La Otra Orilla (The Other Shore) is an artistic production company founded by Québec dancer and choreographer Myriam Allard and Franco-Tunisian singer and stage director Hedi Graja. The company develops pieces that involve a sensory dialogue between multiple languages, drawing on flamenco roots to create hybrid performances that reinterpret and transform the art form through a multitude of cultural and artistic influences.

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Born in Québec City to a Franco-Manitoban father and Greco-British mother, Myriam Allard grew up in a household where music, dance and openness towards others were part of everyday life. Her discovery of flamenco was like an earthquake—in 1996 she left her native land for Spain, where she trained under masters of the art for, dividing her time between Seville and Madrid. Her professional debut took place on the welltrodden boards of Spain’s traditional tablaos, including those of Las Brujas in Spain and Mari Paz Lucena in Japan. She then danced for the great choreographer Israel Galvan (Spain) and collaborated with Stéphanie Fuster, Cristo Cortès and Mathias Barchadsky (France), to name but a few. Brimming with her experiences overseas, she returned to Montréal in 2006 and founded La Otra Orilla with Hedi Graja. Over the years, Myriam Allard has become a true reference in the field of flamenco in Canada. At once a choreographer, performer, artistic director, mentor, collaborator and teacher, her generosity in sharing her vision of the world knows no bounds, in a quest to always seek out more light. For Myriam Allard, the body knows all. It’s manifold, and it dances. Encountering the Other, whether overwhelming or infused with memory, allows us to define ourselves. It puts us face to face with our own identity and opens horizons.

This relation to the other is central to her approach. It enters into her work through, notably, the strong presence, breathing and physicality of the musicians on stage Bodies and sounds meld, whether they are raw and primal or simply express the essential. Always lying in wait, sometimes in the background, occasionally as the protagonist, the flamenco corpus is the foundation of her work. She is anchored by it. Sound-based choreography, made of tensions and suspensions. DEBORDEMENTS echoes this approach.

Multidisciplinary artist Hedi Graja was born with one foot on each shore of the Mediterranean, which crucially influenced his artistic identity. Initiated into theatre in Paris, then classical singing in Toulouse, he was eventually introduced to flamenco, which would have a pivotal effect. He left for Seville to learn more and flamenco singing became his preferred expressive medium. After spending four years in Andalusia, he completed his studies in art and literature in Paris, where he also continued studying flamenco singing and collaborated as an actor with the theatre company Le Théâtre du Voyageur. Since 2006, he’s been developing La Otra Orilla’s visual signature, taking charge of stage direction and design for all their productions. With a strong, fiery bass-baritone voice, rare in flamenco, Hedi Graja’s singing displays the elements of a deep flamenco, anchored and timeless.

For Hedi Graja, “It’s vital to play with shapes, bodies, sounds, words, accidents, rhythm, and to allow the intention to be born from this grand dance of elements—to pass through childhood to discover, compose and theatrically develop the shape of a discourse whose methods don’t obey any internal logic.” This process guides his work. For him, each piece is an opportunity to cast a renewed look at the world.

Jonathan Parant is an experimental rock musician. He’s a founding member of three bands: Fly Pan Am, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O. and Feu Thérèse. He’s taken part in performances for many years, both as a solo artist and as part of a collective. He now creates under the name Actors Artificial. Using this pseudonym, he orchestrates dark musical connections, a kind of dramatic audio and visual sagas. In this context, he offers poetic justice to banal images, familiar rituals and insignificant actions, transposed into a performative environment where the artists’ bodies become vehicles. With his friend Alexandre St-Onge, he created the sound design for Moi qui me parle à moi-même dans le futur and Trieste from author, stage director and actress Marie Brassard (Québec); on his own, he did the sound design for La vie utile from actress and dramatist Évelyne de la Chenelière (Québec), staged by Marie Brassard, for Une conjuration at Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental (Montréal), for the in situ piece the place In between and DEBORDEMENTS (2023) from Montréal dance company La Otra Orilla. Since 2009, he’s part of the collective K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., a multimedia project of which he is a founding member, along with Alexandre St-Onge and Alexander Wilson, where music, images, videos and lights are improvised and revisited through multiple derivatives: programs, computers, midi interfaces, etc.