exploration of an Anishinaabe fire prophecy. Red Sky often has two productions on the road at once, in the style of another Canadian export, Cirque du Soleil, and gave more than 263 performances last year. Red Sky has been broadening worldviews
not only through its dance but through its REDTalk series. Since 2011, Red Sky has hosted these audience discussions with a wide range of artists, scientists and other experts eight times a year in various Canadian loca- tions, including Toronto, Sudbury, Temagami and the Bear Island Reserve in Ontario. In May, Red Sky hosted a REDTalk discussion called “Stars and Sky Stories:
Indigenous
Cosmology and Western Astronomy” with Indigenous astronomers, astrophysicists and a NASA astrobiologist.
TRACE’S TRAIL
“Miigis” is what first brought Red Sky to the Berkshires. A Jacob’s Pillow producer saw an excerpt of the performance at the Fall for Dance North Festival in Toronto and booked it for the 2017 season of Pillow’s Inside/Out
series, free performances on an open-air stage preceding each night’s features. The dramatic show about one of the Anishinaabe prophecies wove them together with con- temporary touches such as break dancing. The performance excerpt so impressed Pillow Director Pamela Tatge that she jumped at Laronde’s suggestion for another production designed for the venue’s Doris Duke theater. The result was the U.S. pre- miere of “Trace.” “Trace” is many things to Laronde. “The
idea of ‘Trace’ came from the notion that all things are traceable and that what we leave behind as humans, as a culture, as a nation and as an individual is our legacy,” she says. “Any kind of visible marks we leave behind can be seen as trace—a footprint as a cul- ture or a scar.” And all traces, she realized, have origins.
“What is our origin as Indigenous peoples and more specifically, what is our origin as Anishinaabe? The search for origin took me right back to the stars and to the beginning of time,” says Laronde. “It’s exciting to think that
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 13
“Adizokan,” a cross-genre blend of dance, video, In- digenous and orchestral music, was performed in 2018 at the Fall for Dance North Festival at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, Ontario. It was composed of seven movements that connect stories of ancestrial origins, from Earth to the sky. The dancers included: at left, top, Julie Pham, Jera Wolfe, Cameron Fraser-Monroe, Eddie Elliott, Lonii Garnons-Williams and Miyeko Ferguson; at left, bottom, Julie Pham and Ian Akiwenzie; and above, Julie Pham and Jera Wolf.
PHOTO BY BRUCE ZINGER/COURTESY OF RED SKY PERFORMANCE
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