The Arrivals Legacy Project: Exploring Art and Ancestry

What stories live in your body? Unlock Ancestral stories and discover how they can be powerful sources for artistic expression, personal growth and community empowerment. This workshop co-facilitated by Diane Roberts and Liliona Quarmyne will invite artists to explore the legacies we carry and the legacies we choose to leave behind. www.arrivalslegacy.com

Haitian anthropologist/historian Trouillot asks, “How do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?” Addressing this question is an act of profound activism that Arrivals navigates by helping artists make sense of the histories within. In demonstrating this, Diane and Liliona will share:

1. Arrivals Contextualization – Decolonization and Reconciliation through Movement

2. Performance Demonstration – The Body as Relationship between Land and Memory

3. Participatory Engagement

Diane and Liliona will invite participants to embody key building blocks of Arrivals. Introducing our bodies as a creative village, we will discover tools to bring emerging stories, memories, gestures and movements to life in the village circle.

This workshop is by registration only. Please email countermemoryactivism@gmail.com to sign up; seats will be given to the first 24 respondents.

Facilitators

Diane Roberts is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholar and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship award holder. She is the founder of the Arrivals Legacy Project (www.arrivalslegacy.com) and has been the lead workshop facilitator for the past 16 years. The roots of storytelling and multi-disciplinary art forms (mixing of ritual song, dance, storytelling, live art and theatre) drive her arts practice as a director dramaturg and cultural animator. Her intuitive style of facilitation draws on specifically crafted creative engagement tools that inspire artists of all disciplines and cultural backgrounds to unearth their authentic creative impulses. Her working methodology draws out and establishes a common vocabulary amongst Indigenous and diverse artists, our ways of working and our sense of ourselves as artists in a global society.

Based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on the powerful, unceded and unsurrendered land of the Mi'kmaq people, Liliona is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, community organizer, and activist. Originally from Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents. Liliona performs across the country and internationally, creates original works as an independent artist, facilitates community programming, and is the Artistic Director of Kinetic. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.

Our mission is to enable BIPOC creators to access and re-root their creative impulses by attuning to the wisdom of their ancestral stories through embodied research and reciprocal knowledge exchange.

Starting from cultural humility and creative curiosity, we accompany artists from all disciplines as they unearth personal and cultural histories using conventional research and embodied recovery tools, cross-cultural exchange and performative story-making. Our workshops and residencies birth new discoveries and plant creative seeds that cultivate interdisciplinary works for performance and/or exhibition.

Links to Arrivals Legacy Project www.arrivalslegacy.com.  A description of Arrivals Legacy Project: The Arrivals Legacy Project (ALP) is a national Interarts organization founded in 2015 and incorporated in 2021 whose head office is based in Montreal.

Arrivals Legacy Project logo design by Terry Sunderland. All photos by Diane Roberts, Subject in photos: Danielle Smith & Peter Olelakan Adekokan (couple by the ocean).