In The City: Living Ritual – International Indigenous Performing Arts Festival

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The Living Ritual – International Indigenous Performing Arts Festival – taking place in Tkaronto (Toronto) kicks off tonight and runs until July 27 at Harbourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre.

Produced by Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, one of Canada’s leading performing arts companies, the festival creates space for Indigenous artists, arts and culture enthusiasts, and both local and global delegates from across Turtle Island (Canada, United States), Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia to gather, network, perform, celebrate, promote and dialogue about Indigenous artistic practice. The Living Ritual festival’s vision is Indigenous-led by Dora Mavor Moore Award and recent REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award-winning Artistic Director Santee Smith, and Artistic Producer, Curator and Festival Executive Producer Cynthia Lickers-Sage.

Privileging Indigenous performance, the festival presents a wide array of works through powerful contemporary and experimental works, crafted from Indigenous methodology, voice and body, uniting past, present and future dance and theatre practices.

Toronto Arts & Culture — Living Ritual Material Witness

The festival opens up with an Onkwehon:we Edge of the Woods Welcome Ceremony as part of its daytime programming which includes: Provocation Addresses, panel discussions, Embodied Sharing (Master Classes) and Performative Lectures. The program changes in the evening to include one night only public performances and premieres from internationally renowned artists and companies: the pioneering Spiderwoman Theater (New York, USA) presenting Aanmitaagzi‘s “Material Witness”, Qaggiavuut Nunavut Performing Arts’ (Nunavut, Canada) new work “Kiviuq Returns”; the world premiere of “[MIS]CONCEIVE” by Thomas E.S. Kelly (Queensland & New South Wales, Australia); the critically-acclaimed “We Wait in the Darkness” by Rosy Simas Dance (Minnesota, USA), and Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s (Toronto, Canada) own “NeoIndigenA” by Artistic Director Santee Smith.

At a time when many colonizing structures are openly being called into question, Living Ritual also offers an honest public forum to dialogue on decolonial processes and push button issues, discuss global issues in Indigenous performance, and engage in professional development, while promoting artistic cross-pollination and inter-cultural collaborations.

Living Ritual takes place on the ancestral territory of the Onkwehon:we, Anishaanbe and Huron-Wendat and acknowledges the spirits of the ancestors, animals and the land in the Dish with One Spoon Treaty lands and open a space to honour our interconnectivity and interdependence.