Silvy Panet-Raymond, MEd, Université de Montréal

Professor, Contemporary Dance

Biography   

Interdisciplinary artist Silvy Panet-Raymond trained initially in dance with Elizabeth Langley and then with a number of renowned dance and performance artists in North America, the UK and Europe such as Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson, Liz Lecompte and the Wooster Group, Richard Alston, Richard Pochinko, David Zambrano and Joan Skinner.

In London, UK, she launched the Dance performance series at Battersea Arts Centre, co-founded the collective Dancework and performed in a number of projects, including with composer Michael Nyman and visual artist Bruce McLean. She joined the Rosemary Butcher Dance Company in residence at Riverside Studios that also hosted innovative works from around the world.

Settling in Montreal in 1980, she co-founded Tangente, danse actuelle, Montréal's first resource centre and producer for new, experimental dance. In the years that followed, she created a number of solo and collaborative works with visual artists and musicians (such as Eva Brandl, Denis Farley, Alain Thibault and Michel Lemieux) that toured across Canada and abroad. Supported by arts funding, she carried out research projects in Mexico, Myanmar (Burma) and other South-Asian countries.

She has written for a number of dance and arts publications including interviews with John Cage and Merce Cunningham for Performance Magazine, Artscribe, Parachute, Danse Canada Dance, Les Herbes Rouges, Revue Jeu, to name a few.

She obtained a certificate in 'expression dramatique' and an M.Ed at Université de Montréal, under the direction of Gisèle Barret, a visionary pedagogue.

After touring and creating extensively, she traveled alone through the Native communities and sites in the American Southwest states. Upon her return to Montreal, re-oriented her creative research  towards site-specific projects, co-founding with Domingo Cisneros and Wanda Campbell  Art-Aventure, an international and interdisciplinary open collective. Their first in situ projects took place in the Zone of Silence situated in northern Mexico's desert and then in Québec's Boreal vastness.

She was commissioned to choreograph and stage multimedia works such as Solid Salad by Michel Lemieux (Félix award for Best Production with René-Richard Cyr and M. Lemieux, 1985) and Kâ by Martine Michaud, Félix award for Best Staging, 1989).  Composer Zoran Scekic and choreographer/performer Marija Scekic commissioned her to create a solo for the Zagreb Music Biennale, 2007.

She is also interested in new ways of creating and collaborating beyond borders, artistic, geographic, real or virtual. See recent project ensembleouvert.weebly.com