#local-artist — Public Fediverse posts

PAUL DROTOS’ GUIDE FOR YOUR IMPROV JOURNEY

Your Improv Journey is Paul Drotos’ treatise meant for beginners, veterans and randos. It is an easy read and is relevant even when considering teamwork, community and art in general.   

Improv is an art form where actors create scenes on the spot. In a show, troupes will usually have games they play with varying levels of audience input.   

When the scene ends, that is the end of […]

Yellow Cycat

“Yellow Cycat” is a new colored pencil drawing and is part of my ‘Cycat Series’. This is a quirky, fun loving, cat like monster.

CYC040 #johngreggstudios #coloredpencil #art #cycat #drawing #art

UNDERDOG STEPS UP PERFORMANCE TEAMS, COMPETES IN CALGARY

The Underdog Dance Corp. is Waterloo Region’s first beginner-focused adult dance studio. They introduced a more intensive training regimen for their performance team earlier this year, including strength and flexibility training in a second studio in Uptown Waterloo.   

“It’s just the consistency and the hard work to train the body to do it, and you literally practice showing up for yourself fully,” Emily Peat, the director of the Underdog studio, said.   

The studio sent its competitive teams to the Calgary International Salsa Congress from Mar. 26 to Mar. 30, 2026, which featured salsa and bachata dancers from around the world, as well as local professionals and troupes from all over North America. Quinn Vandenheuvel and Emily Dodsworth placed second in the amateur heated bachata division. Peat and Jorge Pablos placed first in the professional bachata heated division. Peat and Phil Roy placed second in the professional salsa showcase division. Bani Singh placed third in the professional-amateur (pro-am) open showcase division with Phil Roy.  

There are 13 students in three teams, who competed. The Bachata Partner amateur team, the Bachata Ladies Styling pro-am team and the Salsa Shines pro-am team. All teams were trained to compete in amateur categories.  

“It all kind of comes down to that in the end. If we teach good fundamentals to people right, then we’ll succeed with our students. And they’ll succeed, whether it’s in our class or out on the dance floor,” Phil Roy, the Experience Manager at Underdog and an instructor, said.  

The team’s six-hour training regimen has included strength training, flexibility training and acro training alongside running through their dance routines. The conditioning, cross-training and technique work help make sure the dancers are prepared for competition.   

“They’re low stakes, relatively—if you win a dance competition, whatever. But you practice discipline. You practice being there for yourself. You practice, ‘how can I react in moments of high stress?’,” Peat said.  

Many of the dancers also competed in “heats”, which require them to improvise for one and a half minutes to a random song within their registered category and style.   

“Because everyone’s relying on everybody else, to make sure that everybody comes away from the competition with a good experience. So, it does take that the group effort to achieve a shared goal,” Victoria Giampaolo, an Underdog student and team captain, said.  

In the week leading up to the Calgary International Salsa Congress, the students are performing in front of their peers periodically in the studio.   

The Calgary congress is one of many competitions that the Underdog Dance Corp. are planning to participate in this year—other cities include Montreal and Toronto.   

“[Competition] really brings the social aspect of dance to the front in a way that a showcase team doesn’t as much. So I really like that. It makes me push myself,” Giampaolo said. 

COMMUNITY THROUGH KOLLECTIVE

At Kollective Studios, community is among their core tenants alongside creativity, choreography and just a little bit of chaos. Among Kitchener- Waterloo’s newest creative ventures, the Kollective Studios partnership introduced Kollective Kreations, a crafting space that focuses on the art of decoden. Decoden is derived from the Japanese words for decoration (deco) and phone (den). Known for its over-the-top cute designs, decoden is a DIY craft using whipped cream-inspired glue and adorablecharms to decorate items like phone cases, Polaroid frames and accessories.

Their grand opening weekend for their new venture took place over the weekend of Jan. 9 to 11, 2026. Community members came out en masse to try their hand at decoden and to support business duo Kezea Shayne Gamboa and Alex Duong.

Following up the successful launch of their dance studio Kollective Khaos on Aug. 22, 2025, the two are now offering alternative creative outlets to their dancers as well as the wider Waterloo Region audience.

As an immigrant who came to Canada from the Philippines with her family in 2017, Gamboa always found that community was a big part of her life. Being able to foster a creative community in a leadership role has been a lifelong dream of Gamboa’s, starting in high school where she choreographed dances and taught them to her classmates.

“I really want to build a community where it’s filled with different stories, different backgrounds and different types of creativity,” Gamboa said. Gamboa and Duong met in 2023, in one of Gamboa’s K-pop dance classes. They quickly became friends through the environment that Gamboa cultivated in her classes, with post-class group dinners to Korean BBQ.

Duong loved the atmosphere so much that he began encouraging Gamboa to open her own studio and further expand her ethos to more than just her own classes.

“That’s where Kollective Khaos dance comes from. We want everyone to feel like they’re part of it and that they’re not just coming for dance class. It’s a safe space and a place where you can feel empowered to be yourself or discover new parts of yourself,” Duong said. Gamboa’s ambitions were not just limited to the dance studio either; on weekends the dance studio used to sit empty, but now Saturdays and Sundays host bustling decoden workshops, allowing folks to come out and try a different kind of creativity.

“When people ask for my advice on how to get over a choreography creativity block, I always tell people to do something else. Do something else that fires up that creativity that’s not dancing,” Gamboa said. “

It really helped me a lot with my creativity blocks and then, because you’re still using your brain, it’s just not on the one thing that you’re stressing about. It’s like a different type [of creativity] and it’s making your brain happy again and allowing it to breathe,” she said.

At its core, Kollective Studios is all about community and connection. For both Gamboa and Duong, without opportunities to socialize together outside of class, they wouldn’t have some of the meaningful relationships they do now. Every month the studio holds a movie night in their space which they pair with a themed dance routine. In January, they watched Bring It On: All or Nothing and learned a routine with guest instructor Sky Pahl, Canadian Football League and National Lacrosse League cheerleader and dancer.

“[It’s] a great time, because we have like a little slumber party almost, so we get to talk to each other … we get to hang around, we get to laugh at the movie and talk about it. I think that’s a huge thing with building community, and I think we’ve had a good response,” Duong said.

Kollective Studios offers multi-week sessions and drop-in dance classes from Monday to Friday in the evenings. On weekends, Kreations runs from noon to 6 p.m. and offers a multitude of accessories for crafters to customize. The studio is moving on Feb. 8 from their current location at 275 Larch St. in Waterloo to a bigger space at 259 King St. W., Unit 203 in Kitchener.

A gorgeous look at Howe Sound in book form, today in The Watershed: https://www.lionsbaywatershed.ca/post/picture-this

#LionsBayWatershed #LocalNews #BritishColumbia #Photography #LocalArtist

A Walk on the Benjamin Park Trans Canada Trail with Tanis MacDonald 

My walk with poet, essayist and newly retired English professor Tanis MacDonald was a masterclass in paying attention to details and place. When I arrived at the Benjamin Park section of the Trans Canada Trail, MacDonald already had something to show me.

“Look,” MacDonald said. “Bug sex. I thought it was one, but it’s two.”

On the green leaf attached to a fence were indeed two beetles with red markings, working to ensure the propagation of their species.

Setting out on this trail where MacDonald promised to show me all the “weird bits,” we spotted bees, the elegant curl of a vine and an unexpected cluster of mushrooms worthy of photographing.

“I like to get outside and walk around and look at shit,” MacDonald said. “[Walking is] a good art practice. Because you have to practice noticing.”

She grew up on the prairies in Manitoba, where she walked regularly with her mother.
The habit continued when MacDonald was a student in Toronto as she often saved the transit fare and chose to walk instead. Walking provided cheap entertainment and became a tool to get to know a place and inspire creativity.

“I didn’t do a degree in Creative Writing,” MacDonald said. “There was no such thing when I was an undergrad.”

She found her way to writing through a poet’s workshop run by Susan Ioannou out of the University of Toronto, a workshop that was revelatory for MacDonald. She took the workshop three times, then sought out guidance and community in other writing classes.

When MacDonald moved to Victoria for school a few years later, she connected with the poetry scene there and began going to regular readings, eventually landing a feature performance spot. In 1996, she won a chapbook competition, and her first full-length book of poetry, Holding Ground, was published in 2000.

In 2006, MacDonald joined the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University as a professor and taught academic courses.

“In about 2013…the department said that they wanted to offer more creative writing courses,” MacDonald said. “I said I would design a creative writing minor and concentration.”

Although MacDonald began her writing career as a poet, eventually she felt the pull of another form of written expression, creative nonfiction.

“I had a very long apprenticeship in poetry,” MacDonald said. “Then in scholarly writing. And…the creative nonfiction came together when I thought, ‘Isn’t there some place that these two discourses meet in the middle?’”

The place they met provided material for two books of essays: Out Of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City, published in 2018, and Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, published in 2022.

“I think a lot about my place in the world,” MacDonald said. “My literal space that I take up, and what happens when you pass through a space and do it repeatedly.”

For MacDonald, community is at the core of her writing practice. From the beginning MacDonald has sought out the company

of other writers, joining and forming writing groups with diverse memberships to give and receive feedback.

“It’s not enough to say it’s good,” MacDonald said. “You have to
say what you like, because that’s how people know what to keep and what to change…what can I pull off…how can we break this apart…what’s risky and what isn’t.”

The trail offered us community as well, signs of the people nearby that MacDonald was quick to notice. A birdhouse in the tree. A bridge made from slabs of stone to allow for a dry crossing. And the community art project Squeak the Sneak; a serpent made of painted rocks that anyone could contribute to.

Walking has provided more than inspiration and a sense of place for MacDonald. It also provided healing assistance when she struggled with mental health challenges during the pandemic.

“[My doctor] prescribed me some medication, and she
also prescribed me a walk,” MacDonald said. “It was mainly to understand that I was not living in a bubble where I would die. I was living in a much broader universe.”

This September, MacDonald will not be heading back to the university classroom to teach. She retired on July 1, and in addition to multiple writing projects, including a full-length book of poetry titled Tall, Grass, Girl, coming out next year, MacDonald is branching out artistically.

She has been taking classes at the Button Factory in painting and linocut. She is looking to expand her bird watching and

is working on ideas for a new podcast. And she will continue to walk the trails of Waterloo Region, paying careful attention to the weird bits.

#birdhouseInTheTree #ButtonFactory #Column #linocut #LocalArt #LocalArtist #manitoba #outOfLineDaringToBeAnArtistOutsideTheBigCity #serpantPaintedRocks #squeakTheSneak #StraggleAdventuresInWalkingWhileFemale #tallGrassGirl #TanisMacDonald #transCanadaTrail #walkInThePark #waterlooRegion

🎨 Announcement Alert! 🎨

I’m excited to share that two of my paintings have been selected to be part of the upcoming Open Exhibition at Open Gallery in their brand new gallery space at Broad Street Plaza, Halifax!

🗓 Exhibition Dates: 11th – 28th June 2025
🎉 Preview Evening: Tuesday 11th June, 5–7pm

#OpenExhibition #OpenGalleryHalifax #ArtExhibition #HalifaxArt #LocalArtist #Painting #ArtShow #westyorkshire #halifax