Confluence: Creative Exchange Cohort

Photo of Victor Tran (Savage) and Mohammad Dreza during CEC Toronto 2026 by Fran Chudnoff

Confluence: Creative Exchange Cohort (CEC) is a national initiative that brings together Asian Canadian dance artists to connect, collaborate, and learn from one another across regions. Designed to foster artistic exchange, professional development, and public engagement, the cohort creates space for meaningful relationships to develop between artists, presenters, and communities.

This season, four artists — Jasmine Liaw, Mohammad Dreza, Victor Tran (Savage), and Simran Sachar will embark on a multi-city journey through Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Through residencies, public events, and conversations, they'll share their practices, exchange ideas, and build lasting creative connections across the country.

In partnership with Toronto Dance Theatre, SummerWorks Performance Festival, Studio 303, Tangente Danse, Odd Meridian & CanDance Network

Photo of CEC artists working with Unlock Dancing Plaza artists from Hong Kong by Fran Chudnoff

Connection - fostering lasting connections with artists, presenters, and communities through residencies and public events.

Process - prioritizing artistic development over production outcomes

Confluence: Creative Exchange Cohort 26/27 Artist Bios

Mohammadreza (Momo) Akrami is an Iranian-Canadian dance and interdisciplinary artist whose work spans Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, San Francisco, and Brussels. With a multifaceted background in mathematics, physics, and theater, Momo brings a unique perspective as a creator, dancer, and teacher. His diverse dance lineage encompasses Flying Low/Passing Through/Improvisation with David Zambrano, Butoh/Noguchi Taiso with Atsushi Takenouchi and Imre Thorman, and Grotowski/post-Grotowski theater. His physical practice is enriched by martial arts such as Wing Chun, Escrima, and Chi Kung.
I'm always sensing and being sensed.
A cypher asks me to read a circle, a beat, a moment. Hustle asks me to read a partner, and let them read me, through trust and consent. Rocking sits between them, reading and answering without working together the same way. Each form gives sensing its own rules.
The exchange is the expression. But some states and elements ask for more time than a battle round or song allows. I want to stay with one texture, one impulse, until it becomes a world. The stage lets me stay.
I work through simplicity, rawness, nuance, repetition, inner rhythms.
I don't bring these forms to the stage to complete or legitimize them. They are already complete. I use the stage to remain inside what a round lets me touch only briefly.
Jasmine Liaw is an emerging interdisciplinary artist moving fluidly between roles of director, designer, curator, producer in contemporary dance performance, new media installation, and experimental film. Evidenced in collaboration and community, Liaw's projects investigate transcultural narratives intersecting her Hakka-Chinese diaspora, queerness, kinesthetic in-betweenness, and topographical understanding of bodies in motion. As a practice of erosion, her work leans into the weight of displaced time and language as a circulatory offering of refusal towards dominant Western structures; developing an endurance for generative changes and knowledge(s).
Liaw is a recipient of the 2023 Emerging Digital Artists Award presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video for her experimental film work, xīn nī 廖芯妮, and a 2025 Interaccess Media Arts Prize finalist and 2026 Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre Steven B. Jung Award recipient, for her ongoing research project, to name language.
Simran Sachar is a dance artist, choreographer, writer, and actor based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Known for her fusion of contemporary and street dance, she works across film, theatre, XR, and public art. Recent highlights include co-choreographing Today is the evening to strike lightning (Indian Summer Festival, 2025), co-directing These hands are still at work (Surrey Art Gallery), premiering her XR film The Edge of The Underworld (2024), and her live work ACT TWENTY FIVE. Her films BETA बेटा and LUNACY have screened nationally, with LUNACY earning an Audience Choice Award.

CEC Toronto 2026

Photo of CEC artists working with Unlock Dancing Plaza artists from Hong Kong by Fran Chudnoff

CanAsian Dance is situated in Tkaronto, a Mohawk word meaning “the place in the water where the trees are standing.” It is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and it continues to be the home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

This land is under the Dish with One Spoon covenant, an agreement between the Anishinaabeg and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This land is a dish to be shared and cared for and we all share one spoon; the spoon is to be used to take only what is needed and to leave enough for others, thus ensuring a viable and abundant future. We recognize the enduring resilience of Indigenous peoples and we acknowledge that we are accountable to these relationships and these agreements.

We carry these values of responsibility in sharing and caring in abundance with consideration of not only ourselves but of our communities that we share together.