Indigenous Dramaturgies Gathering

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

July 7 - 21, 2019

 

Overview

 

This program provides the opportunity for each dramaturg to invite a mentee or collaborator with the hopes of strengthening relationships, introducing each other to various ways of working and creating space for potential future collaborations. This is an opportunity to offer professional development to an emerging artist or to focus on a current or upcoming project with a creative partner.

 

One of the primary intentions behind the Indigenous Dramaturgies Gathering is the offer of reciprocal mentorship and community building. In reflecting on the ways in which we could approach and discuss Indigenous dramaturgical processes, we collectively acknowledged the significance in including a wide range of voices, experience and perspectives, as well as making space to support emerging theatre and performance artists.

 

A guiding principle for establishing a mentor/mentee or collaborative artistic relationship during this gathering is to expand the circle and include more artists in conversations about creating and developing work that is centered in Indigenous experiences, knowledges and practices.

 

Every day during the Indigenous Dramaturgies Gathering, one of the invited Artist -dramaturgs will share aspects of their artistic process for developing and creating new work. We are interested in hearing about how artists work with their communities, with youth, with stories or with the land to help inform their performance practices. We hope that in having these daily offerings, it will connect artists who have not worked together before but who are working in similar ways. Following these offerings, the invited mentee / collaborating artist will also have time to make an offer, run an exercise, or present to the larger group.

 

All of the invited guest artists share in creative processes that look to themselves, their cultural realities, relationships and teachings as ways to help navigate their artistic practice. This, in some cases, puts the body, ceremony and relationships at the core of the performance-making processes. We believe that Indigenous dramaturgies, as artistic ceremony, as political resistances and as community-building are under studied, under supported and ready to be discussed and explored in deeper detail.