Terraformers
Nuit Blanche Winnipeg - September 27, 2025
Co-presented by @politicalmovement and @tricksterinstitute
Terraformers is an immersive, post-apocalyptic performance piece and installation exploring survival, memory, and the climate crisis through movement, imagery, and ritual. Performers Aria Evans and Philip Geller inflate and place four glowing metallic orbs—symbols of protection and guidance—while responding to a live video feed that includes the audience, blending past and present.
Set in a radiant, artificial landscape where nature has receded, the piece draws on Black and Indigenous knowledge of enduring apocalypse. Terraformers invites reflection on what to hold onto, what to release, and what light can guide us forward. It is both a visual spectacle and a call to prepare for the world to come.
Special Thanks:
University of Winnipeg Theatre and Film Department
Nuit Blanche Winnipeg
Charlene Van Buekenhout
Meet the artists
Creator/Performer
Philip Jonah Logan Geller (they/them) is a Jewish (Ashkenazi) and Red River Michif (Métis) theatre artist, educator, and scholar based in Winnipeg/Wînipêk (Treaty 1). With roots to Rooster Town and family names include Logan, Dupuis, and Vandal , their work is grounded in decolonial practices, ancestral knowledge, and anti-oppressive frameworks.
With a BFA in Acting from University of Alberta and A SSHRC-funded MFA Directing graduate from York University and Ken McDougall Award recipient, Philip integrates trickster methodologies, land-based creation, and collaborative, non-hierarchical processes. Currently they are associate producer for #ReconcileThis at the National Arts Centre, co-artistic producer for Kiyanaan Indigenous Theatre Festival, and in residency at The Theatre Centre and Theatre Passe Muraille.
They’ve worked across Turtle Island as a performer, director, and community-based creator with companies including Buddies in Bad Times, Native Earth, Stratford Festival, Citadel Theatre, and many more.
Creator/Performer
Aria Evans is a queer, Vancouver Island born, Winnipeg based, award winning interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans dance, theatre and film. They moved to Winnipeg in 2023 after living, schooling and working in Toronto for 15 years. As a public speaker, activist and creative leader, Aria draws on their experiences of being mixed race. Aria is a certified Intimacy Coordinator, and with a large-scale vision, collaboration is the departure point to the choreographic work that Aria creates under their dance theatre company POLITICAL MOVEMENT. Advocating for inclusion and the representation of diversity, Aria uses their artistic practice to question the ways we can coexist together. Additionally, Aria is an Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg, teaching in the Theatre and Film Department.
https://www.politicalmovement.ca/
Sound Design
Dasha Plett works with performance, sound, and video. Her work is informed by artists like Maria Chavez, La Pocha Nostra, and the New Narrative movement, and practices of psychoanalysis, collective creation, and plunderphonics. Named one of 10 Toronto theatre artists to watch in 2024 by NEXT Magazine, she has performed her work at Cluster Festival, Art Holm, Nuit Blanche, Young Lungs Dance Exchange, WNDX Festival of the Moving Image (where Etudes for Keyboard received the Best New Prairie Work award), and send+receive (where she opened for Carl Stone). Her current projects are fmmf, an experimental dj performance (album forthcoming 2025), and a trio of new semi-autobiographical expanded-cinema/video works about betrayal, power, lesbianism, and cults.
As a sound designer and composer she has worked with the Buddies in Bad Times, Stratford Festival, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Cercle Molière, Theatre Projects Manitoba, Mammalian Diving Reflex, OneTrunk Theatre, Frances Koncan, Waawaate Fobister, Debbie Patterson, and Alexandra Elliott. In 2024 she was Debashis Sinha’s protege for the Siminovitch prize. She is a proud member of IATSE local ADC659 (Associated Designers of Canada) and a professional audio describer with Vocal Image Ensemble Winnipeg. You can read about Dasha’s work here.