Biography
Treaty 1-born Sophie Dow is a multidisciplinary creative, inspired by dance, music, film, collaboration and Michif/Assiniboine + French/Ukrainian/German roots. An avid adventurer, Sophie exudes passions for busking, yoga and traveling on top of holding a degree in Dance Performance and Choreography from York University.
Sophie presently fulfills roles as: Artistic Associate of O.Dela Arts, The Chimera Project & V’ni Dansi/The Louis Riel Métis Dancers, residency coordinator at Dance West Network, fire spinner & board member with Ember Arts Fire Society, a creative director of Prince Edward County’s Flight Festival of Contemporary Dance, board member with the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance and the Toronto Dance Love-In, musician with The Honeycomb Flyers, a licensed practitioner of Traditional Thai Massage, a trained facilitator & student of BreathWave, a student of cranial-sacral therapy, a freelance dancer/choreographer/sound designer and a puddle jumping trickster.
Artist Statement
If listening is our connection to the universe, physical movement and storytelling are my innate vehicle of communication and response to what I receive. To move is to connect and reconnect, over and over, to a circular way of living - for honest emotion, present physicality, available mind and focused spirit.
Dance is of the most ancient ceremonies of living beings; in our blood, bones and ancestral memory. When I move, I honour those that walked before me, the ephemerality of the present moment and the generations to come, all at once.
I wear hats of a performing artist and a bodyworker and continue deep work of inner-standing how these practices feed each other without separation. Creating is my freedom, a ritual, a conversation with the energies that are greater than I - a daily waking to our higher selves.
My work is invented through interdisciplinary lenses. Physical and musical movement are the primary languages I’ve used for expression since birth. They coincide in ways I can communicate most powerfully with others.
Play is a massive component within and out all of my disciplines. I'm excited by cunning work that extends the spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual capacities of the interpreter and the witness through trick, treat, illusion & surprise.
I am strongly impacted by the tangible and intangible lands of Turtle Island. Spending powerful time traveling between coasts, this country’s landscapes and sacred territories have embedded their history, knowledge and magic into my body through movement and music, playing a pivotal role in calling me home to the Mitchif part of my lineage. With a continuing curiosity and bonding to my ancestral bodies, the gift of creating for my internal understandings has begun translating as a springboard for external assembly.