About Us
As They Strike Collective’s mission is to build a bridge between our contemporary dance practice and the greater community by bringing our work into public space. We believe in working in joy, unlocking the creativity held in the relationship between the body and the imagination. We seek to interrupt the everyday with awe.
Biography
Choreographers, dancers and teachers Chloe and Stefania met at École de danse contemporaine de Montréal during their studies. Through several collaborative processes, Chloe and Stefania discovered their shared interests in the relationship between music and dance, teaching, and accessible public art practices.
In 2017, As They Strike Collective was born, and along with it, the four-part public art project Swish. The series began with the creation of Autumn Swish, a commission for les Amis de la Montagne and the City of Montreal, presented at the Mont-Royal Chalet. Spring Swish was then performed at the “Butterflies Go Free” exhibit at the Montreal Insectarium in 2018, in partnership with Les Amis de l’insectarium. Later that year, Summer Swish premiered at Festival Quartiers Danses. It was also presented at Festival SOIR in 2018, at Festival des Arts de Ruelles in 2019, and in partnership with le Patro Villeray in 2021.
As They Strike’s workshop series was also launched in 2021, developed to further their mission of building a bridge between the greater community and their dance practice. Designed to be adaptable to all ages and abilities, these movement and creation workshops offer exercises to develop imagination, creativity and expression through the body.
Today, the core members of our collective, Bailey Eng, Lucy Fandel, Chloe Hart and Claire MacIsaac, are united by curiosity about how performance processes relate and react to a place. Our individual practices include dance, music, somatics, writing, and acrobatics, to name a few, complemented by experiences in cultural mediation and therapeutic practices. The encounter between our perspectives informs our conceptual and aesthetic direction, as well as our deliberate consideration of audience experience. As a collective, we explore themes including placehood, transformation, multiplicity, participatory and community engaged performance, and human and environmental sustainability.
Morgan Petroski Photography
Since graduating from l’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal in 2015, Stefania Skoryna has performed for Mélanie Demers (OFFTA, 2016), Pétrus / Jérémie Niel (Théâtre de Quat'sous, 2019) and Martin Messier (FTA, 2019) . Quickly, she moved towards choreography and started creating for events at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Chalet du Mont-Royal, the Butterflies Go Free exhibition at the Botanical Garden (As They Strike Collective), as well as the Zoofest ( 2015-2018). Her fascination with the relationship between sound and movement has given her her the opportunity to collaborate with various composers (O. Alary, S. Perli, Y. Berthiaume, R.Camiolo, M. Daigneault, A.Shalev, S. Nesic) and ensembles (Paramirabo and Volte). Her pieces have been programmed, among others, at Tangente, Dance Matters, Codes D'Accès and MUTEK. Her involvement in the community plays a key role in her practice. In September 2020, she finished her tenth year of teaching dance. She also established mentorship for the first years at the EDCM, and is a co-founder and general coordinator of the non-profit Nous Sommes L'Été, which organizes summer movement laboratories since 2014 in Montreal and Quebec. Stefania has started a training program to accompany artists in their artistic practice and is also one of the coordinator of the fundamental research platform in performing arts, Ecotone, from the company Baobab | Multidisciplinary creation.
Morgan Petroski Photography
Chloe Hart is an emerging contemporary and percussive dance artist. Orignially from Nova Scotia (Canada), Hart graduated from École de danse contemporaine de Montréal in May of 2017. In 2016, her choreographic work Cornstarch and Other Dilemmas, created in collaboration with Aliah Schwartz, was presented at Kinetic Studio’s Open Studio Series in Halifax, as well as at the Montreal St. Ambroise Fringe Festival. Her site specific work with As They Strike Collective has been performed in several iconic locations across Montreal. In 2017 she attended The Creative Gesture: Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and participated in the Composition for Dance seminar at the University of Montreal. The result of the latter, a piece entitled Consequence(s), was presented in Toronto at Dance Matters in 2019. In the same year, Chloe was awarded a professional development grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec to support her apprenticeship with Zeugma Danse, with whom she has continued on as a company member. Chloe has also worked with choreographer Sarah Dell’ava on her work O2, which was presented at the Festival TransAmerique in 2021, and with Sandy Silva on the Migrations Dance Film Project. These experiences have allowed Chloe to invest in two of her primary interests: the collaborative process and the relationship between music and dance.