Dancers Jera Wolfe (left, in “Backbone,”) and Morigen (above, in “Tono,”) demonstrate the athleticism and broad scope of Red Sky performances. “Backbone” refers to the Canadian, American and Andean mountain ranges that form the spine of the Earth. “Tono” was inspired by the horse cultures of the Plains and Mongolia.
Growing up in Temagami, Laronde was on every sports team and starred in track and field. Her love of athleticism is apparent in Red Sky’s athletic performances. She says, “I experienced the incredible natural world of islands, trees, water and the Canadian Shield [the Laurentian Plateau]—the home of my parents,
grandparents, great-grandparents
and great-great-grandparents. It remains the source of inspiration for my performances and storytelling.” When Laronde attended the University of
Toronto, she began to study dance, and pur- sued it more intensively at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta. In 2000, she started Red Sky Performance, taking the name from two words in her own sacred name. Its first performance was a multidisciplinary piece with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at the Roy Thomson Hall. A shorter version of the show began touring in 2003 across Canada, the United States, Australia, China, Iceland and Switzerland.
As the number of Red Sky productions
grew, so did Laronde’s role at the Banff Centre. From 2008 to 2017, she served as director of its Indigenous Arts department, which experi- enced substantial growth in dance, storytelling, theater, music, new media film and writing. From Red Sky’s beginnings,
Laronde
reached out to create dance with other Indige- nous cultures around the world, often through a shared relation with the natural world. A 2003 production, “Dancing Americas,” used the metaphor of the monarch butterfly migra- tion from Canada to Mexico to explore the ancient trade routes of the First Peoples. A different animal carried Red Sky to the
world stage. In 2008, the Banff Centre and the Luminato Festival commissioned “Tono,” a work inspired by the horse cultures of the North American Plains and Mongolia. Laronde trav- elled to Inner Mongolia in China and indepen- dent Outer Mongolia to recruit dancers and singers for her production. “We didn’t speak each other’s language, but we communicated
physically,” she said. The percussive stamping in “Tono” evoked the stampeding horses fa- miliar to both cultures. It was performed at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and again at the Shang- hai International Arts Festival in 2014, with many stops in between, in Asia and Canada. The horse also stars in a smaller produc-
tion called “Mistatim,” which is about the taming of a wild horse of that name. A com- bination of dance and dialogue and directed toward children, the show has a message of reconciliation—between horse and human, reservation and ranch, and adult and youth. With a three-person cast, it has performed more than 200 shows. Since then, the pace of the productions has
only increased. In the past two years, Red Sky has presented three world premieres: “Back- bone,” a reference to the mountain ranges in the Americas that form the spine of the Earth; “Adizokan,” a cross-genre blend of dance, video and music presented with the To- ronto Symphony Orchestra; and “Miigis,” an
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 11
PHOTO BY DON LEE/COURTESY OF RED SKY PERFORMANCE
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