Shion Skye Carter is a performing artist originally from Tajimi, Japan, and based in Vancouver, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dance and Kinesiology from Simon Fraser University. As a performer, she has interpreted the works of artists such as Vanessa Goodman/Action at a Distance, plastic orchid factory, and Yossi Berg & Oded Graf Dance Theatre (Israel). Shion’s own choreographic projects are influenced by her personal ethnographic history, and merge her interests in other creative disciplines with physical performance. Her work has been presented at venues across Vancouver, and in 2020 her new solo work Residuals (住み・墨) will be performed at Kinetic Studio in Halifax, followed by a premiere in Montreal presented by Tangente Danse. As co-founder of olive theory, an interdisciplinary duo with musician Stefan Nazarevich, she collaborates to experiment at the intersection between embodied performance, installation art and live sound.

Through my artistic practice, I develop immersive performances which incorporate multiple artistic disciplines. I am curious of the body’s engagement in a dynamic range of movement, from minute, subtle motion, to visceral intensity. Sculptural forms, visual art, live and recorded sound, material, and lighting, all play roles in enhancing my work, and broaden the range of disciplines that I play within, as exemplified by my work as one half of the interdisciplinary duo olive theory with Stefan Nazarevich. An artist’s personal ethnographic history inevitably makes its way into their work; I feel that being a Japanese immigrant with mixed heritage infuses my work with the image and feeling of a body embedding itself into unfamiliar environments. Through this lens, I examine how movement can be used to re-evaluate human relationships to other living things, as well as the inanimate objects that we coexist with.