MAHAILA PATTERSON-O’BRIEN
MAHAILA PATTERSON-O’BRIEN is an emerging choreographer in Vancouver, BC, located on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations of the Coast Salish peoples.
She holds a BFA (Hons.) in Dance from SFU School for the Contemporary Arts where she studied with Judith Garay, Henry Daniel, Rob Kitsos, Cheryl Prophet and Marla Eist. She has also studied at The School for Contemporary Dancers in Winnipeg, MB, and at The University of Winnipeg. Other influential mentors have included Maiko Yamamoto, Justine A. Chambers, Susan Elliot, Wen Wei Wang, Jennifer Mascall (MascallDance), and Constance Cooke.
As a choreographer her work has been presented at multiple venues, including Dancing on the Edge 2018+2019, Victoria Dance Days 2018+2019, Dance in Vancouver 2019+2017, Project CPR (Choreographic Practice and Research), 12 Minutes Max (The Dance Centre), Dance Allsorts (New Works), ROMP! Festival of Dance 2015 + 2017 (Victoria). In Fall 2019 she was commissioned to set a new work on the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts Dance students.
She was selected to participate in the inaugural Dance Victoria Choreographic Lab in 2017 mentored by Wen Wei Wang and returned in 2019 under the mentorship of Justine A. Chambers and Susan Elliott.
In 2016 she came together with fellow artists Felicia Lau and Erika Mitsuhashi to form the collective Farouche. They made their debut with a self produced show at the Gold Saucer. They have gone on to participate in the Simon Fraser University’s SCA Alumni Dance Lab (2017), were artists and residence at the Anvil Centre (2017), facilitated a workshop with the first year students of the SFU Dance program (2017), and premiered their first full length work, We Talk Disco One Day, at the Gold Saucer (2018).
MID-LIGHT
This story takes place a long time ago in a future that has not yet arrived. It begins with two beings in a mid-light world. One asks “Will you show me who you really are?” The other peels the skin back and says, “ .”
Some things are best left unexplained.
Mid-Light is a new, multi-disciplinary performance that combines choreography, text, music, and digital projection to build a restless world — a world always just on the brink of rupture. Performed by 4 dancers — 2 men and 2 women — the work dissects the ephemeral nature of a singular emotional moment, revealing just how malleable memory can be. The moment is repeated; it plays over and over again, continuously dissolving into new configurations of itself.
MID-LIGHT is the third project to be commissioned for T/R’s COLLIDER Residency, a program built around PushOFF to foster artistic practice among Vancouver performance-makers. In 2020, a filmed version of the piece was shot in residence at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. The full work will be premiering in the Fall of 2021, as a presentation by New Works at the Waterfront Theatre in Vancouver.
Photos by Sepehr Samimi and Daniel O’Shea
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