Featured Artists
Nicole Charlton Goodbrand ·
Nicole Charlton Goodbrand (she/her) is a Calgary-based choreographer, dance artist, and educator. Her work blends surreal imagery with precise, physically expressive movement, exploring curiosity, identity, and the tensions between public and private selves. She creates immersive performance landscapes where humour, strangeness, and intimacy intersect, inviting audiences into unexpected, emotionally driven worlds. Through her choreography, Nicole examines the contradictions of human behaviour, the hidden layers of personal experience, and the poetic possibilities within everyday gestures.
Nicole is Associate Artistic Director and a performing dance interpreter with W&M Physical Theatre. She has performed locally, nationally, and internationally, and her choreography has been presented at DSW’s Alberta Dance Festival, Quick+Dirty, To The AWE, WiLDDOGS International Screendance Festival, and Springboard Performance’s Fluid Fest. She has contributed choreography to the feature films Die My Love (2025), directed by Lynne Ramsay, and A Long Winter, directed by Andrew Haigh.
She is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Emerging Artist Award (2024), and her work has been supported through grants and residencies with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Canada Council for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Nicole teaches professionally and is a sessional instructor in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from the University of Calgary, a Graduate Diploma from The School of Alberta Ballet, and a Professional Dancers’ Postgraduate Teaching Certificate from the Royal Academy of Dance (Berlin), graduating with distinction.
The Skin of an Octopus
The Skin of an Octopus is an 18-minute contemporary dance solo that follows the surreal journey of an octopus whose fascination with the human world slowly erodes its sensibility, morality, and identity, as it traverses through the land of fresh air and evergreen trees in someone else's skin. This work was developed in the efforts to disfigure subjective ideals, and to exaggerate perceived personal identity. Highlighting the underlining nature of a beast -- human or cephalopod.
Narrated by Ryan John Arnold, with projection design and digital art by Derek Demassi, this collaborative performance creates a dreamy, ominous landscape that transforms the performance space into a psychedelic playground where absurdity, unease, and physical virtuosity collide.
“The Skin of an Octopus is a wild ride punctuated with strangeness and humour. The work motors on rails of physical virtuosity, equal parts dynamism and specificity.”
— Rufi Oswaldo, Artistic Director, DSW