A Gathering of Indigenous Theatre and Performance

September 17-19, 2015

University of Regina and First Nations University of Canada

Performing Turtle Island brings together established and emerging scholars and artists in the form of a national symposium on how Indigenous theatre and performance are connected to Indigenous identity and community health.

View the schedule here

THEME: As Canada approaches its 150th birthday, the nation prepares to celebrate its place as a home to people from all over the world. At the same time, we ask: where does Indigenous identity and community fit in to the construction of the country’s identity? Indeed, what do we mean by Indigenous identity, and, given the proliferation of newcomers, what do we mean by Canadian identity? In the face of growing international mobility and a radically changing Canadian demographic, it is important to take another look at how identity is constructed on Turtle Island within the ideational borders that designate Canada.

While we are concerned with traditional performance, we aim our focus more on contemporary forms that express Indigenous identities across diverse cultural and social contexts. In this way, we hope to engage Indigenous theatre and performing arts through a multidisciplinary perspective that helps promote Indigenous cultures as valuable sources of knowledge and identity inclusiveness.

Performing Turtle Island is simultaneously local and global. Based in Regina, or oskana kâ-asastêki – Where the Bones are Gathered, the Performing Turtle Island Gathering serves as the primary Canadian node of Performance Studies International’s Globally Dispersed Conference 2015: Fluid States: Performances of unKnowing. This enables our Gathering to interact live and online with multiple performance, symposium, conference, and festival programs across Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. In this way, Performing Turtle Island is a multi-platformed event that is simultaneously actual and virtual, local and globally disseminated, interactive and docked on a website.

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