Break to Build

Laura Cannon is a dancer, choreographer and educator with over 25 years of experience in site-specific dance and innovative practices beyond traditional stages. She founded ProLab Dance in 2019 to support her multidisciplinary performance visions. Cannon has been recognized and awarded for her work as a dancer, choreographer, director, filmmaker and costume designer. She received the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2023 and served as a Dance Wire PDX Ambassador in 2021-22. She is based in Portland. During the pandemic, she embraced dance film studies, leading to her acclaimed short film Garden Bed. It garnered international recognition and awards, including Best Film Shot on a Mobile Device at the Inspire Dance Film Festival 2022 in Sydney, Australia. Another self-filmed project, Medusa, received honorable mention at the 2022 Mobile Dance Film Festival in New York. Cannon has also pushed boundaries with technology. Her extended-reality work Origins (2022), puts a viewer in front of an audience, wearing a VR headset that plays a dance film while a live dancer performs choreography that guides the viewer’s experience. Origins was well-received when performed at the 2023 FIVARS festival in Toronto. She showcased large-scale dance films inside the Kendall Planetarium with When We Were Ocean (2024), creating a 360-degree experience with live dancers and musicians. Cannon holds a BFA from the University of Texas, received the John Bustin Award for Versatility in the Arts from the Austin Critics’ Table, and has performed with notable companies including Deborah Hay Dance, Sharir + Bustamante DanceWorks, and Rude Mechs. Currently, she is in residence at the historic Zidell Shipyards in Portland, where her multi-disciplinary project Break to Build has achieved critical acclaim. Both Part One (2023), and Part Two: After the Anthropocene (2024) sold-out runs in consecutive years. Part One was a “Highlight of Oregon Dance in 2023” in Oregon Dance Watch.