SEPT 21ST – DEC 1ST, 2024

Update:  Due to the air quality, dancers may be inside the High Park Nature Centre for Tanya Lukin Linklater’s open dance rehearsals. Staff will be on hand to guide you. Please join us!

The sky held me (rainfall on hands hair lips) is intended to be a series of springtime site-specific relational investigations taking place at High Park over the course of five days. Building upon the interdisciplinary practice of artist Tanya Lukin Linklater and her work in the 2022 Biennial, Held in the air I never fell (spring lightning sweetgrass song), these process-based open rehearsals will bring Lukin Linklater together with invited dance artists Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Ceinwen Gobert, Emily Law, Victoria May, and lisa nevada to generate resonant embodied inquiries. Bordered to the west by Grenadier Pond and covered in a system of wetlands, High Park is a place of synergy between land and water. During these sustained sessions, Lukin Linklater will lead a collective process in response to scores she has penned, as well as to the surroundings of High Park during the spring—a particularly generative season that invites us to take cues from the sky above us.

NOTE: Artists break at the following times throughout the week:
June 6th: 12–2pm
June 7–9th: 12–1pm
June 10th: 12:30–1:30pm

This program is co-presented with High Park Nature Centre, and with the partnership support of Ontario Culture Days. Works by Tanya Lukin Linklater were commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and made possible with the generous support of Dickinson Wright LLP, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Women Leading Initiative.

Taiaiako’n Historical Preservation Society Elders Donna Powless (Snipe Clan, of Cayuga of Six Nations) and Catherine Coming Day Tammaro (Spotted Turtle Clan, Wendat Confederacy) lead this informative workshop at High Park Nature Centre for participants interested in the Indigenous histories and land stewardship practices of High Park’s sacred spaces, where 57 ancient Iroquoian burial mounds have been found. Taiaiako’n also works to protect the ancient Mohawk-Seneca town site of Taiaiako’n (village at the crossing), located in current day Baby Point, and the Thunderbird Mound just below, in Magwood Park.