Collaborations
Five blessings (Double Happiness)
FIVE BLESSINGS is made up of five Chinese-Canadian artists who create theatre, sound and music, movement, and performance. We are:
Nancy Tam, Derek Chan, Robyn Jacob, Jasmine Chen, and Howard Dai.
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We’re five first and second-generation Hong Kong and Taiwanese settlers to Turtle Island. Our work celebrates the complexities found within stories and traditions from the Chinese diaspora through songs, audio plays, film, and stage works.
The Giving Shapes
The Giving Shapes is a collaborative project between harpist/vocalist Elisa Thorn and pianist/vocalist Robyn Jacob that formed in fall 2017 at the Banff Centre for the Arts. The project triangulates aspects of folk music, chamber music, and song-writing, combining their classical training and their involvement with the Canadian creative and indie music scenes. The Giving Shapes is a synthesis of their shared musical aesthetic and curiosity with their long-standing relationship as co-curators and presenters. Music from the duo’s projects has been featured in jazz festivals such as the Montreal and Toronto Jazz Festivals, new music festivals like Music on Main, and indie pop festivals including the Campbell Bay Music Festival.
The Giving Shapes :: Tessellation
The Giving Shapes :: Mirror and Echo
Publik Secrets (2013-2025)
Publik Secrets is the umbrella for a constellation of multi-disciplinary art projects. Currently in residence at the Hadden Park fieldhouse, our work includes a variety of public space interventions, performances, installations, and ephemeral gatherings. We support and enable artist-led initiatives that spark critical conversations and risk-taking through new configurations of artists, audience, and community. Within our projects we seek to assert music as always much more than a time-based medium of aesthetic interest, but as a material extension of our thinking and interaction with the world, and thus as a form of world-building that can bring new communities into existence.
Gamelan Bike Bike (2013-2025)
Gamelan Bike Bike draws its musical inspiration from Bali, Indonesia and its raw materials from the scrap metal bins of Vancouver. Founded as a community-based project, the ensemble brings together a diverse group of artists to materialize and animate new experimental instruments. They transformed over 100 discarded bicycle frames, along with other scrap metals, into a range of tuned metallophones and gongs that form the foundation of their sound. The ensemble is dedicated to performing new music for gamelan, including compositions from guest composers I Putu Gede Sukaryana (Balot) and I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka from Bali.
