Cast & Crew

Molly McDermott Choreographer

Molly has worked in dance since 2007. She is a collective artist with Good Women Dance Collective alongside her independent projects. Her choreography has been performed at Fluid Festival, Mile Zero Dance, New Dance Horizons, Vines Art Festival, 12 Minutes Max., Nextfest, the Magpie Collection, Connections//Collisions, and Expanse Festival. This spring Molly looks forward to premiering a new full-length work, in and out of dark, presented by Brian Webb Dance Company. Alongside dance, Molly is a mother of two small humans and welcomes the gentle chaos that comes with balancing motherhood and everything else.

Photo by Armand Bladon.

erψn temp3st Sound/Installation Designer

erψn temp3st is a dancer and new media/sound artist of settler descent. Their explorations cross multiple disciplines and aim to redefine body-based practices in terms of technological, sonic, and sculptural intervention. erψn’s work has been presented across so-called Canada and internationally. They are an MFA candidate and full scholarship recipient in Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2026 graduating class.

Alison Kause Performer

Alison Kause (Towne) is a founding member of the Good Women Dance Collective and an independent dance artist. She is a graduate of the Grant MacEwan Dance Program and the School of Contemporary Dance at SFU, as well as the Education program at the University of Alberta. She has trained and performed across Canada and been inspired by work with local and international colleagues. Alison is inspired by the challenge of finding an intersection between being an artist, mother and teacher – these roles constantly demand attention, inform one another and provide diverse perspectives.

Photo by Armand Bladon.

Alida Kendell (Performer)

Alida Kendell is a contemporary dance choreographer, performer and instructor in amiskwacîwâskahikan. She has trained in both ballet and contemporary dance, completing her BA at the School of Contemporary Dancers in Winnipeg, MB. Her artistry is fed by her work as a collective artist with the Good Women Dance Society (GWDS) and her independent projects. Her participation in the Hack Lab (Theatre Direct) and Balancing Act Canada’s Level UP! initiative has inspired her to work in ways that incorporate the experience of motherhood rather than working in spite of it.

Alida’s artistic interests depart from mainstream choreography that presents polished, predetermined performance. Instead, her works are intimate and dynamic, often abandoning traditional notions of structure and performance in favor of non-linear and vulnerable experiences.

Career highlights so far include creating and performing alongside Alison Kause in the Sterling award nominated production, there we are. There (GWDS), and in the Sterling award-winning productions BEARS (Pyretic Productions) and The Cardiac Shadow (Northern Light Theatre and GWDS).

Photo by Armand Bladon.

Lin Snelling (Dramaturg)

Lin Snelling’s performance, writing and teaching is based in the qualities improvisation can offer as it applies to dance, theatre, visual art and somatic practice. She toured the world extensively as a performer with Carbone 14 and worked with many improvisation ensembles. As Full Professor at the University of Alberta she is presently teaching dance, experiential anatomy and composition and is Coordinator of the MFA in Theatre Practice program. She received a McCalla Professorship in 2019 from the University of Alberta for a new collective creation, A Sounding Line. Her recent dance collaborations are Far Away & Personal a dance film created with Michael Reinhart, eva as part of StageLab, The Liminal with Brian Webb, anything goes: GWG Dance in 17 parts with Gerry Morita, and Versing with musician/composers Michael Reinhart, Jeremi Roy, David Ryshpan and lighting designer Yan Lee Chan. She works with Montreal choreographer Tedi Tafel and was part of Crying in Public, Life World, Calendar and Everyday. Her collaboration Performing Book with visual artist Shelagh Keeley happened at the Edmonton Art Gallery, MoMA, the Power Plant/Toronto, and the VAG/Vancouver. She continues with Rewriting Distance, a workshop and performance with the dance dramaturge Guy Cools. www.rewritingdistance.com

Dorrie Deutschendorf (Lighting Designer/Stage Manager)

Dorrie Deutschendorf is an Edmonton-based lighting designer, stage manager, and technical director with more than 25 years of experience in professional theatre and dance. Most recently, she has worked with Ballet Edmonton and the Brian Webb Dance Company, where she created lighting designs, production schedules, and technical coordination for both mainstage and touring productions.

With formal training in dance and choreography, Dorrie brings a deeply collaborative, artist-centered approach to her work—an approach she also fostered during nearly three decades as a theatre technician and practicum mentor at MacEwan University.

Her extensive background spans a wide range of performance contexts and creative partnerships, including projects with Good Women Dance Collective, Saraswathi Society, Usha Gupta Dance, Cheremosh Dance, Shay Kuebler, Kirsten Wicklund, and Wen Wei Wang.

Tamara Bliss Costumer

As a professional dancer in the USA, Tamara frequently designed costumes for the companies she danced with and for numerous other companies. In NYC and Philadelphia, companies such as Jennifer Muller and the Works, Zvi Gotheiner, Young Soon Kim’s White Wave Rising, Matthew Diamond, Ed Henry, Lynne Wimmer and Rachel Lampert danced in her designs (1983-1993). In Canada since 1993, she costumed Montréal Danse Company’s Cuidad de Heirro (by José Besprovany) and for local choreographers Tania Alvarado, Heidi Bunting, Usha Gupta, Kathy Ochoa, Andrea Rabinovitch, Linda Rubin, Charlene Tarver, Brian Webb, and others. Tamara guest taught dance costuming at New York University, Marymount Manhattan College and in the Arts Outreach program of MacEwan College. The Orchesis Dance Group’s annual productions have seen numerous ‘Bliss’ costume designs, not only for local choreographers but AFA guest funded choreographers such as Peggy Baker, Corie Caulfield, Josh Beamish and Sarisa Figueroa de Toledo.

Tamara received a BA degree in Dance/Theatre from Bellingham’s WWU (1975), a design degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City (1987) and a Masters of Arts degree from the U of A (1996), investigating dancers performing while in Flow and peak experiences. Until 2018, she taught dance in the Faculty of Kinesiology Sport and Recreation at the U of A, where she directed the Orchesis Dance Group.

Tia Kushniruk Co-Creator

Tia Ashley Kushniruk (亚 女弟) is a dance performance artist based in Amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty 6 Edmonton AB. She has performed the works of Jocelyn Mah, Antony Hamilton, Benjamin Kamino, Heidi Strauss, Christopher House, Shay Kuebler, Celia J. Green, Alyssa Martin, Susannah Haight and Christianne Ullmark touring Nationally and Internationally since 2013.

Kushniruk is a conservatory trained dancer with a background in street dance (breaking, house, animation), modern (Graham, Limon, Horton), theatre improv, clown & bouffon and post-modern dance training, with current creative interests in performance that stretch the limitations of “dance” and “theatre” by drawing on theories of new-materialism,  interculturalism and emergent ideas between mixed-race and queer dissociative parallels and the glorious entanglement of “cringe” acts within the real and the digital realms. Her work has been presented by Festival Internacional Nomada, the Beijing International Dance Festival, the National Arts Centre, Dancing on the Edge, Fluid Festival, commonGround Arts Festival, Found Festival, Expanse Festival, Mile Zero and the New Dance Arts Institute with upcoming premieres at Tangente and OFFTA in Spring 2026.

Kushniruk is a 2023 EATF award recipient, the inaugural 2020 Confluence Fellow, holds an MA in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Toronto (2025) and is a proud mentee of Toronto-based Performance Artist Bridget Moser.

Susannah Haight Co-Creator

Susannah Haight is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary performance artist and filmmaker working across dance, theatre, cinematography, installation, and photography. Rooted in a neurodiverse perspective, her work merges movement, ecology, design, and immersive storytelling to explore how bodies interact with space. Trained at École de danse contemporaine de Montréal (2017), she has performed with Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Martin Messier, Andrea Peña, and Caroline Laurin-Beaucage.

Her choreographic approach, influenced by ecological and spatial research, treats movement as something that evolves in relation to the environment, often unfolding in immersive, object-based installations. Her durational work Untitled – Clock Piece was recently presented at Nuit Blanche Toronto (2024) and the Nocturne festival in Halifax (2025).

Haight recently graduated with a BFA in Film Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University (2024), where she received the Achievement in Cinematography Award. Across disciplines, she builds sensorial, cinematic, and poetic worlds that examine the complexities of being human while pushing against conventional performance structures.

Darren Shaen Lighting Designer

Darren Shaen is a lighting designer artist mood maker based in Toronto who works in live performance and nightlife. He frequently uses alternative light sources, industrial objects, and found materials. Darren is inspired by quotidian beauty, analog technology, and the aesthetics of queer nightlife past, present and future. He holds a MFA in Lighting Design from The University of British Columbia.

Recent lighting, ambience, and installations for many events in Toronto’s underground party scenes, including Plantasia, Twist, Natural Born Sinners, Strangers, Björk Party, Club Mud, Places (Techno for Worms), Sous Bas pop up June 2024, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 45th Pride Festival, New Ho Queen, The Beginning, and the biannual queer warehouse rave series Something For the Lovers.

Recent lighting designs for stage include “MAMI” (dir. isi bhakhomen), Caminos Festival 2025, “pacing” (dir./choreo Susanna Haight) with Arts Orillia’s 2025 Dance & Design residency, the 2025 Rhubarb Festival, “MÀSCARA” (by Pulga Muchochoma) with dance Immersion, SummerWorks Festival 2024, Caminos Festival 2023 and “This Lament I’ll Lip-Sync Until I’m Born Again” (dir./choreo Riley Sims) with Social Growl.

Darren currently works as the lighting lead and head technician at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, leading the technical installation of productions including “The Green Line”, ”Shedding a Skin”, “speaking of sneaking”, “Angels In America”, and “Roberto Zucco”.