Friday, January 30, 2026

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9:30—10:00AM // Connection Café: Meet + Mingle

World Arts Centre at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (See map)

Start your day with coffee, conversation, and connection. A daily morning hub for delegates to gather, check in, and ease into the Industry Series together.

10:00AM—12:30PM // Decolonizing and Indigenizing How We Work: Four Perspectives

World Arts Centre at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts

What does it mean to decolonize and/or Indigenize our institutions, practices, and ways of working—beyond performative gestures and toward systemic change? In this session, four arts leaders share reflections grounded in organizational development and transformation. Justin Neal speaks to the values and practices shaping Holy Crow Arts; Reneltta Arluk discusses her leadership at the Banff Centre and the National Gallery of Canada; Yvette Nolan offers insights into governance and structural transformation at PuSh and beyond; and Napo Masheane shares perspectives informed by her long-standing leadership in South Africa’s theatre landscape. Together, they offer critical insights into this iterative work.

Facilitator: Brian Postalian

With speakers: Yvette Nolan, Reneltta Arluk, Justin Neal, Napo Masheane

Meet the Speakers

Napo Masheane 

Napo Masheane is a multi-award-winning, theatre-maker, playwright, director, producer, performer, poet, and cultural curator — one of South Africa’s leading theatre matriarchs. Born in Soweto, raised in QwaQwa, she crosses artistic, academic and ancestral borders with bold, feminist storytelling. Founder of Feela Sistah! and HerStory Festival, former PACOFS Artistic Director, she continues creating, teaching Oratures, and archiving black women’s narratives through her production company Village Gossip Productions.

Yvette Nolan

Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, director and dramaturg. From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Her book, Medicine Shows, about Indigenous performance in Canada was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. She recently defended her Master’s thesis, about governance in non-profit theatres, at Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. 

Justin Neal 

Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw member, Justin Neal, is a playwright and founder of Holy Crow Arts, a Coast Salish centered arts organization that has premiered his plays, So Damn Proud  and Keepers of the Salish Sea. His screenplays have placed him in competitions, programs, and residencies across North America; his feature The Skins Game has been awarded funding from Telefilm. It will commence filming in 2026. holycrowarts.com

Reneltta Arluk, D.Litt (she/her)

Reneltta is an Inuvialuk, Dene and Cree mom from the Northwest Territories. She is founder of Akpik Theatre, a northern focussed professional Indigenous Theatre company. Raised by her grandparents on the trap-line until school age, this nomadic environment gave Reneltta the skills to become the multi-disciplined artist she is now. For nearly two decades, Reneltta has taken part in or initiated the creation of Indigenous Theatre across Canada and overseas. Reneltta recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta for her commitment to decolonizing institutions. Reneltta is the first Inuk and first Indigenous woman to direct at The Stratford Festival. There she was awarded the Tyrone Guthrie – Derek F. Mitchell Artistic Director’s Award for her direction of the The Breathing Hole. She works at the National Gallery of Canada in Indigenous Ways & Decolonization.

12:30—1:30PM // Catered Lunch

World Arts Centre at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts

Enjoy a catered lunch between sessions — menu and details will be shared in advance.

1:30—3:30PM // Expanded Dramaturgy: Context, Relation & Encounter

Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts

In contemporary practice, dramaturgy is shaped as much by context as by content. This session brings together five dramaturgs to examine how social, ecological, digital, political, and institutional forces shape the decisions we make in creation and presentation. Through concrete, practice-based questions, the panel explores contextual mapping, relational and opaque dramaturgies, land- and time-based approaches, attention ecologies, and the challenges of working in a post-truth landscape. The second half shifts into a collective room dialogue, inviting artists and arts workers to consider the dramaturgies operating inside their own practices and organizations—its logics of time, relation, and encounter—and explore how dramaturgical thinking can open new possibilities across our shared live arts ecology.

Facilitator: Gabrielle Martin

3:30—5:00PM // Community Programming: Dance West Network Book Launch (Conversations and Essays on Dance in British Columbia)

World Arts Centre at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts

Join Dance West Network as it celebrates its 20th Anniversary year with the official launch of Conversations and Essays on Dance in British Columbia: A Dance West Network Anthology, published by Dance Collection Danse, the premiere dance publisher in Canada, in partnership with Simon Fraser University. This anthology features essays and reflections from artists who have shaped Dance West Network’s legacy and centres Indigenous, racialized, and queer dance artists whose work has often gone unrecognized in mainstream platforms.

About Dance West Network

Dance West Network: connecting artists and communities in motion is dedicated to connecting communities across British Columbia and beyond through dance. We support dance artists by nurturing their creative projects with professional development opportunities, tour and residency connections, workshops, online showcases, and resource materials. Our work focuses on increasing awareness and appreciation of contemporary dance, fostering opportunities for equity-seeking artists and audiences, and building connections among artists, presenters, and collaborators throughout BC. dancewest.net 

5:30—7:00PM // Community Programming: PuSh at Morrow – Tendrils (Odd Meridian/Ziyian Kwan) and Wahsipekuk: Beyond the mountains (Ivanie Aubin-Malo)

Morrow (See Map)

Witness two studio showings of Tendrils by Ziyian Kwan & Wahsipekuk: Beyond the mountains by Ivanie Aubin-Malo. 

Limited Capacity

Tendrils by Odd Meridian Arts

Duration: 35 minutes

Choreographed and performed by Ziyian Kwan, Tendrils is an ode to artists whose inspirational writings, teachings, and practices are living toolkits for survival and hope. Medicines for the healer in each of us. Ziyian Kwan brings her signature imagery and state-shifting presence to this solo that weaves a poetic tribute to the late Canadian dance icon Tedd Robinson, drawing on gifted archival objects and intimate correspondence to explore transmission and artistic kinship.

About Odd Meridian Arts

Odd Meridian moves into its 10th Season in cadence with complex energies that shape the world. At our cultural space Morrow, we’re supporting artists from across disciplines, alongside movement-based works by founding Artistic Director, Ziyian Kwan. We’re here equally as conjurers, and as champions of myriad artistic practices. The unknown is our dear partner and we delight in revolutionary movement where art imagines real.

Wahsipekuk: Beyond the mountains by Ivanie Aubin-Malo.

Duration: 24 minutes

Wolastoq and Quebecois artist Ivanie Aubin-Malo takes us on a journey through dance, music and song into a reimagined tale, invoking the Giants, entities from the oral traditions of the Wabanaki Peoples.

A captivating performance brought to the stage with violinist Julian Rice (Mi’kmaq and Kanien’keha:ka), this creation transports us on a journey through the oral sung and dances traditions of the Wabanaki Peoples.  Wahsipekuk:Au-delà des montagnes (Beyond the mountains) is a leap into the invisible space of dreams, an attempt to reconnect and continue the transmission of knowledge.  The project, co-initiated by Ivanie Aubin-Malo and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine in 2020, invites the audience to experience a vibrant celebration where the past and present meet.

This showing is supported by Matriarchs Uprising.

About Ivanie Aubin-Malo

6:00—7:00PM // Community Programming: Carry the One (Tara Cheyenne Performance)

Progress Lab 1422 (See map)

Presented by Tara Cheyenne Performance with support from Playwrights Theatre Centre

Carry The One is a performance lecture featuring Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg rewilding the self. The “lecture” winds through a performative practical exploration of emotional labour, filtered through a middle-aged femme body that’s in the process of trying to shed the chronic debilitating imposition to take care of the atmosphere, the group, the mood, and the needs of literally everyone else.

About Tara Cheyenne Performance

Tara Cheyenne Performance (TCP) creates kinetic theatrical expressions based on the wonderful human experience through exquisitely realized characters, crafted choreography, a healthy dose of comedy, and lashings of tragedy. Our work exists at the intersections of dance, text and unapologetic comedy. We have been creating and touring original content throughout BC, Canada and internationally since 2007 developing lasting community ties wherever we have travelled, especially in rural BC. The company is a leader in community engagement, audience and artist development, offering workshops, discussions, and mentorship opportunities with each project we create. Our work bridges different performance modes bringing about deeper understanding, exciting collaborations, and new audiences.

7:30PM // Performance: askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ (Tyson Houseman)

The Roundhouse Performance Centre (See map)

Running Time: 60 minutes

Part live cinema, part ecological opera, askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ transforms a miniature film set into vast dreamlike mountainscapes unfolding in real time. Created and directed by nêhiyaw artist Tyson Houseman, this operatic multimedia performance merges live video, electroacoustic sound, and nehiyawewin song to explore cyclical, geologic notions of deep time and connections between land, memory, and future.

More show info

9:30PM–Midnight // Festival Lounge Bar

The Post at 750 (See map)

After last year’s hit debut, the Festival Lounge Bar returns! We’ve once again transformed our office studio into a cozy late-night hub just for artists and industry delegates. Come unwind after performances with music, games, lite fare, and good company — the perfect place to mingle, relax, and keep the conversations flowing. Open nightly during the Industry Series.

Additional Festival Performances Available

7:00PM // Performance: Everything Has Disappeared (UNIT Productions & Mammalian Diving Reflex, in collaboration with The Chop)

York Theatre (See Map)

Running Time: 70 Min

A theatrical sleight of hand blending digital technology, illusion, and clever storytelling, Everything Has Disappeared reveals how Filipino labour quietly sustains the global economy. From ships to care homes to factory floors, the work transforms invisibility into revelation—with humour, wit, and wonder. Both playful and profound, it’s a conjuring act about what vanishes when we stop seeing.

Content note: Haze, flashing lights, audience interaction

More show info

8:00PM // Performance: Orpheus (Alan Lake Factori(e))

Vancouver Playhouse (See Map)

Running Time: 70 minutes 

In Orpheus, choreographer Alan Lake reimagines descent as transformation. Through a world both visually striking and physically visceral, performers move between rupture and renewal, intimacy and immensity. Oscillating between dream and reality, the work becomes a mirror for our fractured humanity—a dance of chaos and connection, inviting us to drink from the fire, and to emerge changed.

Content note / advisories: Brief Nudity

More show info

8:00PM // Performance: catching up to the future of our past (James Gnam / Plastic Orchid Factory)

Scotiabank Dance Centre (See map)

Running Time: 60 minutes, followed by a talkback 

Catching Up to the Future of Our Past traces the elastic rhythms of midlife—where memory and possibility intertwine. Set within a Mary Quant–inspired, retro-futurist astral bubble, their movements measure and unspool time, revealing the quiet space where nostalgia meets anticipation, and where every gesture carries echoes of what was and what could be.

Content note / advisories: Haze, strobing lights

More show info

9:00PM // Performance: SLUGS (Creepy Boys // So.Glad Arts)

NEST (See Map)

Running Time: 60 minutes

From the award-winning performance/comedy duo Creepy Boys comes SLUGS: a techno-punk concert, clown show and basement puppet nightmare about trying to have a good time while the world burns. Fusing DIY absurdity with electronic comedy songs and trash puppetry, this “brilliantly smart and beautifully stupid” hit from Edinburgh spirals from chaos into catharsis. For tonight, we are free.

Content note / advisories: For adult audiences; Nudity; representation of sexual violence, gun violence and self harm; coarse language; sexually explicit content with audience interaction; Flashing lights; haze; use of prop firearms 

More show info