SHIFTING TIDES 2023

Maqmikew Ohnè:ka

by Meagan Musseau and Lindsay Dawn Dobbin

Maqmikew Ohnè:ka is a prayer in the form of a dance. A creative meeting of land and water to express the freedom and love found in connection to that which sustains us.

Maqmikew (meaning land in Mi’kmaw) Ohnè:ka (meaning water in Kanien'kéha) is the creative confluence of two Indigenous friends, imagining an ecosystem of sustainable relations.

Artists Meagan Musseau and Lindsay Dawn Dobbin were called to collaborate with the lands and waters of Elmastukwek and Sipekne'katik while considering relationships in all their forms, with all beings. Nature teaches us how interconnected we truly are with the planet, and this connection is medicine. While colonialism has taught us limited and oppressive forms of love and relationality, often rooted in ownership, Indigenous understanding of relationship is rooted in connection, listening, presence and gratitude for our expansive kinship network.

Omote (面)

by Miya Turnbull and Shion Skye Carter

"Omote (面)" is a performance by dance artist Shion Skye Carter and visual artist Miya Turnbull, where hand-crafted masks in myriad shapes and facial expressions become extensions of the body. The masks' distorted imagery borders on uncanny, challenging traditional ideas of beauty, while articulating the concept of honne (本音) and tatemae (建前): when a person’s true feelings and desires (honne) contrasts the behavior and opinions they share in public (tatemae). The artists examine: how do cultural expectations, and one’s ancestral history, influence the parts of ourselves that we express to the world, and the parts that we keep hidden away?

Du néant / From Nothingness

by Jalianne Li and Haqq Brice Adéoyé

A being emerges from nothingness, moving, dancing, with the desire to create. Complexity builds upon complexity until something entirely new is born.

« Du néant / From Nothingness » is a screendance from Jalianne Li (surFace Dance) that combines her artistic practice of exploring facial movement with her new love of makeup. The film was commissioned for the event Séances Éphémères as part of the Volet Arts Médiatiques of the Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie (FICFA) in 2022.

Cumulus

by Sam Penner

Cumulus is the self portrait of a person-in-progress playing in the spaces between art and life, dance and movement, self and other. Exploring the idea of practice as process, the film follows a journey of self-reflection inspired by feminist perspectives on the self. Eschewing masculine-coded philosophies that idealize an independent self as a disembodied, rational mind, feminist thought explores the self as embodied, relational, and cultivated in contextual practices.

What does it mean to see our very existence as practice? To cultivate a sense of self in how we move through each moment, rather than striving to be a finished product, polished and perfect? Accumulating these quotidian patterns reveals the porosity of the individual within our interconnected world. A film for the spiralling, falling apart days, Cumulus is both a blueprint to build oneself anew, and a map back to our shared pool of existence.

Scored by Time

by Nicola Hawkins

Into a vast dilapidated 19th century hall, an elderly woman, wrapped in a torn shawl, drags an upright piano bound by rope topped by a wooden trunk . So begins Scored By Time, the effort of a displaced person to find a haven of memory within a storm of chaos and cruelty. Brought by violence to the cusp of death, the old woman's hallucinatory memories reveal she has been burdened by a lifelong grief, the death of her young daughter. Scored By Time is a wordless, fictional narrative that throws light on the trauma of the many displaced people who have migrated and migrate still across the globe.

The Web

by Millefiore Clarkes and Tanya Davis

The Web is a poetic rumination on the world we inhabit and the complex connection—and disconnection—we feel.

 Special Screening: We are pleased to include the Atlantic Premiere of Woodight: Green Moss Meadow - a collaboration between Hear Here Productions and Mocean Dance!

Woodlight: Green Moss Meadow

by Erin Donovan, Susanne Chui, and Alice Burdick

Woodlight: Green Moss Meadow takes place in Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded home of the Mi'kmaq people, who have inhabited this area, also known as Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, for over 11,000 years. Hear Here Productions’ Woodlight films are a series of 5 minute films all shot in one day, that combine choreography, poetry and music in an outdoor setting.

This is a collaborative project with three main artistic collaborators: Susanne Chui (choreography, dance, artistic advisor), Alice Burdick (poetry) and Erin Donovan (Artistic Director/Hear Here Productions, musician and composer/sound designer). The films were made in collaboration with Mocean Dance, Picnic Studios and Stonehouse Sound. The first of the three films (Field & Tree) was completed in March 2021 and the remaining two films (Green Moss Meadow and Rock, Tree, Water) were completed in 2023.

Director’s Note: A response to the changing state of the world we are in and a reflection on grief (both in terms of our planet but also personal grief) Woodlight: Green Moss Meadow offers the viewer/listener a space to pause and reflect. This film was made with the generous support of the Canada Council, Mocean Dance and the Lunenburg Foundation for the Arts.