Exquisite Pressure x The Only Animal
March 27–28, 2026
7:30pm, 7pm doors
$17, No one turned away for lack of $
WHAT LAB 1814 Pandora Street
tickets online or at the door
The Only Animal and What Lab are very excited to welcome you to back to Exquisite Pressure! ExP allows artists to try something new, to share their works in progress in front of an audience, gather feedback, and put their investigations to the test. It’s a night to experience new work in beautiful, brave, and vulnerable early stages.
Featuring the work of:
Alyssa Amarshi + Sarah Nash Wong
Noelle Lee, George Berking + Kyra Fay
Sarah K. Finn
Curated and hosted by The Only Animal:
"For this Exquisite Pressure, we’re interested in work that overflows the container of traditional performance.
We’re sharing new performance works of multiple disciplines that:
-explore a novel creation process to reflect ‘eco-centric’ values or concepts
-initiate a process or relationship that could have a life beyond the performance of the show
As an environmental arts company, we’re especially curious about work that:
-centres relationship: with both humans and non-humans
-speaks to communities and ecologies: including plants, animals, people and ancestors, both ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’
-cares for collaborators: before, during and after the creation"
Please Note
This event is masks required to protect immunocompromised artists and community members. Masks will be available on site if you do not have your own. We understand some folks may not be able to mask for medical reasons—please be in touch with us if so and we will make sure you are able to access the performance. If you are feeling unwell or have had a recent COVID exposure, please stay home!
Questions? Email us at studio@whatlab.ca
Accessibility Info
What Lab is located at 1814 Pandora Street. There is no dedicated parking, only street parking. The venue is located on the second floor up one flight of stairs, but there is a ground level accessible entrance through the back of the building. Seating is typically informal, and will include some combination of chairs, floor seating, couches, and cushions. There is one single-occupancy, gender-inclusive washroom. The washroom is not big enough for larger style wheelchairs to completely turn around in while the door is open. We are a trans-inclusive space.
Future Soil
By Alyssa Amarshi + Sarah Nash Wong
Future Soil is an anti-performance and collective meditation inspired by the ritual of tarot reading and the collaborative relationship between rock and lichen, who came together through slow processes of weathering to create the first soils that were the basis for all life on land. As we live through times of global socio-political collapse, we look to rock and lichen as elders, survivors, and oracles, whose collaboration models the kind of solidarity we must embody to birth new worlds from the cracks of empire. Weaving this wisdom into text and movement, we invite witnesses to slow down and zoom in alongside us. Together, we compost our grief into soil from which new ecosystems can emerge.
Alyssa Amarshi + Sarah Nash Wong – Creators/Performers
lichen + rock – Mentors and Co-Creators
wings in the breath, rope in the spine
By Noelle Lee, George Berking, + Kyra Fay
Rooted in ritual and transmission, wings in the breath, rope in the spine unfolds as a living structure of ropes, masks, and fish leather wings guiding three bodies in shared tension. In the piece, connections are traced between land and body, past and future, and individuality & shared becoming. Gravity is the oracle, where myth, memory, and instinct intersect. What emerges is a creature wider than single body; sensitive, agile, and alive, orbiting with the earth. wings in the breath, rope in the spine, forms temporary architectures of care and strain, balance depends on attention, choice, and collective sensing.nsettled bodies; the place of our origin – a distorted place in space and in hearts.
Noelle Lee, George Berking, + Kyra Fay – Creators/Performers
This is what could happen
By Sarah K. Finn
this is what could happen. this isn’t like stand-up or storytelling or spoken word or a guided meditation or a town hall or a fight club or a funeral or a mosh pit but it could be that. a show that’s not quite happening, but is happening, and it (and us) will all kind of decompose in the process. made theoretically with no emissions (including farts), and mostly outdoors, in collaboration with fungi that’s maybe grown in the What Lab shower in the weird room next to the washroom, a collective compost heap, a feral archive, & a wikihow page titled ‘how to dig a hole’ by experienced landscaper Anthony “TC” Wiliams.
Sarah K. Finn – Creator/Performer
Samira Banihashemi – Collaborator/Musician
about the artists
Sarah Nash Wong and Alyssa Amarshi are collaborators, comrades, and kin situated on the unceded, ancestral, and illegally occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Together they rest, meditate, facilitate, write, organize with Dancers for Palestine YVR, marvel endlessly at rocks and lichen, commune with their ancestors, rant about white supremacy, and contemplate the complex and generative experience of existing in a body. Grounded in dreams of collective liberation, their collaborative vision is to engage with artmaking as a mode of resistance to build worlds of tangible solidarity and care with each other and the land. Nash and Alyssa want you to know that spiritually, they are just two lil guys. They dedicate their work to their late friend Zahra Shahab—thank you Z for planting these seeds of friendship.
Noelle Lee 李茵諾 (Lei Yan Nok) is an interdisciplinary, process-based artist, working predominantly with dance, performance, and visual arts. Her work is rooted in an exploration of the intersections between artistic practice and therapeutic modalities, supported by teachings from the land and the people who tend to it. She is greatly interested in improvisational sound and movement, somatic therapeutics, archetypes and myths, and the cultivation and movement of energy. Her work is informed by all those before her and all those that will come, and she is forever grateful to the living entity of land that has always supported her. She was born and raised in Hong Kong, has a Cantonese-Hong Kongese mother, and a Fujianese father raised between Hong Kong and Makassar, Indonesia. She currently live on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Kyra Royo Fay is a Filipina-American multi-undisciplinary artist, educator, and facilitator living on the unceded territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Nations. Born and raised in the archipelago of Indonesia, her work is shaped by the textures of diasporic identity, ecological kinship, and ancestral entanglement.
George Zheng Berking is an artist and community organizer on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Rooted in lineages of clown, contact improvisation, somatics, and mobile sculpture, he tends to systems change across individual and collective bodies, attuning them to land and other-than-human beings.
Sarah K. Finn (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəyə̓m, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səlí̓lwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations. She creates live performance, video, and film using puppetry at large and miniature scales, physical theatre, immersive design, humor, and meandering storytelling. Finn often embodies nonhumans with oversized heads—recently a cargo ship, mushroom, octopus, and deer-cyborg—to trouble human-centric narratives and invite mischievous togetherness amid uncertainty. Her work has been presented in Canada, the Czech Republic, Japan, and the U.S. at Risk/Reward Festival (PICA), La MaMa ETC (NYC), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Mabou Mines (NYC), and The Brick’s Exponential Festival (NYC). She has received support from the Brooklyn Arts Council and a MAP Fund Microgrant, with residencies at Mabou Mines and Object Movement. Finn trained at École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and holds an MFA from Simon Fraser University. @sarah.k.finn. Photo: Chelsey Stuyt
Samira Banihashemi (she/they) is an electronics-based musician, audio engineer, and designer specializing in theatre and live performance. Their work spans composition, sound design, and technical direction, with a focus on creating immersive sonic environments. Their recent roles include Audio Engineer and Technical Coordinator for the Small World Music Festival and Global Toronto, Stages Coordinator for Sunfest, and Technical Director/Stage Manager for Corpus Dance Projects’ internationally touring show La Bulle. Their design work was featured in the Canadian National Exhibition at the prestigious 2023 Prague Quadrennial.
This presentation is funded in part by
