by MARITES CARINO

Moving and shaking in two worlds is challenging, and Ilona Dougherty knows it. She's been straddling the domains of dance and activism since childhood.

The daughter of activist parents, early photos of Dougherty show her protesting at the tender age of three. During her youth, she was also immersed in dance, but at 13 was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a physical disorder that she describes as "your brain telling your muscles to contract for no reason." Her condition left her unable to dance for a full year, during which she had an epiphany of sorts. "I realized I love to dance and it became clear for me that I had to find a way to do this in my life," she recalls.

After finishing high school, a determined Dougherty packed up and moved from the Yukon to study at Concordia University, finishing four years later with a double major in contemporary dance and community, public affairs and policy studies. Keeping up her activism, last year she co-founded outreach project Apathy Is Boring. What started as an initiative to encourage youth to vote has gained enough momentum to keep it alive and well, post-election. "It's our mandate to use art, media and technology to revolutionize democracy," she explains.

Juggling art and activism has been challenging, however. "It took a long time to realize neither community would accept me. Protesters were saying, ‘Why aren't you making protesting your life?' and artists said, ‘If it's political, then it's not really art."

This didn't discourage her: last year she won the Montreal Fringe festival Dance Award for her choreography Oongit. She's currently working on 100 Boring Moments, a piece that explores how the banalities of everyday are elevated within the context of celebrity. Dougherty has found a voice as a choreographer with a social conscience. "I feel like I want to live in both worlds," she says. "It's not easy, but I'm not willing to sacrifice one or the other."