A Research-Creation on Critical Embodiments for Possible Futures

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Chantier Performa invites you to meet Lília Mestre on the occasion of her residency presentation for the project KiT!. This event is organized in collaboration with Milieux’s Performing Arts Research Cluster (LePARC), as part of the 2026 Interdisciplinary Encounters.

KiT! (Keep in Touch!) is influenced by Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject—phenomena massively distributed across time and space that exceed direct human perception. This research-creation seeks to tune in to what cannot be fully grasped: climate, atmosphere, or collective affect. Through embodied practices, it explores fictions of post-climate disaster cultivating awareness, imagination, and responsiveness.

For the MAI residency, we will bring together blind, partially blind, and sighted performers. Working with objects, materials, and technologies, the project emphasizes multisensory exchange and modes of perception beyond the visual—touch, sound, movement, word, vibration, and breath. Collaborators come from different disciplines—somatic practice, dance, electroacoustics, voice, composition, and scenography—each contributing their artistic and critical approaches to the studio process.

KiT! approaches choreography as a relational practice that shapes how we perceive, sense, and coinhabit the worlds the work proposes.

In this approach, choreography can be understood as a practice that slows down perception and thought, making space for heterogeneous agencies to participate in composition. It hosts situations of attention through improvisation, rather than producing fixed meanings, aligning with what Isabelle Stengers (2005) calls an ecology of practices—modes of coexistence grounded in reciprocity and complexity.

About Lília Mestre

Lília Mestre (she/her) is a Portuguese performing artist, dramaturge, and researcher based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her work explores collaborative formats in contemporary dance and choreography, using scores, intersubjective set-ups, and chance-induced processes as artistic and pedagogical tools.

She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance at Concordia University and co-director of the Performing Arts Research Cluster (LePARC) at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology. Her research focuses on alternative modes of organisation and study as a means of social, climat and political reflection.

Lília was awarded the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2023) for her project Through Materialities, Bodies and Words and currently leads Keep in Touch! Critical Embodiments for Possible Future(s) (2025–2028), supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture.

Participants 

Cover image : courtesy of Lília Mestre

Published on March 20, 2026

Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)