The KickStart Festival of CanAsian Dance, in collaboration with Tangente, is a contest that aims to inspire Canadian choreographers to design and present a short work that illustrates a new direction or a constructive change in their approach to choreography. Choreographers from the KickStart 2020 Festival’s initial program are from Ontario and Quebec: Andrea Nann, Winnie Ho, Charo Foo Tai Wei and Deepti Gupta.

Andrea was born and raised in Vancouver and is a fourth generation Chinese-Canadian.  She is the founding artistic director of the Toronto-based Dreamwalker Dance Company. After graduating from York University’s Department of Fine Arts in 1988, Andrea was a full-time member of the Danny Grossman Dance Company from 1988 to 2003. Over the course of her 31-year career in contemporary and modern dance, Andrea has contributed to the creation of new works by over 60 dance/theatre creators. 

Winnie Ho (Superhova) is a dance performance artist who seeks to explore and expand ideas of intimacy, empathy, and embodied eroticism. She continues to explore these topics by interacting with organic/inorganic matter and by connecting to her Chinese diaspora and queer identity.  She also questions conventional roles of spectatorship in performance and creates practices whereby boundaries between spectator and performer can be dissolved and redefined.

Trained in modern dance and Chinese classical dance, Charo Foo Tai Wei arrived in Quebec City in 2005, where she trained in contemporary dance at École de danse de Québec. From 2007 to 2013, she performed in Robert Lepage’s production The Blue Dragon (Ex Machina) as an actress, dancer, and choreographer. Since 2010, Charo has traveled North America, Europe, and Asia to give classical Chinese dance workshops and to perform in festivals. In 2015, she discovered butoh by studying with Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Atsushi Takenouchi, Yumiko Yoshioka and Rizhome Lee. Recently she attended Tadashi Endo’s workshop, which inspired her to research selfless body initiation. Currently, she is combining classical Chinese dance and butoh to develop her own choreographic language.

Born in India, brought up in Ottawa, Deepti Gupta is an accomplished and dedicated exponent of the elegant kathak dance from North India. Deepti is Artistic Director of Arzoo Dance Theatre, an organization dedicated to creating new works in dance that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries. Deepti’s choreographic work is at the cutting edge of contemporary South Asian dance. She has also worked extensively in Indian theatre as an actor, dramaturge, and playwright.