Victoria Cheong aka New Chance
singer, music producer, astrologist, composer
What the Nominator shared: They are deeply committed, starting from DIY to highly dedicated elaborate production. She is fully immersed in care in all her collaborations.
In their own words: I have been collaborating in dance since the early 2000’s, starting out as a teenage filmmaker (film school!) me and my dancer friends would make videos in the alleyway behind the coffee shop where we worked. Around 2010, I started making music and that is when I began scoring and composing for dance. During the era that followed I moved through DIY spaces and curated many cross-disciplinary art happenings that included music and dance performances. I did a fair amount of guerilla style performing during that time (alas, no documentation). My performance work was multi-media, incorporating lighting, props, music and projections.
Over time my participation in dance has become more "professionalized"/ more in dialogue with institutions and granting bodies as a collaborator in various roles.
My process has involved supporting the work with whatever skills are appropriate, and inevitably performing and improvising myself. Sometimes I am very much involved in the conceptualization and creative ideas, sometimes my music or DJ mixes are commissioned. I have found that making music for dance needs to involve my own body, and it has been a synthesis of intellectual ideas and psychic images, as well as embodied experience and feeling as a way of knowing. Collaborating in dance has been one of the most consistent parts of my artistic practice and a place of exploration and adventure and magic. The processes and methods of dance creation have grown to play a huge role in how I make things, in general.
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.
