On Monday February 14 (online), join us at Speaking of Dance Talking Truths: Shaping Our Presence and Remembering Our Past, presented by Matriarchs Uprising in partnership with DanceHouse and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs. What does care look like when we create work that holds ancestral spirit? Indigenous women from across the country speak about the choreographic impulses that guide their creative process and the cultural heritage informing their practice. Join Olivia C. Davies (O.Dela Arts) in conversation with Matriarchs Uprising artists Maura Garcia, Christine Friday, Sophie Dow and Jeanette Kotowich. In this virtual circle conversation setting, we invite listeners to sit in circle and hold space for women to speak their truth about the ways our creative acts connect us to our communities, help define our worldview, and communicate our dreams for the future. At 12 pm. Tix

And speaking of Matriarchs Uprising, check out the Matriarchs Uprising Festival February 14 – 19. Featuring live performances, on-demand videos, master classes, workshops and circle conversations, including Grandmothers Creation Residency Showing (online), and two live performances, Kwê (Jeanette Kotowich in collaboration with Stephanie Cyr, Olivia Shaffer, Tamar Tabori and contributing artistic designers), and Ancestor Dances (shared by Maura García). All events are FREE! and you can see the full schedule here.

Also part of the PuSh Festival as it moves into it’s second week and as part of the Dance Centre’s Global Dance Series, February 4 check out Mayday’s La Goddam Voie Lactée (The Goddamn Milky Way) – check out a teaser here. An award-winning choreographer and multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal, Mélanie Demers dives into the political and the poetic with audacious works which fuse dance, theatre, literature and music with explosive effect. La Goddam Voie Lactée is her response to the harshness of the world: a pagan mass, both celebration and challenge, inspired by the constant mourning that marks our current age. Five charismatic women deploy their bodies, voices and instruments in a series of visceral scenes full of raw physicality and emotion. Reflecting on the need for solidarity in the face of adversity, this work is an exercise in self-imagination and creativity, and a means of finding our bearings in this imperfect world. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre, 8 pm. Tix

We know these times are trying, but the silver lining of presenting dance during a pandemic is that we have so many offerings of dance on screen! February 16 – March 6 (online), Digidance presents Via Katlehong Dance from South Africa in Via Kanana. Pulsing with rhythmic energy, the seven dancers and single musician of Via Katlehong Dance have teamed up with contemporary choreographer Gregory Maqoma for Via Kanana, examining corruption in South Africa and asking wider questions about those in power and the unfulfilled promises made in the transition to democracy. Careening from the mundane to the metaphorical, this production takes its inspiration from South Africa itself, evoking a new promised land that never arrives (Kanana in the Sotho language) which people must rise up and seek for themselves. Under South Africa’s apartheid regime, black rural populations were displaced to the townships that ring big cities. In these ghettos, surrounded by unemployment and crime, Pantsula was born as a dance of protest. Originally just a dance, it’s now a lifestyle, covering fashion, music, and language. Via Katlehong Dance, founded in 1992, combines pantsula, tap dance, step, and gumboot—a miners’ dance based on handstrokes on the thighs and calves—into a distinctly South African choreographic language that celebrates the urban and calls for positive change. “Beyond protest, Via Kanana is a hymn to hope.”—Toute la Culture. This sounds amazing – grab some friends to join you and get your tix here!

The Friday Round-Up, a place for the Vancouver community of dancers and dance lovers to come together and share what is going on in the local dance community. In this new world in which we find ourselves, it is now more important than ever to find ways to connect and share all the many new and innovative ways in which we create, communicate and relate in the world of dance. So if you have something you would like to share with the Friday Round-Up, please send it to debora@dancehouse.ca. We look forward to hearing from you!