Ziyian Kwan casts spells for thriving art making and sharing in community. Always brimming with ideas, she is a skilful, inspired manifest-star of vision. Her life and soul speak art. She crafts ingredients of movement, language and image to tell personal stories that reach into the collective. Enchanting the everyday with magic of life, she alchemizes the stuff of mind and heart into embodied reality. Ziyian’s passion for creative life is contagious. She inspires and uplifts young artists to follow what lights them up. Ziyian cares deeply about the arts community and works endlessly, conjuring resources to support many artists’ practices and work through her beautiful, cherished cultural space and hub, Morrow. Born in Hong Kong, Ziyian moved to Vancouver with her family as a child. She found her calling of dance as a young adult, which led her on a rich journey performing in an eclectic range of choreographers’ works across the globe. Her burning creative fire stoked her own choreographic inquiry, which she has continued to tend and evolve since 2013 through her company Odd Meridian Arts. Ambitious, generous and playful, there’s always something exciting brewing when Ziyian is around! Her potions are gently subversive rebellions aiding and reclaiming our queer, wild, tangled natures. Always divining with her signature, peculiar and poetic hand, she draws us into dream-like worlds of her own making.
-Written by dance artist, Kelly McInnes
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Which ’hood are you in?
Mount Pleasant
What do you do?
I’m a dance artist who performs and creates work. I conjure riddles that vanish in time, collages of movement, image and rhyme. I aspire to tend, to vision, to glow spaces intentioned by kindness and flow. I invite you to banter, to revel, to bless to partner in actions of gentle transgress.
What are you currently working on?
I’m mid-creation of a collaborative work called 3⁄4 echo, created in collaboration with choreographer Calder White and DJ Ziggy Zaya. This co-creation is part of a Bring Your Own Body, a summer performance series that I visioned and am producing as Artistic Director of Odd Meridian Arts, at our cultural space Morrow.
Where can we find your work?
My work is produced by Odd Meridian, the arts organization that I founded in 2015. With Odd Meridian, I consider my 37-year choreographic and performance practice to be part of a greater whole, which includes supporting colleagues through presentations, paid residences and commissions of their creative work. A lot of my work is at Odd Meridian’s home base, Morrow – but I’m also grateful for many collaborative processes and presentation opportunities around town and across the country. I hope you’ll visit Odd Meridian’s website and Instagram to find out about the gamut of really rad activities that we’re producing! Also, you can follow me on Instagram.
