Sept 27

Painted Dance Collective

Painted Dance Collective was founded by Hazel Sparling in 2019 in an effort to provide more education, training, creation, and performance opportunities for local aspiring, emerging, and established dance artists in Sydney, Unama’ki/Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Since its establishment, Painted has hosted over 5 shows and showcases, produced 2 video projects, participated in multiple arts festivals, and performed countless times in the community.

Today in 2025, Painted operates as a competitive and recreational dance studio and company providing high quality technical training in various styles, creative development programs for aspiring dancers, and choreography and performance opportunities for all ages. Blending the worlds of competitive dance and recreational dance is something we are passionate about as we work to grow the amateur and professional dance opportunities available on our Island. Everything we do at Painted is rooted in a genuine love for dance and we are committed to ensuring that shines in all of our work.

Stellar Collisions

Community Project

Our relationships ebb and flow- just like stars. They can co-exist with one another, but they can also become closer in space to one another, eventually causing a collision. What happens when we collide with the people in our lives, and what are the possible resolutions? What about when our own thoughts conflict with our actions? ‘Stellar Collisions’ is a dance piece exploring the concept of stars combining in space, also known as stellar collisions, and the similarities between this phenomenon and the human experience; in both interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.

Using lighting, music, props, and choreography, dancers will play with the various outcomes of stellar collisions, such as a new star forming, the creation of a black hole, or powerful explosions as concepts for movement and storytelling- what these concepts might look like grounded in humanity and our delicate experience with one another.

Lumière Arts Festival 2026 // Metamorphosis

Lumière invites artists to explore transformations, growth, and renewal —across beings, identities, societies, and materials – through the lens of artistic expression. In the chrysalis phase, change is unseen, mysterious, and full of possibilities. Artists are invited to create/present works that examine shifts in personal identity, explore adaptation or environmental cycles and the transformation of objects and materials, highlighting not just beginnings or endings, but the unfolding of the process itself.

The Metamorphosis theme delves into the ongoing process of transformation from one life stage to another. Like renewal processes in nature, change unfolds in phases, some visible, and some hidden. How do we hold space for the unknown phases in between growth and reemergence? How do we honour the process of becoming?

In response to an ever changing world, the festival offers a space to reflect on how we adapt, change, and evolve. The festival is a space for collective transformation and activation of unconventional spaces into interactive and imaginative art installations.

Lumière asks: How does art mirror transformations? What guides us forward through unknown processes of becoming? In the glow of shared experience, we celebrate the beauty of metamorphosis, the mystery of the chrysalis, and the endless possibilities of becoming.

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.