Professional dancer and choreographer Barbara Diabo, originally comes from the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawake and now resides in Montreal. She has been performing for over 25 years and presently specializes in both traditional and contemporary Aboriginal dance, especially in hoop dance.

At Prismatic 2016 she will be performing Sky Dancers: The Quebec Bridge Disaster. In 1907, when the Quebec Bridge collapsed during construction, 33 Mohawk ironworkers from the small reserve of Kahnawake fell to their deaths, causing a wave of after-effects that stretched out to the whole world. Barbara is a direct descendant of this disaster and has choreographed this dance piece that brings the past to the present. It will haunt you, charm you, and bring new understandings of Indigenous people.

The performance of the Quebec Bridge Disaster will be part of Session 4 of The TALK: A Reconciliation 109 Years in the Making. In this session, Barbara will be joined by historians and members of the engineering community to explore how the Quebec bridge collapse affected different communities over the past century. 

Prismatic is thrilled to present Barbara’s work and to facilitate a conversation with the wider community about the wide-ranging impacts of the 1907 Quebec Bridge collapse.