Heather Falk – Tour Guide

Heather is excited to be participating once more in IGNITE!; having performed in 2011, Castle in the Sky, and 2013, FUGLY. Select theatre credits include An Improvised Hamlet (Improv Guild), FUGLY (The Janes) & Coast (Theatre Transit). Heather is an ‘09 graduate of Playhouse North School of Theatre & an avid improviser in city, performing with Obviously Improv, Mixtape & The Kinkonauts. She is also co-founder of The Janes, a performance creation collective, who can be seen next at the Edmonton Fringe this August.
 

Owen Chan – Tour Guide

Owen is a high school drama teacher, improv enthusiast and passionate live theatre-ist. Owen is a founding member and current Artistic Director of The Kinkonauts, Calgary’s Improv Laboratory, who have just closed their 2013/2014 Season. Owen is the director and coach of Dream Toast (The Kinkonauts), an improvised dream, and is an ensemble player of the mainstage company. Recent mainstage shows include: Much Ado From Nothing: Improvised Shakespeare, and Beauty. Love. Truth.

Tony Tran & Pamela Tzeng

Pamela and Tony are Calgary-based dance makers, performers, choreographers and producers. They are both very excited to return to Ignite!! with their recent collaboration, appearing in Let Down Your Hair, a Calgary Tower performance tour. For more about their various projects please visit www.pamelatzeng.com & www.tonytran.ca.
Armed with a BComm in Marketing with a Minor in Dance from the University of Calgary, Tony Tran is an active member of the Calgary Dance Community especially within the Urban Dance scene through his work as an instructor, performer, producer, curator and choreographer. He has travelled to New York City, Finland, and Montreal in quest for dance knowledge and development with which to share what he has learned to the city of Calgary. Tony is a Board of Director with Springboard Performance and Calgary Contemporary Dance Collective, and in 2012, Tran established his own collective to further the growth and education of Vogue culture and dance in Calgary as the Founder/Artistic Director of The Bad Girls Club YYC.
Pamela Tzeng is an interdisciplinary dance artist based in Calgary, Canada. Her artistic journey has brought her to train and perform across Canada, Europe and Brazil. As an interpreter she has worked with choreographers Tania Alvarado (CA), Noam Gagnon (CA), Helen Husak (CA), Ismael Ivo (GE/BR), Taryn Javier (CA), Robin Poitras (CA), Kenji Takagi (GE) and Stephen Thompson (CA/FR) amongst others. Under the creative platform Make Shift Project, Pamela explores her artistic range as a dance maker, teacher and producer. Her choreographies, which span the world of dance theatre and multidisciplinary performance, have been presented in diverse festivals in Canada including Fluid Movement Arts Festival, Expanse Festival, Guelph Dance Festival and Vancouver’s Dancing on the Edge Festival. Pamela is co-director of Calgary Contemporary Dance Collective, a not-for-profit organization focused on establishing a consistent and advanced training program/ meeting place for professional dancers in the local community.

Photo by Vernon Rubiano

Sara Deabler & Natasha Jensen

Sara Deabler is a writer undertaking a Master’s degree in creative writing. Natasha Jensen, a recent graduate of ACAD, is an artist and cultural worker. Natasha and Sara have been best friends since high school; one time they ate an entire bucket of ice cream together before 10 a.m. They are thrilled to be part of the Ignite! Festival.
Sara Deabler is a writer, student and multidisciplinary artist with degrees in English and Women’s Studies. Finding her work in the murky trenches between genres, Sara’s interests lie in experimental writing, underrepresented narratives and the fantastically banal. She will be relocating to Montreal in the fall to pursue graduate studies in Creative Writing. Her poem “Of Hares” was recently selected for the Spring 2014 Poem of the Season at the University of Calgary.
Natasha Jensen is a young woman working from her 3rd floor walk-up in Calgary, Alberta. Her work is a tender and personal extension of herself and is inspired by obsession, the female experience, romance, fragility and eccentricity. She has an interdisciplinary art practice in drawing, sculpture, photography, installation and has begun to explore performance and theatre this year. This is her second attempt to translate the theatrical nature of her work through collaborative projects. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Calgary including Stride Gallery, Marion Nicoll Gallery, and Art Gallery of Calgary. Her work can also be found in private collections. Website: Natashafayejensen.com

Ian McFarlane, Kathryn Smith, James Wade & Kevin Jesuino

This multifaceted, motley mash up of artists stems from a vast array of disciplines, including performance, design, playwriting, installation, and community engagement. Let Down Your Hair will be the first time this group has assembled, brought together through a love of performance, collective creation and found space.
Ian McFarlane is a multifaceted artist with a repertoire in performance creation, acting, set design and visual art. His work has an inevitable tendency to blend these disciplines, accessing the manipulation of space and the potential of the performing body. He is a graduate of the University of Lethbridge, holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Multidisciplinary with Great Distinction. He has a healthy habit of encountering unique spaces in which to explore character, movement, image and text, having created art in mechanical rooms, abandoned houses, under bridges and amongst unsuspecting patrons in coffee shops. Ian is also a co-founder of the creation based theatre ensemble, Frivolous Fools Performance. You can catch their latest creation, The Hudson Bay Epic, at Fringe Festivals across western Canada this summer. Learn more about Ian at ianfmcfar.weebly.com.
A Calgary-based designer, director and producer, Kathryn Smith keeps busy through various adventures about town. Select credits include: The After Party (Lunchbox Theatre), The Wasp, Michel & Ti-Jean, A Spark Extinguished (Sage Theatre), Song of the Say-Sayer, Unidentified Human Remains (University of Lethbridge), Chicago, Love Train, Two Hit Wonders (Stage West), Peg and the Yeti, Marooned With Munsch, Billy Bishop Goes to War (New West Theatre), WILF, Straight On Til Morning (Red Phone Theatre), 10-Minute Play Festival, Ignite! Site Specific (Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre) The Carrying, Monstrosities (Urban Curvz Theatre), The Tighty Whities Present…Death (Winner of the 2013 Provincial One Act Festival), Goblin Market/Little Problems (Pape & Taper Productions).
Kevin Jesuino is an emerging artist and performance practitioner devoted to theatre and media experimentation through interdisciplinary research, performance creation and education. He is a graduate from Grant MacEwan University (Diploma in Theatre Arts) and the University of British Columbia (BFA Interdisciplinary Performance) where he graduated with distinction with a Medal in Fine Arts. In 2012 he was nominated by the Arts Council of the Central Okanagan for his support in community arts development. From 2006-09 he founded and was the Artistic Producer of New City Collective, a site specific performative installation based company which was based out of Bangkok, Thailand. Notable created performance works are “Grumplestock’s” (2005, Edmonton), “Narok: Burning Down the Big Top” (2009, Bangkok), “End of Birth” (2009, Bangkok; 2010, Baltimore), “Last Will & Testament” (2012, Kelowna/Chilliwack), “Finding Pessoa” (2013, Kelowna/Chilliwack).Kevin Jesuino has presented and collaborated on work in Canada, the United States of America, Thailand, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. He is currently based in Calgary, Alberta.

Kyle Hinton

Kyle Hinton is a multi-disciplinary artist who loves to play with sound and performance. He loves to experiment and explore the boundaries between performance, sound and technology. Past Sound Design Productions include Death of the Freak Show 2012 (High Performance Rodeo/Swallow-a-Bicycle); i-ROBOT Theatre (Swallow-a-Bicycle); S/Kin 2011-2013 (Mind Hive Collective); i-ROBOT Unplugged (Swallow-a-Bicycle); Soundasaurus 2012 & 2013 (ECPA). He also wrote Characters and Violence in 2010 for NextFest.

JAS 360

JAS 360 is a performance collective created by Jamie Hobbs, Alicia Ward and Shelby Jansen. With an emphasis on community, participation and spectator interaction, JAS 360 seeks to create performance in unexpected places. What started out as a “theatrical practical joke” has turned into an outlet to create and continue relationships while exploring our home and community of Calgary.

Mark Hopkins – Producer / Curator

Mark Hopkins is a Calgary-based theatre artist and community-builder. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre, Calgary’s leading purveyor of fearless site-specific theatre. He’s also thrilled to be associated with artsScene Calgary, ArtsVote Calgary, Calgary Arts Development, the Calgary Foundation, the Mayor’s Arts Champions Committee and VoteKit Calgary, and is the host and founder of We Should Know Each Other.
Some recent honours and awards include:

• The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal
• Avenue Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2012
• The Calgary’s Herald’s 20 Compelling Calgarians for 2011
• 3rd Hardest-Working Calgarian in FFWD’s 2011 Best of Calgary survey

Mark experienced his professional playwriting debut with Lunchbox Theatre’s 2012 production of Super 8, a play that he co-wrote with Charles Netto, that won the Discovery Prize in the 2011 Alberta Playwriting Competition and that will be adapted into a short film in 2014.
Follow Mark on Twitter at @markchopkins.

Charles Netto – Producer / Curator

Charles is the Co-Artistic Director of Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre.
Charles works primarily as a writer, director and producer. He has directed, and had a hand in writing and creating numerous Swallow-a-Bicycle productions: i­ROBOT Theatre, Eavesdrop: The Coffee Shop Show, Freak Show: Tall Tales and Terrible Truths, Death of the Freak Show, Wanderlust, Shhhh!, as well as shorts A World Gone Mad, Free Coffee and Sprawl.
Charles co-wrote the play Super 8 with Mark Hopkins. Super 8 won the Alberta Playwriting Contest and premiered at Lunchbox Theatre in 2012. Charles and Mark recently adapted Super 8 into a short film, One Night in Aberdeen, that will premiere in 2014.
Twitter: @nettocharles