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.
Current Members
Bailey Eng's movement practices stem from contemporary dance, breaking, parkour, contortion, and Chinese pole. She graduated from Concordia University with a BFA in Contemporary Dance, after having also studied at L'École Nationale de Cirque and York University. Previous work has allowed her to incorporate dance, circus, and parkour, including work with Nadère Arts Vivants, Destins Croisés, Animals of Distinction, and We All Fall Down. She is part of As They Strike Collective, bringing together her interests in movement, psychology, and healing, through interaction with public spaces and learning from nature.
Claire MacIsaac is a dance artist and community wellness facilitator, with a BFA in Contemporary Dance and Psychology. She approaches her creative process with values of accessibility, compassion, and curiosity in alternative ways of engaging in dance and choreography. A member of As They Strike Collective, Claire’s current practice focuses on the psychosocial relationship between space and self, explored through transition, boundaries, and metaphor. Pursuing a Master’s in Counselling Psychology, Claire’s studies inform her integration of emotional sustainability into her creative practice.
Lucy Fandel is a dance artist based in Tio’tià:ke / Montreal. She grew up in Concord, MA (USA) and Beaulieu sur Mer (France) before studying dance and sociology at Concordia University. She especially loves places where waters and winds move in great streams. Through choreography, performance, teaching and writing she explores how to connect to the poetry of movement in ourselves and our surroundings. Recognized in by Dance Magazine as one of 25 to Watch in 2024, Lucy has the joy of collaborating and performing with artists across disciplines including Allison Moore, Ariane Dessaulles, Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux, Cara Roy, Nickle Peace-Williams and the collectives Daughter Product , among others.
She is active in her community as an artistic advisor, arts outreach educator, co-founder and coordinator of several cultural projects. These have included the Performing Arts Research Cluster at Concordia University, Nous Sommes L’Été, a non-profit in service of emerging artists’ creative development of which she is co-founder, and Mouvement Perpétuel, an art film production company. She has also been writing for The Dance Current Magazine since 2017.
Chloe Hart is a contemporary and percussive dance artist. Orignially from Nova Scotia (Canada), Hart graduated from École de danse contemporaine de Montréal in 2017. As a choreographer, her work has been presented by Kinetic Studio (Halifax), Dance Matters (Toronto), NUVO Théâtre musical theatre (Montreal) and Festival Errances (Vaudreuil-Dorion). Passionate about the relationship between music and dance, as well as the collaborative process, Chloe has pursued training in these fields through opportunities such as The Creative Gesture – Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Composition for Dance seminar at the University of Montreal. As a dancer, Chloe has worked for Zeugma Danse since 2019, performing the three chapters of their site-adaptive trilogy, Errances, Cube and Aube. She has also collaborated with choreographer Sarah Dell’ava on her work O2, which was presented at the Festival TransAmerique in 2021, and O, presented at Tangente in 2022, as well as with Sandy Silva on the Migrations Dance Film Project. She is currently working on two collaborative performance-creation projects, Songs that Shan’t be Named and Astérisme.
Past Members
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.
