Now Hear This 2026
Re-Zoning: Pigeon Breeders with Kate Stashko | Alicia Proudfoot – Perennial
Date: Friday, June 5, 2026 7:30 PM
Venue: Mile Zero Dance Space (9931 – 78 Avenue NW, Edmonton)
Perennial by Alicia Proudfoot is a performance of sound and sculpture. The engulfing heave of metal and pulp and fibre that grows out from my harp is chronic illness. The body is the thematic root of my art practice. A sick body, in my case an asthmatic body, creates friction with society’s mandates of idealized productivity, strength, and sustainable health. I critique these rigid qualifications through the sensational design.
In the room is a Breath Bouquet (4’ x 4’ x 9’). It explores how flowers are oversaturated with a pursuit of wellness or a wishing of another’s wellness. This modular installation is of an enlarged metal flower arrangement that houses oil filters as if they are blooms of a bizarre plant that I can tend to and breathe out of. The soundscape emitted from them navigates gentle breathing to more erratic, pairing the percussive somatic sounds with the hauntingly beautiful sound of the harp. I am excited for a performance that tethers sound and sculpture together in a visceral duet.
Content warning – Moments of intense breathing.
Re-Zoning, featuring Pigeon Breeders (Myles Bartel and Will Scott) and Kate Stashko, proposes that through collaboration and awareness, systems—and how we inhabit them—can be reimagined. Re-Zoning is supported by the Edmonton Arts Council and the City of Edmonton.
Content warning – Potentially loud volumes and harsh sounds.
Thank you to our festival media sponsors Taproot Edmonton and Exclaim!, equipment sponsor Long and McQuade, and refreshment sponsor Sea Change Brewing Co!
The Artists
Alicia Proudfoot is an interdisciplinary artist with a penchant to incorporate industrial process and technology into her projects. She delights in modifying her formal training in sculpture, harp, and performance to engage with people. Experimentation is valuable to her creative research about humour’s role as explored through her somatic archive on illness. Alicia holds a BFA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from NSCAD University.
Her work thrives alongside community engagement. Alicia recently had a solo exhibition at Harcourt House that reimagined her ribs as mountains and a duo show with Mika Haykowsky inside the U of A Hospital. Their work lauded an intersection of art and the medical world so both could take up space to care and learn from the other.
Pigeon Breeders are an Edmonton-based experimental improvisation music duo founded in 2011 by Will Scott and Myles Bartel, blending ambient, electroacoustic, free improvisation, noise, and psychedelic elements. Their work has been described as “gently unsettling washes of sound” and “intelligent, beautiful sonic art” (Oliver Arditi). Their forthcoming album, Springtime As Violence, will be released in 2026 on Honey Farm.
Kate Stashko is a dance artist who has been based in Edmonton since 2012. She has worked with artists including Peggy Baker, Lin Snelling, Heidi Strauss and Mile Zero Dance, and was a member of Good Women Dance Collective (2012-2022). She has performed and created across Canada, and is interested in improvisation, non-traditional formats and cross-arts dialogue. Having first shared a bill at Now Hear This 2014 and collaborated through Mile Zero Dance’s SubArctic Improv in 2016, the three artists reunite as a dedicated trio.
Accessibility
Mile Zero Dance Space (9931 – 78 Avenue NW, Edmonton): accessible building with multiple all-gender washrooms. There is a cleared path from the front door to the warehouse space. We have two accessible washroom facilities on the main floor as well. There is an automatic front door and the sidewalk outside needs to be improved. The #523 bus stops at 99 St and 78 Ave, approx 120 meters from the venue (stop #1542 SB, stop #22729 NB), and the #8 bus stops at Whyte Ave and 99 St, approx 500 meters from the venue (stop #1035 EB, #2824 WB)
