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Shion Skye Carter, photo Nanne Springer
By choreographing with handmade photo-masks of their faces, dance artist Shion Skye Carter and mask maker Miya Turnbull explore their mixed Japanese Canadian heritage, collating and contrasting personal experiences, while evoking the ritualistic nature of Japanese traditions such as the tea ceremony.
This performance challenges traditional ideas of beauty, while gestures and tableau articulate the Japanese concept of ‘honne’ (a person’s true feelings) and ‘tatemae’ (their public face).
Through choreography hybridized with heritage art forms like calligraphy, Shion’s work utilizes a sensitive intensity to navigate the body’s complex internal and external worlds.
Miya focuses on self-portraits, using her photo-mask technique to make life-like variations and representations of her face, often distorting, erasing or manipulating her image as a way to explore identity.
