Jazz Danceworks and Fondation Jean-Pierre Perrault, as well as with acclaimed artists Benoît Lachambre, Trajal Harrell, Adam Linder, and Antonija Livingstone. His collaborations have received accolades, including a Bessie Award (NYC), two Dora Mavor Moore awards, and a Mohn Award during the 2016 Made in L.A. Biennial. In 2016, he also received the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award.
Thier work Make Banana Cry is a critical and destabilizing dance performance which questions Asian stereotypes while examining the transmission of cultural identity. A diverse cast of Canadian artists approach the issue by exploring Western myths concerning the “Asian Fantasy”, eventually moving forward to propose other ways of “being together.”