ABOUT

We All Fall Down (WAFD) is a non-profit organization that supports and promotes creation, research, presentation and innovation in dance, music and theatre, through interdisciplinary artistic propositions. Founded in December 2019, WAFD formalizes the 20-year collaboration between choreographer Helen Simard and composer Roger White. Under their artistic co-direction, the company has made the performing arts a site for experimentation and risk-taking, allowing the deconstruction and reinvention of the body and the ways it interconnects with time and space, as much for the performer as the spectator. In their interdisciplinary creations, the body is a speaking, dancing, musical entity, at once impulsive, vulnerable, hybrid, vigorous, dislocated, and emotional.

WAFD are associated artists of Diagramme - gestion culturelle.

Helen Simard is a choreographer, rehearsal director and dance dramaturge. Originally from Kingston, Ontario, she relocated to Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal in 1996 to pursue a career in the arts.

Simard collaborates with musicians and dancers to create visceral interdisciplinary shows. Her work uses repetition, complex spatial patterns and techniques of sensory overwhelm to create hypnotic, dreamlike performances that blur the boundaries between conscious and subconscious spaces. Past works such as NO FUN (2014), IDIOT (2017), Dance Side of the Moon (2018), REQUIEM POP (2019), and PAPILLON (2020) are joyfully chaotic and complex in their simplicity, walking a fine line between the real and the imaginary.

Simard holds a BFA (Concordia University, 2000) and MA in Dance (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014). Her current research explores themes relating to loss, memory, nostalgia, and intergenerational exchange.

Roger White is an autodidact composer and sound-based artist. He began his career as an active musician and DJ in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal’s underground music scene (Kops Crew, Rhythm Mercenaries, Dead Messenger). Today, White primarily composes music for dance, using audio synthesis, hypnotic sound loops and binaural recording techniques to create immersive sonic landscapes that invite spectators to sink into altered levels of consciousness. He is also currently developing a podcast that explores the creative processes of neurodiverse artists.

White was an artist in residency at the Segal Centre for Performing arts for their 2019-2020 season, through the Jewish Arts Mentorship program. He used this opportunity to develop his first full length show, BECAUSE YOU NEVER ASKED: a dreamlike interdisciplinary work where historical fact meets auto-fictional storytelling in a multilayered, intergenerational experience. Based on discussions with his grandmother about her experience of fleeing Nazi Germany, the work will premiere in spring 2023 at Montreal, Arts Interculturels.