Ella MacDonald

performer + co-creator

Ella MacDonald (she/her) is a Professional Actor and Teaching Artist based in Mi'kma'ki (Colonially known as Nova Scotia, Canada). She is a graduate of Dalhousie University (B.A. Hons. In Acting with a Certificate in Dance & Movement) and the recipient of the 2020 Hnaytshyn Developing Artist Grant for English Theatre.

Ella is a trained puppeteer and recently returned from an international tour with Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia. She is an Intimacy Director/Coordinator and currently completing her education Principal Intimacy Professions. Ella is also a celtic musician. Select Young Audience Credits include: THE SKELETON DANCE [original co-creation], The Rainbow Fish [Mermaid Theatre]; Birds of a Feather, Mischief [Neptune Theatre Tour Co.]. Select Other Credits: This Hour Has 22 Minutes [CBC], Normal Scotia [Bell Fibe TV].

Jackson Fairfax-Perry

composer + sound designer

Jackson Fairfax-Perry is an award-winning African Nova Scotian composer, sound designer, musician, and musical director based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A graduate of Dalhousie University (Bachelor of Music in Composition, 2014), Jackson has built a multidisciplinary career that bridges contemporary composition, popular music, improvisation, and theatrical sound design.  For the decade following his graduation, he recorded and toured nationally and internationally with Hillsburn, an award-winning indie-pop band. Since 2023, Jackson has collaborated closely with Lance Sampson, AKA Aquakultre. As musical director for Sampson’s live performances, he has co-written, arranged, and performed on several of Aquakultre’s recordings, most notably on the critically acclaimed album 1783. As a saxophonist and keyboardist, Jackson is an active member of Halifax’s jazz and creative music scene performing regularly with several ensembles including Many Worlds, as well as his own group TYNES plus III. Jackson also collaborates frequently with theatre and dance artists, having contributed music and sound design to numerous local and national productions. Jackson is the most recent recipient of the Paul Cram Creation Award, and is in the process of writing his first composition for orchestra, to be premiered by Symphony Nova Scotia at Open Waters Festival in January, 2027.

Sally Morgan

movement director

Sally Morgan (she/her) lives in K’jipuktuk/Halifax. She is intrinsically an improviser and a performer and continues to question and practice ‘how to prepare to be present’ every day. She is a mother, an interdisciplinary dance/performance artist, and a dance/somatic movement and place-based/environmental educator. She has been a part of the Canadian dance community for 30 years, teaching, performing and studying nationally/internationally in contemporary and postmodern dance, improvisation/contact improvisation, and somatic movement practices. Her work has been presented across Canada, in Europe, and the USA.

Sally works within an ecosomatic framework and on/in/with the borderlands between body and place, performance and ecology, improvisation and the everyday. Her work is rooted in critical place studies, relational embodied ethics, slow pedagogies, and site responsive practices. As an educator she works towards an immersive and experiential praxis that highlights theory, practice, and reflection and strives to support and create the conditions in which participants can give themselves permission to notice, feel, think, listen, and move.

Sally coordinated the Somatic Movement Exploration Lab in Toronto from 2013-2018 and has taught as contract faculty at both Acadia University and in The Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University. Sally is currently involved in creating The Diane Moore Legacy Project, with long term outcomes that include a book and a live retrospective event. She presented the exhibition This Body of Work: rendering, reassembling, and performing motherworlds with the sense archive in 2023 with a new publication about the work released by eyelevel in November 2025.

Sally works creatively under the umbrella of SLOW DANCE LAB and with artist collective the sense archive. She is currently enrolled in the SME/Body-Mind Centering program through Sonder Movement Project (USA), under the direction of Amy Matthews, and is a certified Yoga and Pilates instructor (Eastward Moving Dance + Somatics). Sally originally trained at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre (now DAI) and holds an BFA in Dance, MES, Dip. Sustainable/Environmental Education, and 4 years towards a PhD (Dance Studies).

www.eastwardmoving.ca
www.thisbodyofwork.ca
www.sallymorgan.ca

Francine Dulong

project manager

Francine is an queer Acadian physical theatre performer and interdisciplinary artist. She has trained at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq (Paris) and achieved her Masters in Applied Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London). Francine is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Blooming Ludus (2015 - present, UK/South Korea/Canada) and BAGEL+BALLOON (2018 - present, UK/Canada). Blooming Ludus is a participatory theatre company that creates work exploring climate justice and humanity’s relationship to the planet. BAGEL+BALLOON is an interactive game/theatre company experimenting at the intersection of technology, performance and participatory art forms. Francine also makes improvised vocal music from movement! You can find her in the Wabanaki forest of the East and the Great Bear Rainforest of the West, canoeing and song writing.

Cindie Smith

end of life doula

Cindie Smith is an End of Life Doula, registered with the End of Life Doula Association of Canada. She has studied the end of life doula approach to care at Douglas College in British Columbia, as well as Health Services Administration at Dalhousie University. More recently she has been certified in Thanatology (Honours) at Durham College in Oshawa. She also worked for 7 years as caregiver support coordinator for northern and eastern Nova Scotia.

Cindie is involved in community having created the Before I Die Colchester project, co-created the 100 Women Who Care project in Truro,  working as a volunteer disaster management instructor with Canadian Red Cross, and her long-standing association with Maggie’s Place: A Resource Center for Families in Truro and Amherst.

Currently, she is working with Colchester East Hants Hospice Society, training and mentoring palliative care visitors to sit with persons who are dying and their families – sharing their compassion, curiosity and great big hospice hearts.

Cindie’s involvement in good death planning began in 1989 with the expected death of her 5-year old daughter, Maggie and has continued with deaths at home, in hospice, in Palliative Care Unit at hospital, and in long-term care facilities.

She is married, a Mom, and a Granny three times over.

Cindie is a settler Canadian, committed to Reconciliation.