First Nations Dialogues and Global First Nations Performance Network build on four years of convenings and conversations within formal and informal networks in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performance sectors. It also builds on 40 years of vibrant dialogue among Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations North American contemporary theater and dance leaders.
Opening the First Nations Dialogues is Tëmikèkw, an honoring and welcome gathering hosted by First Nations Dialogues with The Lenape Center at Danspace Project.
Highlights include KIN, a multi-day program curated by Emily Johnson and presented by Performance Space New York in partnership with BlakDance and American Realness, that centers radical forms of care, consent, reciprocity, and love. For KIN, Johnson has invited five First Nations Australian artists—Joshua Pether, S.J Norman, Mariaa Randall, Genevieve Grieves, Paola Balla, and local NYC-based elder Muriel Miguel from the Kuna and Rappahannock Nations—to share performance works and related conversations, engaging practices of kinship and power. These artists and their Indigenous knowledge systems work through generosity and acknowledgment of present and past to transmute injustice and grief. They offer a commitment to and ask for participation toward a shared, healing future.
La MaMa and American Realness will present the U.S. premiere of Canadian artist Daina Ashbee’s Serpentine. The First Nations Dialogues also includes an informal reading of plays by artists Ed Bourgeois, Carolyn Dunn, Rachael Maza, and others. Abrons Arts Center will host a special edition of Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter, a ceremonial fire outdoors in Abrons’ amphitheater, centering Indigenous protocol and knowledge, with food, stories, song, dance.