A Canadian dance artist and scholar currently based on Patwin lands (Davis, California) and on Coast Salish lands (Vancouver, BC, Canada), pursuing a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at UC Davis. Currently the scholar in residence at The Scotiabank Dance Centre. 

(you can call me Ily)

Her work is critical of prescriptive mind/body dualisms and hegemonic approaches to kinesthetic experience. She makes movement, textile/fibre, and text-based art in quiet, devoted, clumsy, and rigorous ways to bring creative and infrastructural change to her worlds.

Ileanna is currently working s l o o o o  o  o  o   o   o   o    o    o    o   w l y with slowness and disorientation.

Her research, activist phenomenology, attends to the ways that dancers, who spend decades experimenting with their bodies as sensing and moving social intelligences, are uniquely reflective and insightful about how ideas emerge at the intersection of creative acts of meaningful performance making, pedagogical hierarchies, and social justice issues. As in: dancers invent new worlds. 

Full bio HERE

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ILEANNA SOPHIA CHELADYN

A Canadian dance artist and scholar currently based on Patwin lands (Davis, California)and on Coast Salish lands (Vancouver, BC, Canada), pursuing a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at UC Davis. Currently the scholar in residence at The Scotiabank Dance Centre.

(you can call me Ily) 

Her work is critical of prescriptive mind/body dualisms and hegemonic approaches to kinesthetic experience. She makes movement, textile, and text-based art in quiet, devoted, clumsy, and rigorous ways to bring creative and infrastructural change to her communities.

Full bio HERE


︎︎︎ Contact

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Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn is a Canadian dance artist and scholar who engages slowness, disorientation, and sensitivity, prioritizing collaboration, care, and delight. She works with improvisation to experiment new possibilities in/of technique, aesthetics, and relations of power. She trained at École de Danse Contemporaine du Montréal, Modus Operandi, Simon Fraser University, and University of California, Davis. Her BA, MA and PhD-in-progress are all in the field of sociocultural anthropology where she thinks with the senses to decenter hierarchies of knowledge. Broadly oriented toward care-full pedagogies that resist violent structures of subject formation, Ileanna’s practice emphasizes adaptability, patience, and dealing with complexity. Playful tasks of tender discomfort matter here.

Her research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. 

Ileanna’s practice is and has been supported in Vancouver by The Scotiabank Dance Centre 45W, Action at a Distance, Left of Main, plastic orchid factory, WhatLab, Boca De Lupo, Hop Bop Shop, Boombox, The Firehall Theatre, and EDAM. Abroad, she has been supported by Critical Path (Australia), Hyde Productions (New Zealand/Aotearoa), Stable (Montreal, QC), Coppermoss (Tuwanek, BC), Good Women (Edmonton, AB) and Espacio Expectante (Mexico).  

Slowness takes up most of Ileanna’s time lately: concerned not with the destination, but with what is (messily, abundantly, bizarrely) present right now in this body. Using the practice of slowness to reach into embodied politics of anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, and anti-racist orientations, Ileanna’s dance and scholarly practice insists on simply taking time to drift, cruise, and wander.

Ileanna advanced to candidacy in spring 2024, writing on her research with the Bay Area contact improvisation communities and the variable use of the word/practice of “sensitivity.”

ADRIFT-DRAFT, co-created with Eva Anderson, presented at the Manetti Shrem Meuseum (Davis, CA), is Ileanna’s latest work. A durational, installation, inquiry, performance, improvisation, ADRIFT-DRAFT is a duet lasting many hours. We rolled (on the floor, on each other, between patrons, around the artwork), and we were glamoured by the thickness of attention and presence. Glamoured by the multiplicity of possibilities from/of this now.

Holographic Heartbreak was Ileanna’s full-length solo work that premiered at Left of PuSh in 2023. This solo inhabits a potentiality of postures in transformation. Working with slowness as an incubator for multiplicity and an experience of being overhwelmed, Holographic Heartbreak unfurls as a playlist of explicit transitions in her body that maybe, possibly, reach out into yours.

Echo Chamber, a solo work choreographed by Vanessa Goodman/Action at a Distance and performed by Ileanna, had its world premiere at Chutzpah! Festival in November 2022.

It Was/Wasn’t All Worth It: This piece contains violence (IWWWI) is a full-length duet Ileanna and her collaborator Diego Romero co-created in 2015. Since its original presentation at Interplay (2015), it has been presented at Dancing on the Edge (2017), and Nextfest (2019). It was intended to be presented by What Lab in an experimental, fragmented form in 2019, but Diego kicked Ileanna’s hand in the technical rehearsal and they spent the evening in emergency getting a cast put on Ileanna’s broken metacarpal. Both her hand and their relationship healed. The next iteration of this duet is currently in progress.

IWWWI is a task-based choreography, connecting a series of vignettes that hinges on Diego and Ileanna’s chemistry and technical skill. Each presentation of IWWWI brought significant opportunity to explore and expand the work, tracking the evolution of the work itself and Diego’s and Ileanna’s trajectories as artists. “Recylcing” remains a hypervaluable term for the pair. IWWWI has served as the centerpiece for their joint practice – they value the enduring commitment to one piece of choreography as a container to continuously push and play with their evolving artistic sensibilities. Considering that Ileanna and Diego were teenagers when they first made the work, IWWWI also serves as a technical playground for them as they navigate their growing professional experience and maturingbodies.  

In 2016, Ileanna, Diego Romero, and Katie Lowen conceived of Boombox, an alternative performance and creation space in a semi-truck trailer. After a season of serious renovations, the trailer was retrofitted with a lighting and sound system sufficient to host works by local and out of town artists. Boombox continues to operate as a community-driven creation and performance venue, aimed at providing artists the room to play outside of institutional expectations and traditional proscenium formats. Boombox is a DIY space at heart with a “quick and dirty” methodology that democratizes dance and performance. Split-Screen, a program folded into Boombox and funded by the City of Vancouver/ArtStarts, supported 20 artists under 25 who wanted accessible mentorship, research-creation space, and incubation time to work on their dance practice. Boombox, being a grassroots project, remains relevant to live arts practitioners in the local mileu. [RIP Boombox 2022 - but actually it still exists under new management (Here for Now) at the Birdhouse]

Mentorship, production, writing, costume design and construction, dramaturgy, movement direction, and grant writing are growing branches of Ileanna’s dance practice that support her performance and creation work.  

In 2018 Ileanna completed her BA (joint honours degree in Sociology and Anthropology) at Simon Fraser University where she fell in love with sensory ethnography, anthropology of the senses, practice-as-research, and embodied methodologies/pedagogies. Her honours thesis developed the groundwork for Ileanna to think critically about how bodies and bodiliness are written into (and out of) text-based theory. Seeing the possibility to use her dance knowledge and experience to think about the broader social and cultural worlds she lives in, she began her MA (anthropology) to engage with the concept of agency within dance practice. Playing in a framework of embodied agency and legibility, Ileanna’s MA research sensed through the magical moment of choice-making and decision-taking in dance improvisation.Having experienced the difficult tensions of power and authority as they play out through dancing bodies, Ileanna’s academic work is broadly oriented toward building ethical engagements of dance making and dance practice that rectifies harmful mythologies of dance being inseparable from capitalist markets of surplus and alienated labour. Thinking about agency, Ileanna is curious about the ways that improvisation and scores can bring change to the discourses that shape dance technique, aesthetics, and relations of power.

Ileanna bagan her doctorate degree at UC Davis (Anthropology) in 2021. Her research continues in the vein of pleasure and care, and the ways that improvisation can reaffirm subjectivity and one’s own corporeal powers as they relate to collective aesthetic sensibilities.

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