hum is an intimate physical sound.
It is a privacy that people can hear and feel.
	It is the territory between sound and movement
			from which a new sensory language emerges
Founded in 2000, hum is an interdisciplinary performing arts company dedicated to the creation and dissemination of highly innovative, powerfully communicative and transformative performance, rooted in emotion, that connects with audiences on a fundamentally human level. In an ongoing exploration of the boundaries between movement, sound, theatre, improvisation and other media, hum’s activities include creation, production, touring, and education.
As the company’s main artistic collaborators, Artistic Director Susanna Hood and avant-garde composer/musician Nilan Perera have built a dynamic and emotionally charged repertoire, critically acclaimed across Canada. In creation, they draw on a working palette they have been honing for seven years, where the sound-scape is created live by the manipulation of Susanna’s amplified voice. This is a rich and visceral process where the development of one element is mutually informed by and dependent on the other.
Both as a performer and as a creator, Artistic Director Susanna Hood exists in the spaces between defined forms of expression. Her passion is using the body as an instrument to express in the fullest way possible its most intimate experience of emotion in movement and sound. These distinctive qualities have helped to create the fabric and vision of the company.
Since leaving the company of Toronto Dance Theatre in 1995, she has been developing a practice of combining the expression of voice and movement as a means to create intimate, raw, and sensual performance work, by bringing internal, abstract emotions into concrete, physical and sonic reality. She is most compelled and driven by an initial impulse rooted in emotion that communicates first to her and then to the audience on a very immediate and pre-analytic level. Delving deeply into such states both in creation and performance allows the work to both stay true and transcend the personal into the universal.
Board of Directors Bridget Cauthery, Chair / Treasurer Ron Gaskin, Angela Rawlings Doina Popescu