Elaine Weryshko (she/they) is a physical theatre artist and practitioner of live performance space from Mohkínstsis||Calgary, Canada. My medium is the poetic body for a Post-Britney world, I create for it in a practice based out of extensive training in Lecoq physical theatre and other various contemporary dance/movement devising methods. I write, perform, produce, design and kamikaze live events in alternative spaces all over Alberta. Typical projects are inspired for choruses and large gatherings, casting between 6 to 32 people (or more), searching for group catharsis on and off the stage.
I am interested in creating work that in unimaginable and unreproducible. Inspired through a visceral live honesty to keep pushing the collision of genres between a spectacle and the intimate, personal and political, viewer and participant.
Ultimately, as an artist, I want audiences to be provoked and forced to examine their role in the presentation. They must determine their place as supporters, mockers posers or subjects. My work combines text, music and choreography to build scenes that set up ideas, images and relationships – and then destroy them.
Elaine is the co-Educational Director at the Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry, creator and coordinator of The WunderBriefs series at the Animated Objects Festival and co-curator of, to the AWE, a once reoccurring risk-based performance series in Calgary that finalized in 2021. In the past I have worked with or presented at: The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry, Alberta Gallery of Art, Mile Zero Dance, Sage Theatre, Springboard Performance, Alberta Gallery of Art, Swallow A Bicycle, Theatre Junction, the Pacitti Company (UK), The Invisible Dog (NYC), and mentored with immersive theatre giant PunchDrunk in their London production A Drowned Man. I have trained around the world at: The London International School of Performing Arts, Dell’ Arte International School of Physical Theatre, The Manitoulin Conservatory for Creation and Performance and with the SITI Company NYC Summer Viewpoints Intensive.
Post-Britney : adjective
When the facade is falling the fuck apart, mirrors are cracked, tiarra trashed, we scream at the sky, shave our head, it all oozes everywhere and none of us can go back to the way it was. What is ever actually real?
That moment.
That's Post-Britney, Bitch!
Photo: Melanie Gauer
With deep gratitude for the privilege of living, creating and working as an artist on this Land, I acknowledge my home and work are situated near the convergence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, traditionally called “Mohkinstsis” in Blackfoot, also known as the City of Calgary. These are the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (which includes the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations), Stoney-Nakoda First Nations (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III.