For Springboard Performance artistic director Nicole Mion, Fluid Fest is not simply a collection of shows. It is part of a larger question about how artists, audiences, cities and ideas move together.
By Kimberley Dooshima Jev
Nicole Mion talks about art in terms of systems. Not simply performances, artists or venues, but the structures that allow all of those things to find one another and continue to exist.
“Good curation is about creating an ecosystem, a cultural ecosystem,” says Mion, artistic director of Springboard Performance.
It is a useful way to understand an organization that can be difficult to describe in one sentence.
Springboard operates across live performance, artist development, public space, residencies and festival programming. Fluid Fest is its annual contemporary dance and performance festival. containR creates space for public-facing cultural activity. Season Presenting brings work to Calgary throughout the year. Interrarium supports some of the development and thinking audiences may never see.
Different functions, Mion argues, belong to the same larger system. The question underneath them is consistent: “How can we impact the cultural ecosystem in Calgary and be a part of a national and international conversation around art?”
That question matters in a city that is still regularly asked to prove it has an arts community at all.
The infrastructure behind the art
Springboard began as a collective of Calgary dancers and choreographers looking for ways to create and perform their work.
The practical problem was familiar. Artists needed space. They needed administrative support. They needed audiences. They needed other artists. They needed enough activity around them for a practice to become sustainable rather than occasional. Working collectively offered one answer. Mion eventually took over the organization and began considering what Springboard could provide that individual artists could not easily build alone.
Part of that thinking came from her own experience as a dancer, filmmaker and choreographer.
“You have that enthusiasm for a few years,” she says. “But then after that, it’s like, in a place with so little infrastructure like Alberta for culture, how do you build those ecosystems and how do you find your people?”
The problem was not only making art. It was creating enough movement around the art for a community to form.
An artist might create a work every two years. An audience, however, cannot be expected to build a relationship with an entire discipline by encountering it once every two years. The critical mass has to exist around the work too.
That means developing artists while developing audiences. It means creating opportunities for work to circulate. It means putting performance in places where people may encounter it without already thinking of themselves as contemporary dance audiences.
For Mion, that can be a theatre. It can also be a gallery, a public space or a street corner. Some people, she says, will not enter a theatre regardless of how heavily a show is advertised. Put something unexpected in front of them somewhere else and the relationship changes.
The venue becomes part of the curatorial question.
Fluid Fest offers more than one way in
That philosophy is especially visible in Fluid Fest. Mion resists reducing the festival to a single definition of dance. She talks instead about the physical body and what it can communicate about being alive now.
The 2026 program moves between dance, theatre, music, visual art, installation, public space and performance. For audiences unfamiliar with contemporary dance, that range is deliberate.
“It depends on who you are,” Mion says when asked what people should see.
Someone drawn to visual art may enter through Omote (面), a collaboration between dance artist Shion Skye Carter and mask maker Miya Turnbull. The work brings masks, movement and Japanese Canadian identity into the gallery environment.
Elsewhere, Alexandra “Spicey” Landé and EBNFLŌH bring Mōnad to Contemporary Calgary.
Mion describes Landé as part of a generation of artists taking street dance seriously as contemporary performance language. In Mōnad, she sees movement, theatre and psychology meeting inside a work capable of holding a wider emotional range.
Mion talks about the expectations placed on Black expression and the emotions that become acceptable or unacceptable depending on the room. A work like Mōnad can create space for something less restricted.
“What can you express in what settings?” she asks. The question moves beyond choreography.
It becomes social.
Rachel Meyer’s Mama, do we die when we sleep? enters through another door. Meyer comes from ballet, bringing its physical precision into work that Mion describes as more psychologically and visually expansive.
The setting is not decorative. It participates.
A large pile of chairs becomes part of a world concerned with imagination, relationships and the way possibility changes between childhood and adulthood.
Catherine Gaudet’s ODE works differently again, drawing bodies into collective movement and repetition. Mion describes the experience through sensation. There is something communal in it, something closer to the physical force of a marathon or the shared energy of a rave than the distant observation some audiences may associate with contemporary dance.
That physicality is important to how she thinks about the festival.
Contemporary performance can ask difficult questions without requiring an audience to arrive with an academic vocabulary for answering them.
Mion jokes about the idea that contemporary dance can sometimes feel like a kind of sushi you need training to understand.
Fluid Fest is built against that assumption.There can be experimentation without exclusion.
There can be risk without requiring the audience to already know the rules.
Calgary does not need permission to participate
There is another argument running through Mion’s programming. Calgary belongs in these conversations.
She has spent years travelling to festivals, seeing work and meeting artists elsewhere. Again and again, she encountered assumptions about what could possibly be happening in Calgary.
The absence of national visibility could easily be mistaken for the absence of activity. Mion rejects that logic. Calgary has artists. Alberta has artists. The work exists. Visibility and circulation are separate problems.
Springboard’s role, as she sees it, includes creating some of the conditions through which those artists and conversations can meet.
“I think that Calgary should have great artists from the place and that we need to be in conversation with creative thinkers of all kinds,” she says. “We’re a part of that conversation internationally, nationally, locally.”
Fluid Fest makes that idea tangible.
Artists arrive in Calgary from Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax, Toronto and elsewhere. Calgary artists appear inside the same program. Performance crosses into galleries and unconventional spaces. Partnerships pull different organizations into the same orbit.
The result pushes against the persistent idea that ambitious contemporary arts programming properly belongs somewhere else.
Toronto. Montreal. London. Amsterdam. Why not Calgary?
Mion has seen what festivals elsewhere can create. Her response is not to reproduce those cities here. It is to recognize that Calgary can participate in the same level of cultural exchange while remaining itself.
“I see the possibility,” she says. “And then I’m like, well, why not here?”
Art needs circulation
This is where the ecosystem argument becomes larger than one festival. Artists need more than opportunities to make work. They need routes through which the work can travel.
“Trade is circulation,” Mion says. The comparison is intentional.
Canada would not expect most industries to grow without networks, exchange, research, markets and movement. Mion questions why art should be treated differently.
Local creation matters, but remaining permanently local can make sustained artistic careers difficult. Artists need to encounter audiences elsewhere. Presenters need to see work. Ideas need to move between cities. Relationships have to form across regions and borders.
Culture has its own trade routes.Those routes also shape how a place understands itself.
For Calgary, participation in national and international artistic circulation challenges an old narrative that meaningful cultural innovation always arrives from somewhere else.
Springboard is interested in a different proposition.
The city can receive work. It can generate work. It can host conversations. It can send artists outward. It can become a meeting point. None of that requires pretending Calgary is Toronto or Montreal.
It requires recognizing what already exists here and building the infrastructure that allows it to connect.
Sensation, curiosity and community
For all the systems thinking surrounding Springboard, Mion eventually brings the conversation back to something very simple. People gather. They experience something together and then they talk about it.
A festival can create conditions for that exchange in ways an isolated performance cannot. One event leads into another. An audience encounters an artist and then stays for music. Someone arrives for visual art and leaves having watched contemporary dance. People who may not normally occupy the same cultural spaces find themselves sharing a room.
The experience keeps unfolding.
For Mion, that physical act of being together matters at a moment when so much cultural life is mediated through individual screens.
“You have a visceral experience of being in community, not just on your computer,” she says.
The conversation after a performance matters too. The confusion, excitement, disagreement and recognition are part of what happened.
Fluid Fest does not need every audience member to understand every piece in the same way.
It’s asking them to enter so they can encounter something. Fluid Fest is asking its audience to remain curious. That may be the clearest expression of what Springboard has spent decades trying to build.
Not simply an organization that presents art, but a structure through which artists, ideas, audiences and places can continue finding one another.
A cultural ecosystem built from sensation, curiosity and community.
