Due to an incident at High Park beyond our control, the session on Sunday, September 22 was cancelled.

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.

Movement facilitation by Meryem Alaoui.

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.



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.

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.

Date

September 21, September 22

Time

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.

Artist Bio

Emily Law

Emily Law is an artist, choreographer, producer, lifelong student, and mother.

Her choreographic work has been showcased on companies and in festivals such as Toronto Dance Theatre, The Next Stage Theatre Festival, Toronto Fringe Festival, CanAsian Dance Festival, The Reel Asian Film Festival, Guelph Dance, Jeux de la Francophonie, Winterlude, Dusk Dances & Fall For Dance North.

She has had the pleasure of working with Tanya since 2011, along with companies, collectives and artists such as Returning River, Kaha:wi Dance Theatre & The Dietrich Group among many other wonderful artists. She is co-artistic director of Mix Mix Dance and Parks N’ Wreck. She has been nominated for two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Gemini, & the 2017 Premier’s award. Emily is currently completing a MA at York University.

Artist Bio

Ivanie Aubin-Malo

Wolastoq and Quebecois dancer, choreographer and curator Ivanie Aubin-Malo invests herself in projects that reflect on ecology and human ethics regarding our environment. She has also danced Fancy Shawl, a powwow style, since 2015, connecting with the spirit of transformation and celebrating women’s audacity. Her artistic research as a creator aims to shed light on the beauty of the Wolastoqey language and its relation to the land and the body. Ivanie additionally contributes to connecting Indigenous movement-based artists in order to break isolation, cultivate inspiration, facilitate knowledge sharing, and encourage certain experimental collaborations. With this intention, she has helped spark recurring events in and around Montreal/Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang: MAQAHATINE (Tangente and l’Agora de la danse, 2020-2022, Tangente 2023-2025); OHAKWARONT (CCOV, 2022-) and Nikak Tagocniok (Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault, 2023-). As a dancer, she regularly collaborates with Tanya Lukin Linklater and has worked with k.g Guttman, Andreane Leclerc, Corpuscule Danse, Lara Kramer and Alexandre Morin, amongst others. Alongside Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine, she is currently co-creating a performance on wolastoqiyik and Innuat giants and oral stories. Recently based in L’Islet (QC), Ivanie plans to open a Wolastoqey Cultural Center where culture can be celebrated and revitalized in the area while connecting with others.

Photo by Magdalena Marszalek.

Artist Bio

lisa nevada

lisa nevada (b. New México, Chicana, Nuevoméxicana) advocates for our earth mother through her dancemaking, performance, and teaching. Living most of her life in New México, lisa eventually landed in Brooklyn in 2019 where she thrives as a dance and teaching artist. In Lenapehoking (NYC) and beyond, she facilitates movement experiences and performs dances that engage all peoples in the observation of ecosystems and our human interactions to ignite kinship with mama earth, centered on gratitude. She choreographs for experimental theatre & musicals and is continuously mining her personal creations and offerings. Her embodied research and performance delve into the sonic realms of lullaby and wailing in response to humanity’s active destruction of psyche and home. The soils, plants & trees, waters, animals, and insect beings propel lisa’s work while dance remains the sustaining conduit through which she lives and communicates.

Artist Bio

Meryem Alaoui

Meryem Alaoui is a Toronto-based dancer and choreographer from Morocco. Founder and artistic director of Jasad Dance Projects, her work is at the intersection of somatic research using movement and voice, and the exploration of contemporaneity through the reclamation of embodied performance practices, dances and knowledge from her culture as a Moroccan diasporic dance artist.

As a dancer, she has collaborated with choreographers Amanda Acorn, Peggy Baker, Antony Hamilton (with the company Dancemakers), Karen Kaeja and Julia Male among others. Her most recent choreographic works have been presented in Tangente in Montreal and at the Théâtre National Mohammed V in Morocco. She is a certified Body-Mind Centering® Somatic Movement Educator and she enjoys facilitating movement explorations for dancers in professional settings and in community and arts-education contexts, such as with Toronto Dance Theatre, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Haneen Women Choir and The Arab Community Centre of Toronto.

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.

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.

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