Be Inspired by Dawn Dreams: Contemporary Circus Artist

This month, we’re excited to shine a spotlight on Dawn Dreams, a contemporary circus artist whose work blurs the lines between physical storytelling, philosophy, and deeply human creativity. Known for her evocative blend of contact juggling, clown, and ground-level circus arts, Dawn brings a thoughtful and trauma‑informed lens to every piece she creates. With a Master’s in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies from York University—supported by an SSHRC scholarship—she continues to push the boundaries of circus as both an art form and a mode of inquiry. Her innovative spirit has earned her multiple Canada Council for the Arts grants, including support for The Juggle‑Poetry Project and her 2025 solo research‑creation work Descartes’ Terror, which explores philosophical dissociation and cultural fragmentation through her unique circus‑based practice. Discover Dawn Dreams—explore this contemporary circus artist’s insights and inspiration in this powerful, in‑depth feature.

Q&A with Dawn Dreams

When did you start your artistic journey and what were some of your goals when you started?

I started street performing on the streets of Vancouver in 2005. I had fallen in love with a street performer living in London, England, who had come home for a visit, and was telling me all these beautiful stories of street art. I had never considered art in my life. I was enchanted by the possibility of the freedom to make money playing on the street. I was from the suburbs of Toronto in the 90’s, and it seemed devoid of culture. I was never really allowed to use my voice, so it was rebellious to decide to dive in.

I performed on Granville Island and in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, and I ended up using performance to travel the world.

At the time, there was a real stigma about being a “beggar on the streets” as a busker. Circus wasn’t even considered an art form by Canada Council standards. They were standardizing grants for Circus here in Quebec, but that was on the other side of the country, and this was before the internet had true video capacity, and not everyone had onboarded to the digital space yet, so the information wasn’t available like it is now.

What stage are you at now?

I am at a point in my career where the accumulation of thoughts and the synthesis of everything that I ever learned is coming together into a theatrical deep dive journey of reorienting oneself back into the body after our culture having discarded it as a way of knowing for so long.

I’ve been working on juggling letter-props (the alphabet) since 2012. I really couldn’t create the props that I wanted until 3D printing became more available. And now I’ve finally achieved the size and weight and what I call juggleability of my letters. It’s a big win.

I’m finally putting together a show that includes these props and decades worth of research and cultural exploration. I call the show Descartes’ Terror. Its name is a reference to Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error, and it explores the mind-body split from an embodied perspective and analyzes Descartes methodology through embodied practice.

What have been your greatest achievements?

One of the first big shows I ever did was with Kingston Symphony in 2016. It was a huge deal for my career. After that, I managed to get a Canada Council of the Arts grant for building the letter props in 2020, and I also was able to get a SSHRC grant to fund me to finish my master’s degree at York University for theatre studies, performance and dance. And that has led me back here where I now live in Quebec again, recently winning the Research and Creation Grant for the scriptwriting for Descartes Terror, which I’m currently writing.

What were/are your biggest struggles?

I really struggled to communicate what I see in my mind’s eye to other people. When I was trying to build letter-props that I could juggle, I was having these conversations with plastic retail stores in the early 2010’s, and I could not get regular people to understand the concept of physically holding letters and moving them around to write as a physical practice. There was this one woman who owned the foam store in Victoria, BC who saw my vision, and made me my first set of letters. After I had the letters in my hands, I could demonstrate the concept, like a picture that I could put into people’s heads.

I struggle with staying in the straight lines culture draws for us to follow. I derive meaning from the world through an embodied-spatial point of view. And then when I translate my thoughts into reality I have to flatten everything into a two-dimensional straight line. And I find this translation challenging. People don’t understand the 3D shapes that I see, I’m constantly translating my embodied ideas into language. It’s like trying to suck a mountain through a straw. It makes finishing projects challenging. I am spending so much time translating embodied cognition into rational sentences. So, it means that I am a bit slow, but I go deep.

What was the problem you were experiencing before you came into YES?

I am new in Montreal and I am just trying to learn the landscape of the current reality that is Montreal’s Artistic Scene. YES sharing various artists’ work gives me some perspective on what’s happening outside of my small circus world.

What did you find as a result of using our services? What was the best thing about it?

In 2025, I met Caroline at the Yes Montreal Business Skills for Creative Souls Artists’ Conference in April. She’s been helping me take my enormous idea and break it into tiny pieces so that we can get through to the other side. And she’s suggesting different resources and talking the ideas through. Meeting every six weeks means that I have this moment in time where I look at where the project is and how far we have yet to go together and having just someone being there to support while I, you know, write a script alone in my basement.

How do you feel about the service you have received from YES?

I find Yes Montreal inspiring and it’s great to have a community of artists and people that meet up every once in a while who can be a grounding group of people who are going through similar struggles. Last year, I found the speech from Patrick Corrigan, General Director, Opéra de Montréal at the April conference really inspiring. It’s nice to see big institutions having the same conversations that street performers are having amongst themselves. I look forward to the meet and greets, they offer an eye on what people are doing around town. And also it gets me exposed to more diversity in the arts, and I’m excited about that.

Do you have any other thoughts you would like to share?

I hold strong beliefs that we have to keep street performing inclusive and available to all. I wouldn’t be where I am if I wasn’t allowed to street perform. There’s a lot of people who don’t fit into the straight-line, linear world, but they can succeed when given freedom to do so. Street performing can be bread and butter for any beginning artist (and the best street art takes years).

There’s nothing like an IRL live feed of actually being on the street with people. It is something every artist should try because you get immediate and direct feedback from the real world, the real people. Busking is something that has shaped my practice from day one, and I think it’s fundamental to my art and to the community. Street Performing means being with the people. All kinds of people. Tourists. People who are living on the street, the businesses and their workers, the government and institutions that run the streets. Glen Hansard says “If you sit on a street corner in New York City for long enough, the whole world will pass you by.” Street performing touches all kinds of levels of people and the public, not just your chosen audience, everyone. We all need accessible art that is embedded in everyday moments like this.

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Want to go deeper into Dawn’s creative process and community impact? Click here to find out more.