Messages on Doors: Nuu Chah Nulth

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About

Join us in person this September 29, 2022 for the public feast and sharing of the Core Artists’ and Community Participants’ artistic responses to the messages on doors workshop. A live blending of storytelling, personal experience, letters of loss and understanding, and performance art.

Messages on Doors is an online community engagement workshop and live art presentation where members of the Vancouver Island public generate and send personal messages for distant, unreachable, or lost loved ones in an online theatre workshop through a directed creative process.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Indigenous and non-Indigenous community participants work together to create messages shared as part of a digitally streamed and live celebration performance on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Nuu Chah Nulth peoples

The Big Ideas 2022:

We are responsible to take action against the Historical and Present day dark messages of hate towards Indigenous peoples.

What does the world need? What does the community need? What do you need?

Values: Love. Truth. Listening. Survival. Joy.

Artistic Lead — Tsatassaya White:

Tsatassaya White, B.A. is a curator, event planner and community mobilizer. She is a member of the Snuneymuxw First Nation (Coast Salish) and also of Earthquake House of the Hamilton family of Hupacasath (Nuu-chah-nulth Nations). She carries cultural knowledge, roots her work in traditional protocols and has a vast network of community connections. Recently, Tsatassaya curated “Qwuyulush utl’ Swyalana” a day of Indigenous dance at InFrinGinG Dance Festival (July 2019) at Maffeo Sutton Park, produced and directed “huulth-huultha 2020” a dance film in response to the pandemic, and curated the inaugural Sum̓sháthut (Sun) Festival, an on-line Indigenous cultural festival, and co-produced with Nanaimo’s Crimson Coast Dance Society.

Artistic Lead — The Fox Queen:

The Fox Queen is creative collaborators Tamara McCarthy and Dave Mott. These two white artists of settler descent have over 40 years of combined theatre creation, direction, performance, physical training, devising, leadership, independent producing, mentorship, presentation and teaching in the arts sector. The Fox Queen ethos rests solidly inside the founding shared values of Humour, Love, Communication, Listening, Respect, Healing, Song, and Collaboration. Tamara and Dave are focused on Community, Responsibility, Survival, Anti-Racist Practice and the Present Moment.

Messages on Doors Image was created by Eliot White-Hill Kwulasultun.

Artist’s Statement:

Its a simple Salish design in a heart. The crescent and trigon come together with the shape of the heart to form a the lower half of a face, kind of like the smiling comedy mask.

Links

• The Fox Queen thefoxqueen.ca
• Get a FREE Ticket to the Feast and Sharing eventbrite.ca
• Messages on Doors: Nuu Chah Nulth pacificcoaststage.org

Organizer

The Fox Queen in association with Pacific Coast Stage Co.

Progressive Theatre Collective, The Fox Queen was formed during the early days of Covid 19, due to a strong desire to connect, inquire, dismantle, (re)align artistic practices, and forge new decolonized ways of theatre making and creation. FQ is guided by a set of shared Values: Love. Truth. Listening. Survival. Joy. Humour. Communication. Listening. Collaboration. Our values lead and define us.

FQ exists in the present moment, self reflecting and focusing on the heartbeats around us; we are flexible, continually responding to the evolving needs of the people on our teams and the communities with whom we engage. We are committed to transforming practice while working towards decolonization and reconciliation.

Pacific Coast Stage Co. nurtures Central Vancouver Island’s emerging theatre artists. We facilitate collaboration, development, and experimentation with all artists we work with, and are committed to the preservation of unbounded artistic freedom.