NWXR 2025

Beyond the Stage - Open Studio Sharing

 

Sunday, March 30, 2pm

Roundhouse Community Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver)

Free

RSVP to Attend

Check out the creative collaborations NWXR 2025 artists have been exploring this season! 

This season NWXR invited artists, technologists, and creative explorers to reimagine Vancouver as a living, breathing canvas. Through a series of interdisciplinary workshops led by Avideh Saadatpajouh, XR Program Coordinator for 2025, and featuring guest facilitators and lecturers, artists gathered to explore how movement, extended reality (XR), and sensory experiences can transform urban spaces into stages for embodied navigation.

Beyond the Stage is a collaborative space where creativity flows freely, the process is the purpose, and the city becomes a participatory landscape. Dance becomes both a guide and a map, leading artists and audiences into unexpected relationships with the spaces they inhabit and each other.

Through an open call in December 2024, a diverse group of 22 artists from across discipline and practice were selected to be part of the NWXR program this season. Activities included workshops and gatherings through January, February, and March, culminating in an Open Studio Sharing at the Roundhouse Community Centre. Please join us on Sunday afternoon to glimpse some of the work this passionate and dedicated group of artists have been exploring over the last three months together. 

PLUS, stick around for some exciting updates and partnership announcements from our friends at interplay_2025 as they announce their next open call!

 

Sunday Afternoon Schedule: 

2pm - Open Space Activation & Participatory Performance

           (latecomers and in/out welcome as you need) 

3pm - Artist Talkback 

3:30pm - interplay_2025 Open Call Announcement & Exciting Updates + Mingle

 

Access: all performances will take place either inside the Roundhouse Performance Centre, or outside in the courtyard near by. All spaces are wheelchair accessible. The Roundhouse has multi-stall and single-stall universal washrooms. Light snacks will be provided. Loud sound or bright light may be part of this performance; audiences always have autonomy to move a part of the performance space where they feel comfortable. This event welcomes audiences of all ages. 

Community Partners

Beyond the Stage Workshops

Week 1 - January 26th: Textual Exploration

About
Listening to the City’s Language and Stories with Guest Facilitator Sara Finn. This workshop invites participants to attune to Vancouver’s multisensory language—its human and nonhuman voices, evolving landscapes, and digital and physical materialities. Through visualizations, multimedia sources, and intuitive writing prompts, participants will explore fragmented narratives and shifting perspectives, inspired by Bathsheba Demuth and Anna Tsing. As the first in the seven-week Beyond the Stage series, the text generated will be gifted to the next movement exploration, fostering an ongoing creative dialogue across disciplines.

Week 5 - March 2nd: Movement Exploration

About
This workshop served as a reflective culmination of the series, inviting participants to revisit key themes, experiences, and lingering questions from previous sessions. Through tactile brainstorming and collaborative discussion, we engaged in an open dialogue to uncover central ideas that emerged across workshops. This gathering fostered a space for collective synthesis, deepening connections between past explorations and inspiring new creative directions as we approach the final sessions.

Week 2 - February 5th: Sensorial Exploration

About
Beyond Sight and Into Sensory Perception with Guest Facilitator Avideh Saadat Pajouh. This workshop invited participants to explore the world beyond sight, engaging with textures, sounds, tastes, and scents to challenge the dominance of vision in perception. Through guided exercises and movement between indoor and outdoor spaces, we experimented with the emotional and mnemonic power of sensory experiences. The session culminated in the creation of Emotional Recipe Cards, which were gifted to the next Movement Exploration workshop, continuing a creative dialogue through multisensory storytelling.

Week 6 - March 9th 2025: Creative Expansion

About
This was the start of the last two sessions dedicated to shaping the final project, using insights from the previous five workshops to guide the creative process. Participants formed groups and stations, integrating key questions and themes from past discussions while blending mediums such as sound, movement, and visuals. This dynamic, interdisciplinary exchange allowed ideas to evolve collaboratively, setting the stage for the culminating creation.

Week 3 - February 19th: Movement Exploration

About
With Guest Facilitator Alexa Mardon. More information coming soon.

Week 7 - March 16th 2025: Final Jam

About
More Information coming soon!

Week 4 - February 23rd: Technological Exploration

About
Mapping Presence Between Physical & Digital Spaces with Guest Facilitator Ghazal Majidi. Led by Ghazal Majidi and Avideh Saadatpajouh, this workshop explored the interplay between body, technology, and perception through movement, framing, and embodied communication. Participants examined how bodies navigate digital and physical realms, how attention shapes virtual spaces, and how gestures extend presence beyond language. Using mapping techniques and sensory tools, they attuned to unseen spatial dimensions, rethinking their relationship with digital spaces through play, reflection, and co-creation.

Beyond the Stage 2025 is activated by these facilitators:

Avideh Saadatpajouh - XR Program Coordinator 2025

Bio
Avideh Saadatpajouh is a multimedia artist and design activist who explores the intersections of technology, performance, and eco-consciousness. With the motto "Explore, Experience, Enhance," she embraces a holistic approach to her practice.

Avideh, born in the western part of Asia and now a resident of Canada, is pursuing her MFA at Simon Fraser University, School of Contemporary Arts. Her artistic work, rooted in her interdisciplinary background in architecture, industrial design, and new media art, investigates how human-centric worldviews shape environments. She explores the concepts of knowledge mobility and accessibility through low-footprint impact models.

Her interactive projects include the responsive inflatable sculpture "Pulse-Fiction," which explores making invisible frequencies visible, and "Sinusoidal Fiction," a performance art piece with a responsive stage that delves into surveillance dynamics, digital navigation, and AI image detection models. As the new XR program coordinator, Avideh aims to foster innovative XR experiences that bridge art, technology, and social engagement, contributing to the dialogue around contemporary performance art.

email: avideh@newworks.ca
Website: www.avideh.cc
Instagram: @where_the_dada_is

Photo by: Sardar Farrokhi
finn_headshot_ellapennington

Sarah Finn

Bio
Sarah Finn (she/they) is a theatre and film artist and writer. My practice uses handmade and multimedia elements, incorporating original text, movement, wearable sculpture, humor and video to realize stories of landscape that grapple with the hope and despair of ecological disaster. My performances and films have been presented at festivals in the US and internationally in the Czech Republic, Germany and Tokyo; and venues in New York, where I was the recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant and MAP Fund Microgrant and a resident artist at Mabou Mines and Object Movement at Center at West Park. I trained at Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and am currently pursuing my MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. www.sarahkfinn.com ; @sarah.k.finn Photo Credit: Ella Pennington
Ghazal Majidi

Ghazal Majidi

Bio
Ghazal Majidi (she/her) is an Iranian new media artist and filmmaker, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Her works span 3D animation and film, video games, extended reality, interaction design, generative systems, and installations. Playing in the intersection of digital media and non-linear storytelling, her work challenges the constructed stereotypes of contemporary technoculture, examining liminality, simulations, nostalgia, disintegration, and noise. Magical realism is a common genre in her works, probing questions about the nature of memories, dreams, and reality. Drawing from her academic background in architecture, Majidi’s work is deeply entangled with the poetics of space and involves intricate world-building in virtual space. By critically engaging with digital tools and immersive technologies, Majidi crafts alternative narratives and affective experiences that invite the audience into the uncanny valley. Majidi’s works have been presented internationally at film festivals and galleries, including Vienna Shorts, Mutek AE, Brussels Independent Film Festival, MONSTRA Lisbon Animated Film Festival, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, and Denver Digerati Emergent Media Festival amongst others. Majidi holds a Bachelor of Architecture and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Simon Fraser University. www.ghazalmajidi.com

Alexa Mardon

Bio
Alexa's practice includes making dances, writing about dances, dancing, teaching, and community actions, often overlapping and blurring together. Dance is the practice through which they sense and engage with the world around them, build nervous-system resilience, and gather in creative resistance and joy with existing and emergent community. Alexa studies movement through dancing, bodywork, support work and poetry. Alexa is a queer second-generation settler of Finnish/Karelian/British Isles descent living as an uninvited guest on the illegally occupied, unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. In Alexa’s work with Mardon + Mitsuhashi, Alexa trips out on the feeling of not quite knowing where they end and Erika begins. With Erika Mitsuhashi, they make interdisciplinary performances as Mardon + Mitsuhashi. As a dancer, they have performed for companies and artists including Sasha Kleinplatz (MTL), Benjamin Kamino (MTL), dumb instrument dance (Vancouver), MascallDance (Vancouver), battery opera performance (Vancouver/Toronto), and Justine A. Chambers (Vancouver). Alexa's writing and choreography have been presented across time and space, including with Summerworks Festival, OFFTA, The Dance Centre, Charcuterie Magazine, ISSUE Magazine, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Made In BC. Photo: Rachel Topham

Documentation:

Megan Gibbons

Aidan Ferrar

Niloufar Samadi

External Eye:

Justine A. Chambers

 

Past

opaqueREFUSALS Work in Progress

Opening Showing
by danielle Mackenzie Long Tuesday, Oct 29 | 6pm Roundhouse Community Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver) Free. RSVP required.
About the Work
You're invited to an Open Showing of a Work in Progress — come witness and discuss how dance and technology can interact together. Bubble wrap represents a restrictive binary structure that is meant to be disrupted. danielle Mackenzie Long is drawn to the way in which the material evolves through deflation and puncturing in order to provide safety to a delicate object, just as bodies evolve in various ways to support gender affirmation of trans people. Playing with the transparency of bubble wrap in both live and digital spaces, danielle uses it to conceal, distort, and ultimately reveal the complexity of intersecting genderqueer identities. opaqueREFUSALS is a slowly developing two-part work; one part live performance, one part interactive online animated visual "zine." Its creation process embraces the intimacy required of pursuing dances working in relation to technology, and what emerges from digital glitches that occur.
Learn More

New Works XR

New Works XR (NWXR) supports new voices in the development and exploration of creative technologies and embodied practice. Each season NWXR offers a unique suite of opportunities for movement artists to investigate, learn, and create within the intersecting space of XR (Extended Reality); an umbrella term encompassing augmented (AR), virtual (VR), and mixed reality technologies.

First developed in 2021 between New Works, dance artist Erika Mitsuhashi, and a team of consulting artists and technologists, the program was envisioned as a process-focused space to explore, learn, and expand individual practices on and off screen. Since that inaugural season, NWXR has continued to develop and evolve as a residency, learning, and community building space under the leadership of a different artist each season. Through rotating leadership NWXR offers deepend opportunities across somatic and XR practices as led by artists who are currently creating and questioning within those same creative spaces.

In the shifting landscape of new technologies and practices, the program remains curious, investigative, and artist-led.

Meet the XR Team

NWXR has been generously stewarded by a diversity of voices who have helped to shape, push, and lead the XR program since it’s inception.

Alexandra Caprara - XR Program Coordinator 2024

Bio
Alexandra Caprara (she/her) is a queer interdisciplinary artist from Tkaranto, Ontario whose practice is grounded in performance making and design, with a focus on devised processes, movement, interactivity, and design lead creation. Her work often centers themes of femininity, autonomy, somatics, and queer ecology, and believes in making and producing work that center queer joy. She has worked internationally as a director, performer, and designer for lighting and video projection, and has presented her work across Canada alongside companies such as WorkMan Arts, Factory Theatre, Theatre Replacement, and Good Woman Dance. She is currently concluding her MFA at Simon Fraser University, where her research focused on developing devised methodologies that centered harmonious relations with technology, performance interactivity, and ways technology can embrace the organic in both form and content. You can find out more about her work at alexandracaprara.com. She is thrilled to be a part of the New Works team! // Photo by Chelsey Stuyt

Gemma Crowe - XR Program Director 2023-24

Bio
Gemma Crowe is a new media artist and recent graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s full-residency MFA program. Crowe holds a bachelor’s degree in contemporary dance and has ten years of professional experience in filmmaking and video art, which influences how she approaches an audience of viewers and listeners. Her thesis research is concerned with the illusory potential of sound and the sensory apprehension of movement. Crowe received Canada Council and British Columbia Arts Council funding for her research into spatial sound and the bodily experience as well as a research award through Emily Carr University. Crowe completed a residency at Lobe Studio working with world-class 4DSOUND spatial sound software and delivered a presentation on embodied sonic design at the 2022 International Seminar on Sonic Design. Crowe will continue her research in embodiment, virtual theory, and audience perception in her role as New Works XR Program Director.

Sierra Megas - XR Program Manager 2022-24

Bio
Sierra Megas is an artist and arts administrator grateful to be living on the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her practice attends to physical materials through dance, embodiment, and improvisation and has recently involved list making, long-distance friendships, collecting foods and trinkets to connect with ancestors, making ephemeral sculptures, and observing minutiae in natural environments. As an extension of her practice, Sierra seeks to work meaningfully towards greater sustainability for artists through community programming, producing, curation and outreach. She has worked with Still Moon Arts Society, The Dance Centre, Vancouver New Music, Dumb Instrument Dance, Mascall Dance, and EDAM Dance. Alongside Francesca Frewer, Erika Mitsuhashi and Antonio Somera Jr., she is a co-producer-curator of Here For Now Collective. Together they produce the bi-annual, multidisciplinary art showcase Here For Now, and co-manage the beloved DIY performance venue, Boombox. Sierra has been supporting New Works XR since its Pilot program in 2021 and is delighted to continue creating spaces for dance and movement artists to experiment with new technologies.

Erika Mitsuhashi - Program Founder 2022

Bio
Erika Mitsuhashi is an interdisciplinary artist and performer living and working on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations of the Coast Salish peoples, known as Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied at Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts receiving a BFA (hons) in dance.
She has had the pleasure of interpreting the work of dance artists including Justine A. Chambers, Ziyian Kwan (Dumb Instrument Dance), Sasha Kleinplatz (Wants&Needs Danse), Rob Kitsos, Vanessa Goodman (Action at a Distance) and Judith Garay (Dancers Dancing) in festivals and platforms such as Vancouver International Dance Festival, Dancing on the Edge Festival, Re-FUSE presented by the Vancouver Art Gallery and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival 2020. Erika’s work has taken the form of performance for stage, installation, experimental film, site specific/responsive performance, scenography and projection design. Most recently she has been experimenting with live-stream video and digital spaces as sites for intimacy and choreography of attention. Her work and collaborative projects have been presented locally and internationally by PAUL Studios Berlin, Powell Street Festival, Toronto Love-In’s PS:We are All Here series, Surrey Art Gallery’s InFlux, Kinetic Studio’s Open Studio Series, Shooting Gallery Performance Series, Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival and La Serre's OFFTA festival of live art. She has been supported by organizations including New Works, SummerWorks, VIVO Media Arts, plastic orchid factory, Dance West Network, Boca De Lupo, Theatre Replacement and Company 605 in the creation and development of her works to date.

Past Seasons

NWXR activities have been supported by a broad community of mentors, workshop leaders, panelists, partners and audience-in-residence members, including: 

2023-2024

Alexandra Caprara - XR Program Coordinator

Caroline MacCaull - XR Artist 

Chimerik 似不像 Collective - XR Artist 

danielle Mackenzie Long - XR Artist

Freya Björg Olafson - XR Artist 

Gemma Crowe - XR Program Director 

Nancy Lee - XR Artist 

prOphecy Sun - XR Artist 

Sarah U - XR Artist

Simran Sachar - XR Artist 

Sierra Megas - XR Program Manager 

NWXR 2023-24

2022-2023

Carey Dodge, Boca del Lupo - XR Partner

Caroline MacCaull, Chimerik 似不像 Collective - XR Partner

Casey Koyczan - XR Partner 

danielle Mackenzie Long - XR Artist, Artist in Residence 

Emily Carr University of Art + Design - XR Partner

Emmalena Fredriksson - XR Partner

Freya Björg Olafson - XR Mentor 

Gemma Crowe - XR Program Director 

Ian Garrett, Toaster Lab - XR Mentor 

Ian Lavery - XR Mentor

James Albers - XR Artist, Artist in Residence 

Jay Dodge, Boca del Lupo - XR Partner 

Nancy Lee - XR Mentor 

New Media Gallery - XR Partner

Sammy Chien, Chimerik 似不像 Collective - XR Partner

Sarah U - XR Artist, Artist in Residence

Sierra Megas - XR Program Manager

Simran Sachar - XR Artist, Artist in Residence

NWXR 2022-23

2021 - 2022 

Eric Cheung - XR Artist

Erika Mitsuhashi - XR Program Director

Ian Garrett, Toaster Lab - XR Mentor

Jacob Niedzweicki - XR Mentor

Kevin Li - XR Artist

Sierra Megas - XR Program Manager

NWXR 2021-22

Top: Sinusoidal_Fiction 2023 performance by Avideh Saadat Pajouh.