Painted Dance Collective

A non competitive studio space providing training opportunities for artistic and personal growth in Unama’ki/Cape Breton, NS.

Where do we go from here?

Community Project

Over the last two years we have been asking this question. Whether or not we ever had the answer didn’t change the fact that we did have to keep going. Keep making new decisions. Keep moving forward. We had to find a way to re-imagine and re-emerge after it felt like the world stopped. Within that was (still is) incredible struggle and loss. So how do we find the endurance to keep going? How do we grow around our grief?

This piece explores how collective awareness is fundamental to self awareness, using choreography that inspires individual decision-making within the group of dancers to create a visual for the idea. The ways in which we experience our surroundings, happenings, and communities, will affect how we individuate; in our identity, emotions, and choices. These experiences will activate us, challenge us, change us. Some of us will get lost, some of us won’t make it. The only thing for sure is that we go through it together.

Length of piece: ~20 minutes, Runs 6x every 40 minutes

Performance Times: 7:05pm 7:45pm 8:25pm 9:05pm 9:45pm 10:25pm

Join us in between sets for an all night dance party!

Lumiere Arts Festival 2024 // The Art of Caring

Lumiere Arts Festival invites artists and community members to reflect on the concept of care.

In a polarized landscape, care can lap like a brook, or pound like large waves crashing ashore. To care is to tend, to root, to rebel, to share and to endure. This year, the festival is encouraging artists to submit works rooted in solidarity, with community building as resistance, that explores the need to care for ourselves, others, and the earth, both locally and globally. The Lumiere Arts Festival makes space for joy, contemporary art, and meaningful dialogue.

Land Acknowledgement

Lumière Arts Festival, on behalf of the board, the artists, and the communities we represent, acknowledges that we work, live and play in the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, in Unama’ki Cape Breton, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.

We are grateful not only for the strong and ongoing stewardship of these lands we call home, but also for the stories, music, and art that Mi’kmaq people continue to create and share, carrying ancestral voices, sacred teachings, and legacies of interconnectedness and resilience forward into the present and on to the future.

We aspire to reflect that sense of connection between past and present in our festival. We are inspired by L’nu artists to foster connection and self-reflection in our work. We will work to ensure that art is accessible, inclusive, and integrated into public spaces so that we can share our collective stories, recognizing the challenges of our past and imagining brighter futures.

We are all Treaty people.