Join us in person this September 2022 for the public feast and sharing of the Core Artists’ and Community Participants’ artistic responses to the messages on doors workshop. A live blending of storytelling, personal experience, letters of loss and understanding, and performance art.
Messages on Doors is an online community engagement workshop and live art presentation where members of the Vancouver Island public generate and send personal messages for distant, unreachable, or lost loved ones in an online theatre workshop through a directed creative process.
In the spirit of reconciliation, Indigenous and non-Indigenous community participants work together to create messages shared as part of a digitally streamed and live celebration performance on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Snuneymuxw peoples.
The Big Ideas 2022
We are responsible to take action against the Historical and Present day dark messages of hate towards Indigenous peoples.
What does the world need? What does the community need? What do you need?
Values: Love. Truth. Listening. Survival. Joy.
Artistic Lead — Tsatassaya White
Tsatassaya White, B.A. is a curator, event planner and community mobilizer. She is a member of the Snuneymuxw First Nation (Coast Salish) and also of Earthquake House of the Hamilton family of Hupacasath (Nuu-chah-nulth Nations). She carries cultural knowledge, roots her work in traditional protocols and has a vast network of community connections. Recently, Tsatassaya curated “Qwuyulush utl’ Swyalana” a day of Indigenous dance at InFrinGinG Dance Festival (July 2019) at Maffeo Sutton Park, produced and directed “huulth-huultha 2020” a dance film in response to the pandemic, and curated the inaugural Sum̓sháthut (Sun) Festival, an on-line Indigenous cultural festival, and co-produced with Nanaimo’s Crimson Coast Dance Society.
Artistic Lead — The Fox Queen
The Fox Queen is creative collaborators Tamara McCarthy and Dave Mott. These two white artists of settler descent have over 40 years of combined theatre creation, direction, performance, physical training, devising, leadership, independent producing, mentorship, presentation and teaching in the arts sector. The Fox Queen ethos rests solidly inside the founding shared values of Humour, Love, Communication, Listening, Respect, Healing, Song, and Collaboration. Tamara and Dave are focused on Community, Responsibility, Survival, Anti-Racist Practice and the Present Moment.
Full information here: