Jasmine Van Schouwen

Jasmine (Yasmine) van Schouwen is a dance artist and multidisciplinary creator based in Gatineau, on Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. She is the founder and artistic director of the Voices Dance Project, and works as a performer, teacher, and independent choreographer. Her artistic practice focuses on classical and modern ballet, floorwork, contemporary dance, and improvisation.

Jasmine is passionate about exploring how different dance styles can come together to deconstruct hierarchies and boundaries between forms, and about using dance as a tool to deepen our understanding of people and their stories. Her works investigate the shared dimensions of human experience, seeking to cultivate solidarity through the recognition that we are all shaped—and at times wounded—by the very systems that sustain us.

Recent Projects

are you here, with me?  (2026) traces the journey of a pod of Southern Resident killer whales—one of the most endangered orca communities in the world—through birth, freedom, capture, confinement, death, and ancestral return. In this excerpt,  the pod welcomes a new calf into the world. As the young orca grows within the matriarchal pod, she begins to learn how to communicate with her sisters and is introduced to their practices of communal care and reciprocity. The score for this piece is built from the voices of J‑Pod, a Southern Resident family whose distinctive call was transcribed for harp and woven into unflinchingly tender music by composer Michelle Gott. (Collaboratively choreographed by the Voices Dance Project under the direction of Jasmine van Schouwen)

Mycelium (III) (2026) is a solo work inspired by the literary piece Arsenic mon amour, offered as a love letter to a territory and its contradictions. Exploring the troubled relationship between the people of Rouyn‑Noranda and the Horne smelter, the piece follows a figure caught between attachment to her community and the industrial force that shapes and threatens it. As pressures accumulate, her body unravels and a single word escapes, breaking the fragile balance she has tried so hard to maintain. Accompanied by projections and an original soundscape by Ottawa‑based composer Jack Hui Litster, which incorporates excerpts from the work that inspired it, Mycelium (III) echoes an unresolved story still carried in the bodies of Rouyn‑Noranda’s inhabitants. (Choreography, performance, and projections by Jasmine van Schouwen)

Watch Mycélium III here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy3qoO7dvc8

Les Cartes blanches de la danse de Gatineau (2026) is a new initiative that invites dance artists to invent moments that didn’t exist before—spaces where dance can be unruly, intimate, explosive, or fragile, and where the audience experiences it without distance or barriers. Above all, the format pushes performers to create without the comfort of a darkened theatre or a stage separated from the audience. Presented at the Bar Minotaure and co‑produced by Maren K. Elliott and Jasmine van Schouwen, the first edition — Coexistences entremêlées — brought together five original works blending contemporary dance, burlesque, ballet, pole dance, and country line dance, exploring themes of displacement, ecology, identity, history, and hope.

Learn more: https://sites.google.com/voicesdance.ca/cartesblanchesdeladanseeng/program

Our Wombs? (2025) An interdisciplinary open studio in the Scott-Fairview House, created in collaboration with three other artists, Our Wombs? explores the reproductive body and parenthood. The public is invited to move from room to room in an immersive experience combining dance performances, musical compositions, poetry, and audio testimonies gathered during interview sessions and somatic explorations with members of the public. Halfway between installation, performance, and mediation, this intimate space makes visible the often-silenced experiences surrounding motherhood and non-motherhood. (Management, production, and creation under the direction of Jasmine van Schouwen with Audrey Lanoux, Riley Hannah Lewicki, and Yolande Laroche)

Watch a video from the open studio of Our Wombs? here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utuzBTzwi2s

On Home (2025) is a one-hour danced journey at the border between the known and the unknown — a poetic odyssey where loss, longing, and rediscovery of home become movement material. Carried by a collective musical and choreographic creation, this interdisciplinary work weaves together stories of exile, grounding, and rebirth, questioning what remains of us when our bearings collapse. (Choreography and Production by the artists of the Voices Choreographic Project under the artistic direction of Jasmine van Schouwen)

Trailer On Home: https://youtu.be/Iy3FC8wDP2w
Learn more about On Home: https://www.fr-voicesdance.ca/spectacles-ant%C3%A9rieurs/au-seuil-du-chez-soi

Le travail (2024) is a gesture-based choreography performed to a recorded excerpt from The Need for Roots by Simone Weil, presented at the Avant-Première in Gatineau as part of the pre-production Toutes études confondues by the PenserDanser company. Raw and sensitive, yet at times tinged with absurd humor, this short gestural poem — almost caricatural — sought both to embrace and to parody Simone Weil’s concept of work as the spiritual center of human existence, using gestures that evoked the monotony and hardship of factory labor. (Choreography by Jasmine van Schouwen)

Watch Le travail here: https://youtu.be/qj2qx_HiuAk

On Home Installation (2024)
An interactive improvised dance installation created in collaboration with the other artists of the Voices Choreographic Project, accompanied by live music. The public was invited into the creative process, contributing words, stories, sketches, prose, and quotes about their relationship to home. These informed the dancers’ and musicians’ artistic exploration of the notions of home, displacement, and belonging. (Produced under the artistic direction of Jasmine van Schouwen, Kendra Guidolin and Julia Sterling)

Learn more about On Home: https://www.voicesdance.ca/past-performances/on-home

Poetry in Motion (2023) is an electrifying hour where dance and poetry merge into a single breath. Fourteen choreographies born from collaborations between dancers and BIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA poets weave intimate narratives, where ballet, modern dance, Graham technique, and bellydance intertwine to give body to the words. Carried by a captivating original score, this moving fresco invites the audience to feel poetry in the heart of movement. (Collaboratively choreographed by the Voices Dance Project under the direction of Jasmine van Schouwen and Sarah Squizzato)

Trailer Poetry in Motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UOk9UoJxxo

Mycelium (2023) is a danced homage to the land and its contradictions — a vibrant solo where rootedness and uprooting mingle in a quest for a home that is both precious and under threat. Inspired by the shadow of pollution, the memory of a community, and the breath of local music, this fragile and fervent piece expresses the fight for clean air and water — an intimate cry to fully inhabit one’s land. The work is accompanied by homemade video archives, filmed in Abitibi-Témiscamingue between the 1960s and 1990s — fragments of a fragile past, suspended like memories that might be left behind, swept away by the breath of an evacuation or sudden departure. (Choreography, performance, and projections by Jasmine van Schouwen)

Watch Mycelium: https://vimeo.com/859143797/a352b3d358?share=copy