Sarah Bild

Choreographer, dancer and artistic director of her company BILDANSE, Sarah Bild has been practicing her art in Montreal for more than 20 years. She developed an organic approach to making dances by following an instinctive stream of physical imagery. Minimalism, abstraction, fully embodied movement coexist to create worlds rich in dreamlike, psychological images, always raising questions about our human place and role on this planet. Her choreographic works have been presented in festivals across Canada.

In 1996, she was selected by the Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes for a choreographic residency in Bucarest, Romania where she presented Prag, the first of her Prag trilogy. Prag 2 and Prag 3 followed in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Her solo Thunder (1999), “… one of the most authentic moments of this dance season…” (Le Soleil) represented the beginning of her exploration into weather and natural disasters. She deepened this research with Brain Storm (2001), presented by Danse-Cité in Montreal.

In October 2002, Sarah Bild began her search for the present moment during a residency with Le Groupe Dance Lab in Ottawa. Her new creations, Are we there yet? and CRUSH are based on this research. They premiered to critical and public acclaim at Tangente in Montreal in October 2003 and CRUSH went on an inner city tour of Montreal’s Maisons de la culture in April 2005. She added the trio Mutiny to this creative track in the fall of the same year.

Since meeting the great improvisational artist and teacher Ruth Zaporah in 2003, Sarah Bild has been training intensively with her in Action Theater, a rigorous improvisational technique that calls upon voice and body and text at every given moment. Her choreographic work is now deeply influenced by this experience. In 2008, Sarah Bild became the first improviser certified to teach the technique in Quebec. She teaches regularly at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal and is invited to teach and choreograph in many training programs across Canada.