Masterclasses
Joy of Jigging with Jeanette Kotowich
Friday, October 6th 2023 | 2:30PM – 4:00PM
Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Open to the public | FREE
About the Artist:
Originally from Treaty 4 territory Saskatchewan, Jeanette Kotowich creates work that reflects Nêhiyaw/Métis cosmology within the context of Indigenous performance, Indigenous futurism, and contemporary dance. Her creations have been presented at theatres and festivals across so-called “Canada,” including Kwê at Matriarchs Uprising and The Dance Centre’s Dance in Vancouver. In the summer of 2020, she conducted land-based research in her home province of Saskatchewan, fusing interdisciplinary collaboration, de-colonial practices and embodied research towards the creation and premiere of Kisiskâciwan in fall of 2022, which toured to Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Australia. Jeanette is Artistic Associate at Raven Spirit Dance, and co-founder of aka, a newly formed collective. She resides as a guest on the Ancestral and unceded Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl ilw̓ ətaʔɬ/, and Xwməθkwəy̓ əm territories, colonially known as Vancouver.
Learn more about Jeanette Kotowich on their website: movementhealing.ca
A Fictional Self-Demystified Creation with Jiv Parasram
Artist Teaching Residency: October 16th-20th, 2023
Dalhousie Arts Centre
Open to FSPA students only
Final Showcase: October 20, 2023 | 1pm – 2:30pm
Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Open to the public | FREE
Whose story do you have a right to tell?
Presumably your own.
But where do you start?
How much do you tell?
And most importantly… how do you make it something that somebody else wants to watch?
An entry level dive into solo creation through storytelling, this workshop will introduce participants to a prompt-based method of content creation. We will work with autobiographical material, and look at strategies to maintain a healthy distance to that material; allowing it to shift from your actual real life, to character and narrative. Because even when you play yourself, it’s just a version of you, and allowing yourself the permission to fiction can really open up what this story’s really about. Also, I don’t know, maybe there’s a unicorn. There can be a unicorn – it’s a play – it’s not real life.
About the Artist:
Jivesh Parasram is a multi-disciplinary artist and facilitator of Indo-Caribbean descent. He is the founding Artistic Producer of the award winning (and unfortunately titled) collective, Pandemic Theatre, and is the current Artistic Director of Rumble Theatre in Vancouver. Jiv’s work has played across Canada and Internationally, his play Take d Milk, Nah?, which recently toured Atlantic Canada, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Drama. His work has ranged from being described as “hilarious” to “profound” to “deeply disturbing” – sometimes for the same piece! Jiv grew up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
Weaving New Ways of Knowing – An Arrivals Taster with Diane Roberts
Thursday, October 12th, 2023 | 2:35PM – 5:25PM
Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Open to FSPA 4th year students only
How can we invite the past to transform our future? What are the legacies we carry, and what do we leave behind? How do we learn to listen deeply to the stories, buried in our bones, that need to be told?
Join Arrivals Legacy Project’s Artistic Director Diane Roberts and members of her co-facilitation team as they lead you through an embodied story-weaving process that explores ancestry as a jump-off point for creative expression. Through this workshop offering you will be invited to enter into an embodied self-reflexive moment to consider and grapple with these questions in these turbulent times.
The SeedPool Process is a transformational exploration of ancestry, ceremony and root cultural practices for artists and creators of change—enacting an approach to collaborative responsibility that is geared toward particular centres of gravity rooted in the body and infused by the spirit.
This lecture and workshop invite a level of engagement that contradicts the traditional role of the researcher as knowledge producer by asking you to step into a state of unknowing and to grapple with what is potentially unknowable.
