MAINSTAGE 2025-2026
Art Market
Jennifer McLeish-Lewis
Art Market
Art Market is a piece about performance as product. It’s a game for myself, a challenge to presenters and producers, a prank for the audience, and a way to bring art to the people! Art Market is a structured improvisation with two dancers and one musician. Art Market happens in a parking lot and is a traveling performance on wheels. Art Market is about the commodification of performance. Art Market speaks to the lack of affordable rehearsal space as well as the lack of affordable performance venues. Art Market is a call to action and a social-political experiment. Art Market engages a local musician from your community to encourage outreach and accessibility to audiences. Art Market is a way for my work to come to you.
Jennifer McLeish-Lewis
My work straddles traditional training and the ephemerality of improvisation. I am keen to destroy the artificial separations between dance and other forms of live performance by melding dance with singing, live instruments and acting. Cross-pollination and collaboration between different performance forms are crucial to my work. In my choreographic process I create strong characters using the dancers’ multi-disciplinary skills, capturing the audience’s attention in an accessible and captivating way to bring the public into the worlds I create. Socially, my context revolves around my identity as a queer intersectional feminist, aiming to transform the portrayal and the perception of women both inside and outside the dance world. I believe that the more personal the work, the more universal its impact. In its exploration of interdisciplinary elements and its fearless confrontation of discomforting subject matter, my work doesn't resemble that of my pears, but instead has a provocative and arresting quality that is all my own.
Performance History & Upcoming Performances
My next creation will start with an invited residency at LENA Residency Centre on Galiano Island, February 1-7, 2026. This will be the first phase of a longer process for the creation of a new solo.
Project Details
Piece / project created by: Jennifer McLeish-Lewis
Key Artistic Collaborators: Choreographer/Performer Jennifer McLeish-Lewis - Performer Hailey McCloskey -
A Local Musician - Someone from your local community who plays cello, violin, or viola. Someone who is classically trained and is comfortable with improvisation.
General Technical Requirements: Outdoor, site specific. We only require a parking lot where the audience can gather.
How much time does the work require for tech set up?None - good weather!
Length of your performance: 5-20 minutes - flexible
Audience Type: General Audience, young Audiences
Number of Performers on Tour (including choreographer): 2
Number of Support Staff on Tour: 0
Performance Type: Mixed Bill.
Performance Type: Outdoor, Site Specific.
How do you define this work?: Site Specific Contemporary Dance Theatre.
Alternative Venues/Spaces/Outdoors: A parking lot where the car can drive into and out of. A place where the audience can gather to watch on foot or with bikes, strollers, wheel chairs, etc.
OutreachActivities
Men's League and Mixed Gender Classes
I am a Contact Improvisation teacher. Since 2006 I have been leading classes, workshops and jams in this post-modern partnering dance form. My current niche is teaching male-identifying movers of all ages. I have taught in Vancouver, across Canada, along the pacific northwest coast and in Mexico. I can offer a 1-3 hour workshop in your community. My workshops are always LGBTQIA+ inclusive. I feel Contact helps create more somatic empathy, more compassion, and deeper bonds within the community.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
2SLGBTQIA+ Community Sharing Circle
Alongside my artistic practice, I am also a Professional Registered Counsellor. I am looking for opportunities to lead group sharing sessions; not counselling sessions, more art based transformational community coaching, for those folks who see the show and would like to engage with the creator, performer, and other audience members afterwards.
Less than $2500