RE-QUICKENING
“I’ve come to this place to kill what’s killing me I’ve come to spit out the bruises and blood-let the pain of my grandmothers I’ve come to dance my bones, blood and wild flesh alive, to ceremony in light.” – Santee Tekaronhiáhkhwa Smith
Provoking, conceptual and visceral Re-Quickening is a timely call for reawakening the intact feminine.
Through bold imagery, sound and embodied Indigenous narratives, it is a re-affirmation of life and sovereignty of female voice and body. Re-storying into balance Re-Quickening is a women’s renewal ceremony. Conceived through an Indigenous creation process, it’s a spiritual resurgence, a piecing together of shards of knowledge, tipping colonialism on its head. The performance touches and moves forward through themes of dislocation from land, body and voice, the history of violence against Indigenous women since contact, residential schools, assimilative process of the Indian Act towards reclaiming women’s medicine, power and connection to land and creative force.
Collaborators
Re-Quickening is led by a powerhouse team of women collaborators: Santee Smith, Monique Mojica, Marina Acevedo (MX), Frances Rings (AU), Louise Potiki-Bryant (NZ), Bianca Hyslop (NZ), Nancy Wijohn (NZ) guided by the words of Leanne Simpson, Christi Belcourt, Alva Jamieson, Leigh Smith and Marie Campbell.
Re-Quickening World Premiere Trailer
Kaha:wi Dance Theatre's new performance work, Re-Quickening premiered at the Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre on April 28-May1, 2016. Piecing together fragments of Indigenous knowing, Re-Quickening is a re-affirmation of life and healing from issues of violence against women and Earth. Conceived by Artistic Director Santee Smith, the Indigenous process was an inter-cultural, inter-Nations approach with collaborators looking to narratives encoded in Indigenous patterning and story, traversing the inner sacred landscape of inverted/backwards woman, Changing Woman, Sky Woman, Clay Woman and Mother Earth.