Ellen Furey is a performer, choreographer, facilitator, spiritual psychic and death doula.
she’s been working in experimental and contemporary dance Since 2012 primarily participating in discursive and collaborative processes emphasizing the messiness and power of subjectivities. Her work solicits the potentials of dance/performative virtuosity - a sense of spectacle - as material to create high spirited, oblique openings and debates. Nonlinearity, nonsense, stupidness, earnestness and devotion are part of her artistic contributions.
She has gotten to work with, for and alongside artists like Malik Nashad Sharpe, Dana Michel, Christopher Willes, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Gui B.B., Alanna Stuart (PYNE), Romy Lightman, Thea patterson, Paul Chambers, Anni Spadafora, Jeremy McCormick, Audrée Juteau, Zoey Gauld, Catherine Lavois Marcus, Dancemakers, and Andrew Tay, among others, and danced in works by Daniel Léveillé, Frédérick Gravel, Marten Spangberg (Sweden), Tina Tarpgaard (Denmark), Sasha Kleinplatz and Clara Furey. Her work has been presented in Europe, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
From 2019 to 2022, she was co-curator/artistic advisor for Danse-Cité. Throughout her term she helped build a 5 year strategic plan for the transitioning directorship and took strong interest in researching holistic organizational health (tracking congruency with the company’s changing mission and values from the internal dynamics to the external image). She now works with Danse-Cité as a leadership consultant to director, Sophie Corriveau.
In 2023, Ellen was the Artist in Residence at Cape Breton University where she organized community-based performance workshops, talks, and events at the intersection of creative process and death, dying, rebirth. During the same period, she created and carried out an experimental choreography curriculum as guest instructor in the Literature, Folklore and the Arts department.
Ellen has trained in mediumship and psychic development as well as conflict management (Conrad Grebel/University of Waterloo). She is a certified Contemplative End of Life Doula (Institute of Traditional Medicine) and helps people to navigate the emotional immensity of big life changes- in themselves or in those they love. in these early years of offering services (readings, mediation, end of life work), Her spiritual practice and her approach to care work is constantly expanding. Her interdisciplinary study will continue within the framework of a queen’s university cultural studies research and creation master’s in 2024-2025.
Ellen is originally from Unama’ki/Cape Breton and is currently based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, Canada.
