Indigenous performance makes leap from longhouse to stage for Victoria showcase
After a year of performances and installations at locations around Victoria, the city's first Indigenous artist-in-residence is taking over the stage at the Belfry Theatre this weekend.
Iroquois Mohawk artist Lindsay Delaronde said Pendulum: An Indigenous Showcase will bring together more than 40 performers of traditional and modern dance, drumming and storytelling.
Delaronde said the opportunity to present a full 75-minute program with nine separate acts is a first in Victoria, where most public events begin by acknowledging the unceded Indigenous territories on which they take place.
"It's the very first time that the Belfry has ever had an Indigenous showcase. That's really exciting for a city," Delaronde told On the Island host Gregor Craigie.
"We get asked to do territorial acknowledgements, but we're never the event."
Delaronde wanted the event to showcase the beauty of Indigenous culture as a finale to her year as Victoria's first Indigenous artist-in-residence.
The showcase will include performances by several Vancouver Island groups, including the Lekwungen Dancers, a Kwakwaka'wakw family with a thunderbird origin story, and a Bear Song performed by Nuu-Chah-Nulth members from Ahousaht.
Performing on stage a new experience
Adapting Indigenous dance and storytelling for a theatre stage has been "a journey" that took a couple of months.
"A lot of the Indigenous peoples don't have a theatre background and so it's been a lot of community engagement, a lot of getting them prepared to be on stage, getting them prepared to perform for an audience," Delaronde said.
She compared the project to dancing in the longhouse as a child, with her grandmother nodding encouragement.
Breaking theatre conventions
"That's our way of life, not performance," she said.
Delaronde said she wants to stimulate all the audience's senses, including smell and taste in the performances — which include evening shows on Friday and Saturday and a matinee Saturday afternoon.
"There's even a component where strawberries will be handed out into the audience," she said. "It's about really creating the theatre space as a sacred space."
With files from CBC Radio One's On the Island with Gregor Craigie.
