ABOUT US
WAFD strives to create pathways to a more empathetic world through the collective experience of the performing arts. It is our mission to create a space where music and dance meet as equal partners, inviting audiences to dive deep into the imaginary and reflect on their own personal stories.
WAFD formalizes a 20-year collaboration between choreographer Helen Simard and composer Roger White. Under their artistic co-direction, the company examines the relationship between movement and sound, in order to create vibrant, surprisingly organic, highly emotional shows where performers are in a constant state of metamorphosis. Their interdisciplinary approach brings together diverse, bilingual teams of collaborators from dance, music, theatre, poetry and visual art practices, in order to examine and celebrate the complexity of the human condition through paradoxical works that are at once beautiful and haunting, accessible and provoking, familiar and strange. WAFD creates shows for both adult and young audiences, which have been presented in Quebec, Canada, Europe and Africa.
Helen Simard is a choreographer, rehearsal director, dance dramaturge and co-artistic director of WAFD. Originally from Kingston, Ontario, she has lived and worked in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal for more than two decades. Her background in b-girling and contemporary dance informs her raw, highly physical movement language, yet it is her obsession with deconstructing time and space that make her choreographic approach unique. Using repetition, complex patterns and techniques of sensory overwhelm, Simard creates hypnotic, dreamlike performances that blur the boundaries between conscious and subconscious spaces. Being bilingual (English and French), she is fascinated by states of inbetweenness, as well as practices of translation and misunderstanding. Past works such as No Fun (2014), Idiot (2017), Requiem Pop (2019), Papillon (2020), and Dans les bras de Morphée (2024) are joyfully chaotic and complex in their simplicity, walking a fine line between the real and the imaginary. Simard holds a BFA (Concordia University, 2000) and MA in Dance (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014).
Roger White is an autodidact composer, sound-based artist, and co-artistic director of WAFD. He began his career as an active musician and DJ in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal's underground music scene. Today, White primarily composes music for dance, using audio synthesis, hypnotic sound loops and binaural recording techniques to create immersive sonic landscapes that invite spectators to sink into altered levels of consciousness.
White was an artist in residency at the Segal Centre for Performing arts for their 2019-2020 season, through the Jewish Arts Mentorship program. He used this opportunity to develop his first full length show, BECAUSE YOU NEVER ASKED: a dreamlike interdisciplinary work where historical fact meets auto-fictional storytelling in a multilayered, intergenerational experience. Based on discussions with his grandmother about her experience of fleeing Nazi Germany, the work premiered in spring 2023 at Montreal, Arts Interculturels.