Nita Bowerman is a multi-disciplinary performer (actor/dancer) and a costume designer. She also devises, designs, produces and performs self-created solo works and cross-discipline collaborations with other artists and professionals. She has long been enamoured with and engaged by independent and experimental theatre in Vancouver. She has worked with several local companies including The Only Animal, Leaky Heaven Circus, Proximity Arts, Anatomica Dance, The Electric Company and Tigermilk Collective. Nita has a multiplicity of performance and design curiosities, including but not limited to, authentic human contact, testing boundaries, the construction of wearable metal works and the integration of new media and technology in garment design and performance.
Since graduating from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts, Nita has earned recognition for her wearable designs couped, a dress made of egg cartons and chicken wire (Runner Up Open Category, Port Moody Wearable Art Awards) and for her haute-cirque headpieces for House of KOSA. As former artist and producer in residence with The Only Animal, Nita has explored the many dimensions of both site-specific theatre and intimate theatre for small audiences. She has underwater pupeteered a fish for a play in a pool The One That Got Away (The Electric Company/The Only Animal) and she has concocted a love story with baking implements on a breadboard stage perched on the laps of two audience members Sugar (HIVE3). These experiences have fuelled her investigation into activated theatre in search of authentic human contact. In 2010 the self-created and produced short performance installation did you see others like me? (BC Buds), found Nita playing self-illuminated in a pitch-black stairwell for one audience member at a time. Her latest creation wreckage
(Vancouver Fringe Festival) took place under a wharf with a homemade raft and a scuba diver and in it she threatened to drown in filthy False Creek night after night in an attempt salvage memory and identity and to find a touch that makes the creature human.
