With sky, sunlight, clouds, wind. With ground, grass, trees, songbirds. (We are held) is a series of site-specific open rehearsals by Tanya Lukin Linklater taking place over four afternoons in High Park leading up to and during the opening of the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art. Building upon her 2023 project presented with TBA, The sky held me and her sculptural work Held in the air I never fell, featured in the 2022 Biennial, the program extends recent research and conversations between Tanya and Anishnaabe and Cayuga knowledge holders around High Park’s Black Oak Savannah and thunderstorms’ physiologic and metaphoric meanings. With invited dance artists, Tanya leads a choreographic process in relation to plant life, weather, and other structures in our lived environment that sustain us. Through sensory investigations grounded in place (the prairie ecosystem of the Black Oak Savannah nestled within the Great Lakes watershed), the rehearsals generate structured improvisational dances, deepening our understanding of and connection to our environment and the weather.
Note: This program is drop-in between 1:00 and 4:00pm. Registration is not required. Visitors are welcome to attend these performance-based open rehearsals to observe the processes that Tanya and dancers work through while in High Park.
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This program is a part of Your Timing is Perfect: Moments and Movements of Inquiry, a performance series in which artists investigate the body as a living archive, exploring its extraordinary strength and resilience, as well as its tenderness, vulnerability, and limitations.
This program is generously supported by ĀNANDAM Dance Theatre.
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Interested in more programming in High Park?
On September 21 and 22, Tanya and the dancers will be joined by 2022 TBA Storyteller Melly Davidson, who will be leading visitors through embodied listening and learning activities based on Tanya’s new Mobile Arts Curriculum learning resource We are with. With sky, sunlight, clouds, wind. With ground, grass, trees, songbird, which explores High Park’s Black Oak Savannah and community stewardship practices.
For information about this Storytelling Session please visit the What’s On page or “Related Programming” below.
Image credit: Tanya Lukin Linklater, The sky held me (rainfall on hands hair lips), June 6 – 10, 2023. Program Held at High Park Nature Centre. Photography: Drew Berry.
September 21, September 22
1:00pm – 4:00pm
Colborne Lodge and the Coach House are wheelchair accessible. Please note that parts of High Park are not and may present mobility challenges.
Part of this program takes place outdoors and is thus subject to environmental factors like sun exposure and brightness.
Part of this program takes place outdoors and is thus subject to environmental factors that produce loud and/or complex sounds.
Part of this program takes place outdoors and is thus subject to environmental factors like strong and/or notable smells.
![A photograph portrait of artist Tanya Lukin Linklater. She is an Indigenous woman with fair skin, and long brown hair. She has brown eyes and is wearing thin-framed glasses. She has a small smile on her face and is looking into the camera. She is wearing a black blazer.](https://media-backup-tba2024.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/29151951/TLL_Resize.png)
Artist Bio
Tanya Lukin Linklater
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s (b. 1979, Alaska; she/her) practice and writings cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, our structures of sustenance, and weather. She undertakes embodied inquiry and site-specific rehearsals. Her recent exhibitions include Aichi Triennale, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; New Museum Triennial, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Inner blades of grass (soft), inner blades of grass (cured), inner blades of grass (bruised by weather), curated by Kelly Kivland, was presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2024. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Her Sugpiaq homelands are the Kodiak archipelago of southwestern Alaska, and she lives and works in Nbisiing Anishnaabeg aki.
Partners
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