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

︎︎︎ Contact 
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


PROJECTS ++ (PRACTICE) 





ADRIFT-DRAFT - spring/summer 2024


Slow rolling, rising into rest, we puzzle through. An embrace to this particulaar space as an invitation to take the time we need. We’ve been here so many times before (a haunted repetition). Being with more, being with what’s here; there’s no rush (for subtlety, for knowing in advance). 

ADRIFT-DRAFT is an improvised, durational dance installation performance co-created by Eva Anderson and Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn. 

Following a curiosity to slow down, we ask: if slowness is not what we think it is, what is it? 

We speculate over time.

Presented at the Manetti Shrem Museum.


 



Our practice emerged over the course of one slow year. We took the time we needed, found the spaces and places that worked (mostly a squash court), and developed a score for inhabiting/activating the gallery 3 hours at a time. 


slow rolling
touch: rise
rest into rise/rise into rest
moving through
embrace
solo slow: capture hauntings
push/pull: relocation
______?
repeat




credit: Hung Q Pham



ROCK GARDEN & ROCK SWAP - summer 2023

Rock Swap is an invitation to gather and share stories of the many lives lived by rocks. Throughout the day, folks of all ages are invited to bring a rock or pick a rock from our collection at our location in Elm Park where there will also be questionnaires available for guests to write about where their rock has come from and where they hope it may go next. Guests will then be invited to swap their rock with someone else’s rock, exchanging stories and nurturing the continuation of the rocks’ life cycles. Together we will trace, document, and imagine both the real and fictional stories of rock migration and shapeshifting across time and space. While we may not know (or remember!) where our rock has been, or where it is going, Rock Swap invites a mode of generative and generous speculation to open up possible futures still in-the-making.

Rock Swap is an extension of Rock Garden - an interactive installation featuring hand-crafted rock-shaped pillows designed and choreographed to provide comfort for the body upon the foundational belief that rest is a form of resistance. These two projects look to rocks as teachers for adaptation and transformation, who prompt us to reflect on and deepen our relationship to land, place, and community.

Supported by: Dance West, Canada Council for the Arts, & Natalie Purschwitz (Elm Park Fieldhouse)






PLASTICITIES PRACTICE - may 2023


Collaborative media project with Teresa Salas and Sarah Ashkin. 
Inquiring into the imaginary of flesh, skin, nature, sexuality, materiality, and how we are already plastic in an entanglement with microplastics. 







credit: teresa salas



WHITE DANCER LOOPS - april 2023



The UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance presented White Dancer Loops, an MFA project, by graduate student Teresa Salas in collaboration with anthropology doctoral student Ileanna Cheladyn on April 11-14 in the Della Davidson Performance Studio, Nelson Hall.  

White Dancer Loops observes the hegemonies of dance and dancing bodies. We question the parameters of what is considered dance, beauty, virtuosity, and complicity through the prioritized perspectives of white and northern values of performance and spectatorship. Looking to disorient the sensation and perception of gendered, colonized, and racialized assumptions we use dance to emphasize the weaving of dancing, embodiment, and politics along lines of liberation, violence, and connection.




HOLOGRAPHIC HEARTBREAK - january 2023


A solo for one refracting dancer. Tall, but not vertical. Sometimes vertical. Always slouching into the next. A solo for being there. All posture and transformation. A playlist of transmutation. 

Presented at Left of Main, as part of Left of PuSh, January 2023. 

  




Conceived & performed by: Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn
Outside eye & mentor & photo credit: Vanessa Goodman
Outside eye: Diego Romero


Echo Chamber - november 2022




Looking at the body as a living archive, "Echo Chamber" explores the residues of past dances. It looks at the body as a container for experience, pleasure, desire and effort. "Echo Chamber" is the newest work from Action at a Distance, created by Vanessa Goodman in collaboration with performing artist Ileanna Cheladyn, with original sound by Loscil and arresting lighting by James Proudfoot. Ileanna transports her audience to a hauntingly beautiful world thick with visceral physicality and full of soft, tender vulnerability.

Premiered Nov 20/21, 2022 at the Chutzpah Festival






Rock Garden - summer 2022

 
Creators: Sarah Wong & Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn

Rock Garden is an interactive installation featuring handcrafted cushions inspired by the movements of shape shifting within the life cycle of rocks. The work honours rocks as teachers for surrendering to transformation, bringing to light the relationship between resistance, rest, and renewal. As a social practice, Rock Garden enacts a relationship between art, activism, and community gathering. This work activates the body as political, recognizing the effects of oppression on bodies and cultivating a pocket of rest and ease within structures of hardness and force. Through the integration of choreography and textile design, our rock garden aims to be a soft place to land that reminds participants to slow down, release, and tend to their embodied needs.

     


Photo Credit: Sarah Wong

 

SLOWNESSES - ongoing 2022



Slownesses is an ongoing practice-based research project thinking about slowness in the body. See the entire page devoted to slowness for the hot goss on slow. 




dream cellscapes - summer 2021/winter 2022


International digital-installation-practice. Conceived by Alice Weber. Supported by Critical Path. Canadian collaborators: Vanessa Goodman & Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn.

“Treating the spreadsheet as a choreographic field, ‘Dream Cellscapes’ encompasses installation and choreography to explore the idea of cells as containers of desire. The cell refers to a contained space. It is also the smallest unit of life. Where there is life there is desire, and while the cell contains/holds/structures — desire flows.

By taking the spreadsheet as the choreographic field, this project explores this idea of cell as container of desire. Between cells and bodies, desire to spills and overflows, a cellular dream; a cellscape. As performers move across IRL and online embodiments, going slack and reanimating, the work asks what flows between cells, both digital and biological. There are questions of spectatorship that undermine a conventional, phalloccularcentric gaze. It’s like watching a sleepover through a bedroom window, except the window is your phone and instead of bedsheets its spreadsheets. They know you’re watching but they don’t mind – which makes you press your face right up.
Corrupting office software for their fantasy, and along with it expectations of time, gaze and presence, Dream Cellscapes looks at digital embodiment and the porousness of desire.”





monolith - spring 2021


As part of Mile Zero Dance’s Dance Crush series. 



“Made possible by The Canada Council for the Arts, monolith illustrates how women are exploited by powerful figures, oftentimes under the guise of good intentions. The main character, Subject 71 is confined to an existence where she must meet the expectations and cater to the demands of The Monitor: a narcissistic and malicious being whose masked face continues to glare with manipulative expression. The Monitor’s commands may be delivered with grace but are in fact insane and inhumane. Subject 71 has no choice but to smile and appease. Her own existence, purpose, and dreams are directly tied to The Monitor’s whims and can be taken away at any moment.

The themes in monolith speak to the experience of many female artists who are placed in situations where they are expected to obey those in higher positions without asking “why?” or even “is this appropriate?” Danced by Kushniruk herself, the sentiment is drawn from her own experiences as a professional dancer.”

Credits: 
Tia Ashley Kushniruk (Concept, Co-writer & Performer)
Rizwan Mohiuddin (Director/Co-writer)
Kristen Innes Stambolic (animation)
Emmett Verhoog (Original Score)
Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn (Rehearsal Director/Movement Director)
Jake Tkaczyk (Production Manager)
Nicholas Lehmann (Cinematographer/Editor)
Alexander Boldt (Videographer)
Kenzie Bowes (Lighting Designer)
Susannah Haight (Costume Consultant)




Undressing Scores - spring 2020



Excerpt from practice-based research period, supervised by Peter Dickenson: 

WHAT AM I WORKING TO TRANSMIT? Attention, social position, sensation, connection, expression, effort, interest, slowness, patience, responsibilities, lineages, the knowledge of movement and of broader gestural implications… something like agency, too.

1.    Undress as slowly as you can. Speak as quickly as you can about a predetermined topic, or an embarrassing story.

Become floor, shake obscenely, be the representative for all humans and be a disgusting human-looking creature, avoid using your hands and feet to locomote, roll your eyes back, see without your eyes, be rhythmic to your physiology which is not the same uniform rhythm of a song, uncomposed orifices and limbs, composed for no one.

download full text here


Fever Dreams - fall 2020



From plastic orchid factory’s 2020/2021 season:

“INCUBATIVE and ADAPTIVE underpin fever dreams, plastic orchid’s 2020–2021 season.
Artists-in-Residence will work at Left of Main to imagine how their interests reach into a world in perpetual transition. Sitting alongside these incubative deep dives, our collaborations for presentation will be adaptive and responsive in nature and by design...

As we sit on the precipice of the unknown, where the unforeseeable and unimaginable are woven into the fabric of our daily lives, we've invited this season's artists to reflect on their practices in this book/let, which we offer in print and digital forms. All of the messiness that binds us in this moment is bound here, as we search for and approach practicing in a different kind of tomorrow. ”
 
Click here to view Ileanna’s reflection/text. 


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