about
The Habitat Practice Group was co-founded in 2018 by Gabriela Petrov, Prof. Myrna Wyatt Selkirk, and interdisciplinary artist, Carina Rose. The group works to create a sustainable and supportive practice of moving and being together.
Through centering their well-being and their evolving needs as artists, teachers, and people, they are creating a space worth coming back to over, and over again. Using tools from their various fields of expertise including theatre, dance, architecture, and somatics, the group is pursuing a long-form investigation of movement, sound, and improvisation.
Whatever arises in their shared process, they navigate it together by dancing, resting, screaming, eating meals and providing comfort. The studio space creates a frame for their work, and yet their relationship is the heart of the practice.
bios
Gabriela Petrov is a theatre artist and educator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has taught performance practices independently and at institutions including McGill University, John F. Kennedy Adult Education Centre and Naropa University in Boulder, CO. She has over a decade of training and practice in the Six Viewpoints approach to performance and studied under the mentorship of Wendell Beavers and Barbara Dilley. She also specializes in Somatic practices and is currently working through Esprit en Mouvement’s Body-Mind Centering® program towards certification as a Somatic Movement Educator with the support of a Professional Development grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Gabriela leads embodiment workshops for artists from a diversity of disciplines and recently launched The Mindful Body, a guided audio-series to create space for simple, everyday embodiment.
Prof. Myrna Wyatt Selkirk (Director, Actor) is an Associate Professor at McGill University, where she teaches acting and directing and directs productions. A few of the productions that she has directed are: Welcome to Townville (devised physical theatre production); Fashion Follies (devised physical theatre); Life in a Box (devised pandemic production); A History of Breathing; The Cradle Will Rock; Richard III (masked adaptation with 3 Richards), The Vibrator Play, Blue Planet, Cloud 9, A Dream Play (physical theatre, masked production), The Good Person of Sichuan, Zadie’s Shoes, The Sea, Tooth and Nail, Bonjour la Bonjour, Twelfth Night and Life and Limb. Myrna’s work and play are heavily influenced by an intense study of and fascination with clown, mask and physical theatre in both training and performance. This research has more recently moved into an investigation and celebration of improvised sound and movement with fellow collaborators in the Habitat Practice Group.
Carina Rose is a movement and visual artist, architect, and ecologist based in Montreal. She trained as a classical dancer, and went on to receive bachelors in Architecture and Environmental Studies from the University Waterloo. Parallel to working in sustainable design and building for the last 20 years, she developed her improvisational movement language through study of Six Viewpoints and Developmental Movement. Her current projects synthesize these two fields into a distinctive interdisciplinary practice of movement performance and installation pieces. She has performed and fabricated work for the Wildside Festival and Symposium Ex-Sculptura in Montreal, Caminos Festival in Toronto, Vancouver Dance Festival. Her independent projects have been funded by Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, Canadian Council for the Arts and Ville de Montréal.
work
