The Gathering
Celebrating 10 years of showcasing, convening and support
for equity and pluralism in the Arts
Gala Performances Featuring:
Sampradaya Dance Creations, Red Slam Collective,
DFM Bassoon Quartet, and KasheDance
Aki Studio
585 Dundas Street East, Toronto, ON M5A 2B7
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Doors open at 7pm | Performances 7:30-9pm | After party starts at 9pm
Catering and Cash Bar!
General Admission: $30 | Students $25
Special offer – all evening performances May 27-29 for $60
Register on Native Earth’s Box office.
In the photo left to right: CanStage Territorial Tales, Red Slam Collective, DFM bassoon quartet, KasheDance, and Sampradaya Dance Creations.
The evening will include:
Land Acknowledgment by CanStage Territorial Tales.
Charting displacement through the intertwined narratives of 6 young immigrants – Territorial Tales explores the voice of youth, the true nature of home and our collective relationship to the place where we reside.
Directed by: Autumn Smith | Performers: Sepehr Reybod, Charles Manzo Alicia Plummer, Anna Markovic and Bilal Baig.
Opening performance by:
Workman Arts’ Bruised Years Choir adds magic to any event! Composed of members who identify as having mental health or addiction experience, their repertoire of contemporary songs is a wonderful way to entertain guests AND make a meaningful social impact.
Established in 2016, the Bruised Years Choir is led by Dora Award-winning artist Jim LeFrancois and musician Rob Joy and performs an assortment of contemporary selections, accompanied by piano and guitar. The Bruised Years Choir has performed at events such as the Invictus Games, the 5th Annual Patrick Conner Awards (Theatre Centre), CAMH’s Phase Three Ground-Breaking Ceremony, the Luminato Festival and the Rendezvous with Madness Festival.
Gala Performances by:
Sampradaya Dance Creations is an award-winning dance company that has shifted the paradigm for South Asian dance in Canada. Under the visionary leadership of its Artistic Director, Lata Pada, SDC has redefined the classical movement discipline of bharatanatyam to be a contemporary expression responding to current realities and relevance. SDC creates dance that is bold and thought provoking while being compelling and engaging. The company has successfully created unique inter-cultural and multi-disciplinary dance works that challenge how South Asian dance is perceived.
Today, it is also recognized as a vital sector builder advocating for, nurturing and supporting the culturally diverse dance ecology in Canada. Ranging from personal autobiographical narratives to the immigrant experience, from historical to political, from sport to popular culture, the Company’s work spans a diverse range of solo and ensemble work. Celebrating 30 years, SDC has positioned itself at the forefront of South Asian dance in Canada, creating new benchmarks of artistic excellence.
Kindred – Inspired by women who share a journey of individual and collective challenges and navigating a world of social pressures, Kindred re-imagines and contemporizes the bharatanatyam aesthetic to speak of female connections and bonds. Choreography: Suma Nair.
Mahlikah Awe:ri Enml’ga’t Saqama’sgw (The Woman Who Stands and Walks In The Light), a TD Arts Diversity and KM Hunter Award finalist, is a Haudenosaunee Kanien’kehà and Mi’kmaw; Drum Talk Poetic Rapologist; slam poet, musician, hip-hop emcee, recording artist, arts educator, keynote speaker, artist mentor, festival curator, theatre artist, and emerging knowledge keeper and medicine carrier. She is the Director of Programming for Neighbourhood Impact for the Centre for Learning & Development in Regent Park and founding member of Red Slam an Indigenous Art 4 Social Change Movement. Published in 9 literary publications and two music recordings. In 2018 she opened for Alma Clooney at the Luminato Festival, and was a featured performer for the inaugural Nuit Blanche in Scarborough, at the Scarborough Civic Centre. In 2019 she joined the cast of The Daughters Of Lilith, while featuring at Aga Khan Museum, The Fiddlehead Festival, The London Poetry Slam Finals and the FOLD Literary Festival in Brampton. Awe:ri is an Unapologetic Cultural Arts Leader engaged in social change movements across Turtle Island, with a focus on access & equity for BIPOC & LGBTQ2S humans.
DFM is the world’s first and only electric bassoon band. This genre-bending ensemble reimagines your favourite tunes from the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond…on electric bassoons.
Since 2011 DFM has been smashing the bassoon’s boundaries through acoustic and electronic sound modifications, creating new and unique sounds with familiar melodies. DFM cannot be contained by your typical symphony orchestra, and has performed for thousands at Yonge-Dundas Square, appeared at the Northern Lights Festival Boréal, and played to standing-room only crowds at pubs, cabarets and fundraiser events in the Greater Toronto Area.
With three bassoons sharing the vocal and lead guitar lines, contrabassoon laying down the bass line and a drummer keeping time, this atypical cover band is an unforgettable listening experience.
KasheDance. In its 10th Anniversary and hailed as embodying artistic diversity in technique, form and choreography, KasheDance echoes in a new genealogy of Afro contemporary dance grounded in three main processes – Creation, Research, Presentation supported by Outreach initiatives in community and in education. We engage and creates within a three-pronged CRP model where Creative / Research / Presentation model, is supported by further deepening with the Critical Response Process pioneered by Liz Lerman / Dance Exchange and grounded in collaboration, representation and partnerships. KasheDance finds inspiration from visual arts, music, mixed media and spoken word and is creatively and socially curious about how dance can fuel focused and progressive conversations around our practice while situating people and audiences in cross-cultural engagement. The company has performed for dance Immersion, at the Canada Dance Festival, Dancing on the Edge Festival, Moving Inspirations Dance Festival (Winnipeg), and at the Lt. Governor of Ontario Suite in a collaboration between the Office of Lt. Governor for International Dance Day 2014 among other venues. KasheDance’s last production FACING Home: Love and Redemption was voted Top 10 performance in Madison, Wisconsin, was in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin Madison Dance Department and has toured to seven cities in US, Canada and the Caribbean. This June, the work will be the main performance event of the US Virgin Islands St, Croix Pride 2019.
Accessibility: Aki Studio Theatre and Regent Park Film Festival are wheelchair accessible. NIA Center for the Arts is partly wheelchair accessible.
We aim to host a fragrance-free event. Please do not wear perfume, cologne, or other scented products.
The Gathering on May, 21 and May 27-29 is in collaboration with:
Andrea Thompson is a writer, educator and spoken word artist who has been publishing and performing her work for over twenty-five years. In 1995 she was featured in the documentary Slamnation, as a member of the country’s first national slam team. In 2005, her spoken word CDOne was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award, and in 2009 she was awarded the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word’s Poet of Honour. She is the author of the novel Over Our Heads and co-editor of Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (both Inanna Publications). Thompson currently teaches at Workman Arts (CAMH), as well as through the Ontario College of Art and Design University and The University of Toronto’s Continuing Studies departments.
Sean Lee is a part of a new generation of artists, curators, and arts leaders bringing fresh perspectives to the contemporary art field through an intersectional disability arts praxis. His methodology reframes embodied difference as a distinct resource that resists aesthetic ideals. Orienting towards a “crip horizon”, Sean leads with disability in his curation for its transformative possibilities.
Cyn Rozeboom (Tangled Art + Disability Executive Director) has over 25 years experience in the non-profit arts sector as a fundraiser, communications specialist, artist, and administrator. Career highlights include founding the Art of the Danforth festival; serving as the inaugural Managing Director of East End Arts; helping establish the Next Stage Theatre festival during her tenure at the Toronto Fringe; and three years with Hospital Audiences Inc. a group which provides innovative arts-access services in New York City. She has an MA in Communications, a Certified Fundraising Executive designation, and a college diploma in Radio & Television Arts. Cyn is Mad-identified and is particularly interested in the contradictions of human nature, construction of identities through story-telling, and the fluid dynamics of power within social structures.
Kirsten Kirsch
Cynthia Lickers-Sage is a Mohawk, Turtle Clan visual artist from Six Nations and is currently the Executive Director of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance. Following her graduation at the Ontario College of Art and Design she Co-Founded The Centre for Aboriginal Media, imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival and is the sole proprietor of Clickers Productions. She has spent the last 25 years working in the not-for-profit arts sector as the Executive Director at imagineNATIVE and ANDPVA and the General Manager at Kaha:wi Dance Theatre. She has also served as an arts officer at the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
Clayton Windatt is a Métis non–binary multi-artist working between Sturgeon Falls and Toronto, Ontario. Clayton holds a BA in Fine Art and is a certified Graphic Designer. With an extensive history working in Artist-Run Culture and Community Arts, Clayton now works as Executive Director of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (ACC-CCA). Clayton works with arts organizations on national and global issues relating to relationships and the intersecting points between many peoples. Clayton maintains contracts as a critical writer and columnist for various publications. Clayton is an active film director with recent works featured in festivals such as ImagineNative and the Toronto International Film Festival. Clayton works with community, design, communications, curation, performance, theatre, technology, consulting, and is a very active writer, filmmaker and visual-media artist.
Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene/ Scottish scholar, artist, writer, and Director of Programming for the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective from Galiano Island, BC which is the land of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation. Usher completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University and is currently a PhD student in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s University. She has been awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship for her research-creation work around urban Indigenous experiences within Indigenous communities, groups, and arts collectives through both little and big gestures that activating public spaces. She was awarded the 2018 Canadian Art Writing Prize and most recently has had work exhibited in Soundings: an exhibition in five parts at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, ON.
Cole Forrest is an Ojibwe artist and spoken word poet originally from Nipissing First Nation near North Bay, Ontario. He strives for compassion and acceptance within the arts. By always seeking new horizons and pushing to be the best he can be, Cole is forever learning new techniques to hone his craft.
Ryan Rice, Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake, is an independent curator whose career spans 25 years in museums and galleries, including posts as Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and the Indigenous Art Centre. He received a Master of Arts degree in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University. His writing on contemporary Onkwehonwe art published in numerous periodicals and exhibition catalogues, and he has lectured widely. Rice is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Faculty of Liberal Arts/School of Interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University.
Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO) 
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