NW Spotlight | Interwoven Connections
New Works Spotlight
A look inside our multifaceted, value-driven, community-responsive service organization
New Works delivers many unique programs, in many different ways, in support of many communities of artists. If you’ve ever asked a New Works staff member, “so, what does New Works do exactly?”, you’ve likely been met with a rambling run on sentence and a laundry list of exciting programs and projects that we have on the go. Up close it may look a little messy, but take a step back and you will see the container: all of our work exists in response to current gaps in the needs of the dance community. This looks like performance opportunities, partnership and collaboration, professional development, teaching engagements, mentorship, skills training, and many more. And we are just one small piece of this vitally diverse dance milieu.
We envision a healthy artist-centred arts ecosystem where connection, collaboration, and opportunity is celebrated beyond the container of our own organization. Through this ongoing blog series, we invite you to join us in witnessing artist experience through and beyond New Works programs, and in celebration of our living, breathing, shared communities.
Interwoven Connections: Luciana Freire D’Anunciação & Kelly McInnes, Premiere Mouth to Mouth at VIDF
By: Marco Esccer & Charlotte Newman
Mouth to Mouth
Life is an ecosystem—a web of movement, thought, and collaboration that grows and evolves over time. For artists Luciana Freire D’Anunciação and Kelly McInnes, this interconnectedness is both a theme of their artistic work and a lived experience in their creative journey. Their latest collaboration, Mouth to Mouth, will be presented at the Vancouver International Dance Festival (VIDF) on March 6 & 8, 2025, marking a significant moment in a five-year creative process shaped by resilience, transformation, and an ever-deepening exploration of biological and philosophical interrelations.
This curiosity laid the foundation for Mouth to Mouth before the pandemic. When the world shifted in 2020, so did their process. The two artists found themselves within each other’s creative bubble, working intimately through pandemic restrictions. This period of concentrated collaboration, supported by The Dance Centre and presented at 12 Minutes Max, solidified the themes of their work: transformation, adaptability, and the invisible yet profound forces that shape us.
The Cohort Program's Ripple Effect
Each spring New Works staff have the opportunity to get to know, mentor, and support a cohort of 10 dance artists through our Cohort Program. The program was created in 2020 by Kristina Lemieux and former New Works Executive Director Julie Lebel, as a space to offer long-form progressional development and mentorship to dance artists focused on the skills, knowledge and networks that empower dancers to produce their work. We got to know Luciana Freire D’Anunciação (Cohort Alumnus 2023) and Kelly McInnes (Cohort Alumnus 2021) through past Cohort Programs, and were very excited to learn that their work had been programmed in Vancouver International Dance Festival’s 2025 season.
Navigating funding systems, presenter relationships, production models and more, takes a huge amount of time and investment from artists at all stages of career and collaboration. As Kelly noted post-pandemic, grant resources and available support has shifted and often feels even more elusive now.
“The cohort and the grant clinic helped me look into grant writing through other lenses, less of a painful event and more like a practice of using clear language to describe an artistic vision.”
“The Cohort program contributed to our resilience, confidence, determination, and skill sets to keep working to bring this piece to fruition after so many years faced with a lot of rejection from funding bodies and almost giving up on it.”
Mouth to Mouth has grown out of five years of collaboration and investment, and will be premiered at VIDF this March in its fully realized form.
Marco Esscer an interdisciplinary queer Mexican artist, Dance Movement Therapist and cultural worker, interested in building bridges of understanding and care through artistic practice and process, and is Communications and Program Coordinator for New Works.
Charlotte Newman is a dance artist, teacher, arts worker, and producer with over ten years of experience engaged in the arts in Vancouver. She is passionate about accessible community building, play and craft as practice, and supporting arts educators and is General Manager for New Works.
Photos: Luciana Freire D’Anunciação and Kelly McInnes in Mouth to Mouth. Photo by Luciana Freire D'Anunciação.