Returning River and the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence invite you for a community gathering in celebration of Chinese Mid-Autumn Moon Festival.

Free and open to all!

Friday September 20, 2024
5:30pm Storytelling walk. Meet at Huron and Dundas.
6:30pm Performances at 707 Dundas St West.

Please RSVP below.

The event begins with a walking love letter through Chinatown led by artist Kwoi Gin, who will regale you with funny, tender, moving stories of growing up as an immigrant kid in the mid-1900s. After visiting the last surviving tofu cottage, audiences will arrive for a visit with author Christina Wong at Denison and Dundas Avenue.

Following a reading by Christina, audiences will move on to PlaySpace at Scadding Court Community Centre for performances, short films and collective rituals. After the performances, stay for a community feast!

Returning River is a collaborative effort between dance artists Jen Hum, Emily Law, Naishi Wang, Pam Wong, Andrea Nann, and videographer Henry Mak. Their inspirations are fed by the stories and viewpoints relating to the different experiences they each have of being a contemporary Chinese Canadian. Returning River is dedicated to exploring space, place, geography, technology and how they are linked to one’s cultural background, ancestry, upbringing, and present day experiences. What is the language we can use to express all this?

The moon is significant and symbolic in many cultures. The moon represents the changing cycles of life and in traditional Chinese culture, it is interconnected to the concept of Yin and Yang, central to the understanding of the cosmos and human nature. As a result it holds a prominent position in many Chinese festivals and rituals including Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival. This annual festival falls on the full harvest moon and celebrates family, gratitude and the abundance of the harvest season.

As an offering at this Moon Festival time, Returning River offers an emotional public experience of storytelling, performance, short films, dance, and a community feast to share our gratitude for the space and place we are inhabiting in the moment.

Artist Bios

Kwoi Gin, Storyteller

Kwoi Gin, originally from Hong Kong, is a photographer, cinematographer and artist based in Toronto. As a Paper Son descendant, Kwoi has been actively documenting his journey and the stories of others through his writing, images & installation. 甄國健 來自香港，是一位現居多倫多的電影製片人、攝像師、攝影師和教育家。作為 買紙仔的後裔，甄一直積極通過電影、寫作和圖像記錄他的旅程和他人的故事.

“…Made in Hong Kong” & culturally disoriented in the Americas. I’ve lost close friends, survived poverty, attended art school, read some books and lensed the world. Life is not about working through an established list of plans, but rather appropriate improvised responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations. Every day can be a revelation of new discoveries. I treasure my memory of past misfortunes. My fortune cookie predicaments include making peace with the notion of living on the margins without borders, staking claims to a “paradise” with decent Chinese food, retiring a gentleman of leisure with a mahjong parlor somewhere in the South Pacific and devoting myself to the art of meditative probability since celluloid art has become obsolete. In the meantime, I’m a free agent, living in my converted church/studio in Koreatown, still looking to go one last dance with anyone out there with a kick ass script to shoot even if it means shooting digital…”

Jen Hum, Contemporary Dance

A Toronto based independent dancer, creator and performer, Jen Hum uses her multifaceted background to create performances that seek to challenge and question the status quo. Her curiosity has resulted in solo projects and opportunities to work with a diverse collection of companies including Fujiwara Dance Inventions, Tracey Norman Dance, Redsnow Collective, Polynomials Dance, J9 Dance Projects, Alias Dance Projects, Anandam Dance Theatre, and Xing Dance Theatre. She has performed in Dance: Made in Canada, Dusk Dances, Dance Matters, Toronto Fringe Festival, The Reel Asian Film Festival, and Nuit Blanche. She has trained locally and abroad is always excited about what future artistic investigations will bring.

Tom Kuo, Production

Emerging from the original electronic music culture in New York in the nineties, Tom Kuo draws passionately from 20+ years of creative sonic experimentations to pursue wide-ranging variations on modern new media arts. Tom is an acclaimed artist, curator, electronic musician, sound designer, and producer. He has curated programs for VMF Winter Arts and Stackt Market, and collaborated with Dreamwalker Dance Company, Jessica Runge, Jackson2bears, Peter Mettler, and many others. He also creates multimedia installations for artistic and commercial contexts. Clients include TIFF Bell Lightbox, Leo Burnett, Sick Kids Foundation, Derivative, InterAxon, WSIB and Scotiabank. Continuously evolving methods to accentuate the moment shared between his self, his technological tools, and his audience, Tom’s explorations of abstract media and sonic territories have led him to create, collaborate, and perform globally and across many contexts.

Henry Mak, Short Film

Henry Mak is a videographer, editor, and director. He is a collaborator with Dreamwalker Dance Company, serving as Director of Video Content and Editor for the interactive web performance of “Firehorse and Shadow”. He edited and collaborated on “this is where I find myself today”, a dance film by Andrea Nann and the third year students in Ryerson’s Dance Program. In addition, he has created performance videos with The Canadian Music Centre, music trailers with Slowpitchsound, promotional material for Litmus Theatre’s production of “Brave New World” at Theatre Passe Muraille and mini-docs on Ins Choi (creator of Kim’s Convenience) and Trey Anthony (creator of Da Kink in My Hair”) and other content for the Toronto Fringe. Other dance groups he has worked with include Polynomials, Jay9 Dance Projects, and the collective Returning River, with whom he did backdrop projections and performance capture of “Point of Origin” which was presented as part of Public Energy Performing Arts’ Pivot Series. His work has also screened at Reelworld and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival. Currently, he is filming and editing a dance film which will screen as part of CanAsian Dance’s Grit Short Dances program as well as filming and editing a series of videos for MABELLEarts and collaborating on their livestream series, “Edge of Sunset”.

Nicola Pantin, Contemporary Dance

Nicola Pantin is an independent choreographer, dancer and instructor based in Toronto, Canada. As an independent dance artist, she has had the opportunity to work with numerous choreographers (Selected: Michael Lichtefeld, Gabby Kamino, Robert Desrosiers, Laurie Raymond, Jenn Goodwin) and theatre companies (Selected: Stratford Festival, YPT, Expect Theatre, The Grand, Springworks, Charlottetown Festival). Her work spans concert contemporary dance, musical theatre, opera, plays, film, immersive and site specific work. Nicola has garnered two Dora Mavor Moore Awards for choreography (Jacob Two Two Meets the Hooded Fang, R/J Remixed) and gold with Corpus at Les Jeux de la Francophonie. Nicola is on faculty at George Brown Dance, Pegasus Studios, Creative Children’s Dance Centre and regularly guest teaches/choreographs all ages and levels at numerous schools, private studios and colleges throughout Canada. Nicola sits on Expect Theatre’s Board of Directors, on Moonhorse’s Advisory Committee and is a member of DCFI Equity Council. Nicola recently completed her training in Intimacy Direction. Upcoming, Nicola is choreographing the ‘Community Project’ for Older and Reckless (November, 2024) “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet” for Sheridan College (Spring 2025) and looks forward to creating new work through her company 3degrees with her husband, Adam Nashman.

Jackson Shoebottom, Sound Design

Jackson Shoebottom, is a Toronto-based musician who specializes in music production, beat making, songwriting, playing keys, and rapping. Jackson has produced for the hip hop artists Saint, withlovefromdeji, and Masta Inferno under the name Neu Sun on songs
titled Peace of Mind, Common Ground, and Spacing Out to name a few. Jackson has worked as a music producer for a contemporary dance film called Night Scrolling by Returning River and as a composer for Paufve Dance. He is currently working on his postsecondary education in the Professional Music program at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Pamela Wong Shoebottom, Contemporary Dance

Pamela Wong Shoebottom has national and international professional performance and choreographic work experience that reflects contemporary dance, interdisciplinary and somatic work. She has choreographed and performed a contemporary duet awarded the American College Dance Association Festival, Gala performance 2017. Pamela’s invested experiences include the following: Resident Choreographer, Dancer and Singer with Pop/Cantopop Singer, Actress Teresa Carpio in Hong Kong, Choreographer, Performer with The Parahumans in Toronto, Dancer, Singer and Interdisciplinary Performer with Joe Goode Performance Group in San Francisco, Associate Artistic Director of Every Day Movement Outreach program with Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre in Toronto. Pamela earned her BFA in Dance at York University in Toronto, Canada and an MFA in Dance at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.

Derek Souvannavong, Contemporary Dance

Dora award-nominated artist, Derek Souvannavong is a dance artist based in Tkaronto (Toronto). Souvannavong is a graduate of the Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours Dance Program at York University, where his achievements in choreography and performance were recognized with the Spedding Memorial Scholarship and the Menaka Thakkar Award in World Dance. He has recently premiered solo work “this identity: woven” at Dance:Made in Canada/Fait au Canada, co-created in collaboration with Peggy Baker. Souvannavong has performed in various works by Ballet Creole, dreamwalkerdance, Rock Bottom Movement, Frog in Hand, Rumi Jeraj as well as worked with artists Danny Grossman, Eddie Kastrau, Laurence Lemieux, Tracey Norman, Emily Cheung, Yui Ugai and Newton Moraes. Of Lao heritage, Souvannavong is intrigued by traditional Lao dance forms and wishes to continue exploring relations between Lao dance forms and the western diaspora of contemporary dance, weaving together his Lao heritage into his work.

Christina Wong, Author

Christina Wong is a playwright, prose writer, and an interdisciplinary artist. Her plays have been performed at Factory Studio, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, and Palmerston Library Theatre. Her work has also appeared in Spacing, TOK Magazine, and on Met Radio.

Her debut book, Denison Avenue (ECW Press, May 2023) with Daniel Innes (illustrator), was shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Award, the 2024 CBC Canada Reads, and the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and longlisted for the 2023 Toronto Book Awards. She is also the narrator of the accessible audiobook of Denison Avenue.

Christina also holds a PhD in Music from the University of Leeds.

Helen Yung, Scenography

Helen Yung is a scenographer and inter/transdisciplinary artist. She has designed set, costumes, installations and spaces for the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the red light district theatre company, Open Heart Surgery Theatre Company, The Independent Aunties, Stand Up Dance, Bad Muse Productions, Dreamwalker Dance Company, TO Dance Community Love-In, and the Storm &nd Stress Company. She makes exhibitions, installations, interactions, interventions and performances that have been presented around the world. Helen has received multiple Toronto Dora Theatre award nominations (Costume Design, Scenic Design, Lighting, and Production). She leads the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence.

Special Thanks

Scadding Court Community Centre, Jake Rutland, B’Jamiin Melamed-Turkish, Aimee Ta & Little Banh Mi Shop, Phil Rock, Mini & Darby Yung, Pegasus Dance Studios

Donations & Contributions

Support this event and others like it by making a tax-deductible donation. Email info@artisticintelligence.com for details.