Past Projects
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Past Projects 〰️
2025 Project: Dance, Poetry, and Music
Resonance — Rhythm and Performance
This dance production will highlight themes of interconnectedness, exploring what rhythms bind artists across mediums. The youth project leader, Ella Stotz, has the goal to fuse multiple art forms into a showcase. In addition to choreographing dance performances, she wants to include live music and spoken word. When asked about why, she answered that she’s curious about expanding her and others’ perspectives about what is possible on stage. This event will provide Stotz with the opportunity to choreograph and execute a production in the Kingston community. The pieces will be contemporary with a bit of ballet influence. If you’re interested in performing, keep an eye out for when auditions open in December!
Youth Project Leader
Ella Stotz
Stotz is a dancer and artist living in Kingston, ON. Growing up as a dancer, she has a ballet and contemporary background. Over the years, she has attended intensive workshops, joined troupes, and performed a variety of genres. In addition to her dance experience, she has worked to teach children and youth. Currently, she teaches Tap and Ballet to primary children at the Kingston School of Dance (KSD). When not teaching, she can be found dancing in The Kingston Youth Dance Ensemble or practicing for Blue Canoe’s Winter 2024 production, Anastasia. In 2023, she performed in the collaborative dance production, Dāstān, which was a series of performances put on by KSD and the Juvenis Festival. Today, Stotz hopes to take what she has learned to create her very own showcase.
Mentor
Lauren Runions
Lauren Runions (b. 1989) is a dance artist, choreographer, and facilitator of mixed settler ancestry based in Tkarón:to (Toronto) and Kjipuktuk (Halifax). They are the artistic director of project I/O Movement which offers site-responsive performances, community workshops, and public residencies.
For Lauren dancing involves moving-thinking, writing, choreographic objects, community labs, performances, and daily independent practice. Their work investigates the role of choreography as a reciprocal spatial practice; and with deliberate movement experiments and staged interventions they begin to expand this notion through score-reading and -writing. Scores open possibility for improvisation, sounding, observing, walking, and tending to routine dailiness. Scores exalt presence and ways to be in dialogue-with material, beings, and place. Lauren’s work questions how social choreographies shape embodied awareness and inform their responsibility to living with city and natural ecologies.
Contact Information
Instagram: : @laurenrunions + @iomovement
Website: https://reciprocalspatialpractice.cargo.site/.