CHANGELING: Experimental Movement Battle

✦ Nov 14 [dance] CHANGELING: Experimental Movement Battle | MC: Sosa, Judges: Simran Sachar + Su-Feh Lee + Antonio Somera, DJ: TRAXXSTAR

co-presented by Barangay Project

2-5pm @ Roundhouse Theatre

A $300 cash prize awaits the battle winner! Competitors sign up at the door.

Pay-What-You-Can ticket available. Email us at admin@chapelsound.org

See the rest of the festival's programming HERE

CHANGELING is an experimental dance battle exploring instinct as a practice of movement; an invitation to trust the body’s impulses, respond to the unknown, and move beyond what is already familiar.

In dance, movement is often shaped by what we know: the styles we train in, the techniques we develop, and the habits we return to. CHANGELING asks what becomes possible when we loosen our grip on these familiar structures and allow intuition, sensation, and spontaneous response to take the lead. What happens when we move before we have the language to explain why?

Situated at the intersection of street dance, freestyle, and experimental movement practices, CHANGELING creates a space for exchange across different movement languages. Rather than asking dancers to abandon their foundations, it invites them to engage with those foundations differently, to stretch their possibilities, encounter unfamiliar approaches, and discover new ways of responding through the body.

Here, experimentation is not about achieving a particular aesthetic or producing something entirely new. It is a willingness to take risks, remain present, and follow movement into uncertain territory. The battle floor becomes a site of inquiry, where dancers negotiate between intention and impulse, control and surrender, recognition and discovery.

Like its namesake, CHANGELING embraces the possibility of becoming something other than what is expected. It asks dancers to remain open to change; not as a destination, but as an ongoing process of listening, responding, and becoming.

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Sophia Sosa is a versatile Filipina movement artist with a training background in Street styles and movement improvisation. Her artistic practice operates at the intersection of rhythm, intuition, and identity. Recognized for her eclectic style and fashion-forward sensibility, Sosa integrates movement, culture and music to develop a distinct and evolving artistic voice. Her work bridges disciplines and communities through an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach.

Through performance and creative research, she challenges conventional boundaries while centering diversity, unity, and cultural dialogue. Her practice creates space, honoring lineage while actively shaping contemporary expression.

Simran Sachar is a choreographer, dancer, teacher, writer, and actor who currently dedicates time to their artistic practice on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, also known as “Vancouver.”A captivating anomaly in street, contemporary, and commercial dance, her work, rooted in her lineage and lived experiences, moves between exploring the live body and the body captured by technology as a channel for disruption, transformation and possibility.What seems to be strange reveals itself as a function for something familiar. Sachar’s work is made for whomever encounters it to feel something. At the center of her process, she is committed to empowering the underdog.

She works across TV/film, theatre, XR, the street dance battle scene, and public art. As of this year, Sachar is working with W*ackers across Vancouver and Montreal to create her first ensemble work titled Twister. 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 and touring 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 FORM's Audience Choice Award, and being featured in the National Arts Centre's CAPSULE series. Sachar is the winner of Release Yourself Whacking Battle in Montreal.

Su-Feh Lee (she/they) is a dance artist whose practice sits in the interstices of performance-making, ritual, pedagogy, writing and dialogue facilitation.

They split their time between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where they were born and raised, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, where they make their home. Over the past 35 years, they have created a provocative body of award-winning trans-disciplinary work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. Su-Feh’s current preoccupations involve somatic algorithms, performance-making as collective nervous system attunement and imagining societies that dance.

Antonio Somera Jr. is a Filipino-Canadian dance artist, office girlie and quirky individual based in Vancouver, the stolen territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Antonio loves participating in community-based activities such as Waacking Wednesdays, Training Society of Vancouver (TSV), Here For Now Performance, and Vancouver Street Dance Festival (VSDF) and whatever amazing events Vancouver offers. Throughout his career, he interpreted works for OURO Collective, EDAM Dance, Company605, The Biting School, Future Leisure, Co.Erasga Company, Konichiwaack. Integrating his passion for both street dance and contemporary dance techniques, Antonio devotes his creative practices to build meaningful experiences through playful investigation. He’s a big fan of cheeky happy hours too.

TRAXXSTAR is an open-format DJ who mixes sexy, industrial, and playful sets, blending dance, electronic, and global club music with a focus on hypnotic rhythms and intercultural exchange. He sees the dance floor as a sonic playground for joy, resistance, and connection, where no genres are off limits.

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We thank our partner The Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, and acknowledge funding support from City of Vancouver, BC Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia, and Canada Council for the Arts. 💫 CONSTELLATION FESTIVAL 🌟 is a result of a two year cultural production mentorship program with Chapel Sound.

We acknowledge and are deeply thankful that this programming takes place on is the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.