WEAVE

On Practice, Integrity, and the Mystic Arc

I came to this work through necessity. Years of holding intense care spaces, alongside my own encounters with pain, fatigue, and rupture, taught me that healing cannot be forced or extracted from life. What did not soften through effort asked instead for listening—for slower rhythms, for ritual, for sound, for devotion, and for a relationship with the body that could hold shadow as gently as light.

Over time, I learned to recognize disruption not as an ending, but as a threshold. My path led me through sustained research and mentorship—across social care, somatics, yoga, devotional music, Hermetic arts, and ancestral ritual forms—each offering tools not to bypass suffering, but to metabolize it. Music and magic revealed themselves as inseparable: sound as invocation, practice as prayer, creativity as a way of remaining in conversation with life.

My life and work move in cycles of retreat and emergence. Periods of solitude, land-based listening, and inward study are followed by seasons of collaboration, performance, and community care. This rhythm is essential to my integrity. It allows me to return to shared spaces resourced, accountable, and awake to the responsibilities that come with guiding and creating.

At the center of my practice is an ethical commitment to humility, lineage awareness, and decolonizing attention. I do not offer answers so much as conditions—spaces where people can listen more closely to themselves, to one another, and to the living world. I understand art, ritual, and healing as forms of stewardship: tending an ever-evolving garden of care, imagination, and shared life.

ELEMENTALS

CURRENT FLAGSHIP PROJECT

In Development for 2026 Release

Event Showcase

event showcase

Director bio

Dawn 'Juan' Collins is a multidisciplinary vocalist, performer, and creative collaborator whose work weaves together music, movement, surrealist art, and ritual-based performance. Based in Halifax, her practice emerges from lived experience—marked by periods of dislocation, devotion, and return—and treats sound as a relational force capable of carrying memory, grief, pleasure, and prayer. Rather than separating art from life, Dawn’s work understands performance as a threshold space where healing, imagination, and truth-telling can occur.

Her artistic path spans jazz, R&B, rock, Latin ensembles, choral traditions, experimental voice, and multimedia storytelling. Recent highlights include singing with the Creative Music Workshop Core Program at the 2024 Halifax Jazz Festival, multi-ensemble performances at Nova Fest (2023–2024), and presenting original vocal, movement, and video work at the International Surrealist Exhibition in St Cirq La Popie, France. She has also contributed to international surrealist exhibitions in Cairo and is a published author of surrealist prose with *Sulfur Surrealist Magazine*.

Dawn’s formation includes a Music Arts Diploma (Vocal Major) from NSCC, decades of choral and jazz training, and dedicated study in sound and movement ritual, devotional music within Nada and Bhakti traditions, and voice work that approaches singing as both discipline and offering. A year of immersion in Egypt marked a turning point in her mystic arc, deepening her relationship to ancestry, land, and the unseen dimensions of creative practice.

Across her work, Dawn explores voice as invocation and performance as ceremony, shaped by a long personal journey through trauma, illness, and recovery. After years working in high-intensity social service and clinical care spaces, Dawn developed PTSD and later recognized the presence of complex trauma rooted not only in acute experiences, but in the everyday conditions that can cause pain to become lodged in both body and mind. Her subsequent decade of healing led her to investigate lifestyle, ritual, sound, and embodied practice as primary technologies for integration.

Living with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain and fatigue, chemical sensitivity, and periods of significant physical loss—including temporary blindness—Dawn’s work is informed by direct experience rather than abstraction. Through sustained research, mentorship, and devotion to practice, she has restored quality of life and cultivated resilience, curiosity, and joy. Her teachers span social work and trauma studies, yogic and somatic lineages, Egyptian Zar and folklore traditions, and intensive study within world Hermetic arts schools—where her paths as magician and musician consciously converged.

Dawn’s life and practice move in cycles of retreat and emergence. Periods of solitude, nature-based immersion, and hermitage are followed by bold, relational community work in urban and international contexts. This rhythm—of descent and return, shadow and integration—shapes a practice rooted in tantric understanding: that pain and challenge may become doorways to wider perception, deeper care, and a more generous world. Through art, ritual, and collaboration, Dawn participates in a living web of care, tending what she understands as an ever-evolving garden of shared life.