The Dance Centre launches its 2026/27 Global Dance Connections series Oct. 1-3 with Cedar Woman by dance and theatre artist Tasha Faye Evans.
A prayer in a long line of prayers, Cedar Woman is a Coast Salish story of ancestral resilience and hope. Through song, dance and ceremony, Evans and an ensemble of dancers call upon Cedar Woman, one of the first grandmothers, who faced the Great Flood with fierce love. Honouring humanity’s relationship with these lands and a legacy of matriarchs reaching back to a cedar tree, the work asks audiences to remember our sacred responsibility to all our relations and to protect what we know to be sacred.
“Cedar Woman embodies so much of what the Dance Centre strives to make possible: giving artists the time, space and support to follow an idea and develop it into a fully realized work,” said Mirna Zagar, executive director of the centre. “Tasha’s artistic practice brings movement, culture, land and community into profound conversation. It is especially meaningful to open our 40th anniversary season with a work that has grown through a long relationship between Tasha and the Dance Centre, and which now arrives in its complete form and invites the wider public into that conversation of discovery.”
Evans developed Cedar Woman through the Dance Centre’s DanceLab interdisciplinary research program in 2020, when the project centred on a collaboration with visual artist and mask maker Ocean Hyland. A work-in-process followed at Dance in Vancouver in 2021. The completed Cedar Woman is now presented through the Dance Centre’s artist-in-residence program.
“Cedar Woman comes from my relationship to cedar, to the women who came before me and to the responsibility we carry for those who will come after us,” said Evans. “This work has grown over many years, through the generosity and teachings of so many people. It is a prayer, but it is also an act of remembering: remembering our relationship to these lands, remembering our ancestors and remembering that what we protect and care for today becomes part of the world our children inherit.”
Evans will be joined by dancers Emily Solstice Baker, Salome Nieto, Sophie Dow, Marisa Gold and Kelly McInnes. Hyland is the mask maker and Xwalacktun made the cedar box. Production manager is Kayleigh Sandomirsky, with lighting design by Jeff Harrison and regalia design by Rebecca Baker-Grenier. Sound design is by Jewish community member Mishelle Cuttler.
Evans is a dancer, theatre artist, creative consultant, cultural programmer and educator of Coast Salish, Welsh and European-Jewish ancestry. Her interdisciplinary practice integrates dance, theatre and culture and is grounded in a responsibility to care for future generations and all our relations. Her body of work encompasses collaborations with Indigenous artists and organizations, theatre and dance performance, cultural programming and community-based projects. (For more on Evans, see jewishindependent.ca/learning-from-her-ancestors.)
The world of Cedar Woman extends beyond the stage with Honouring Cedar, a free exhibition in the main lobby of the Dance Centre, curated by Evans. The exhibit, which opened Sept. 12 and runs to Oct. 12, is a meditation on cedar as the Tree of Life and features work by Xwalacktun, Hyland, Baker-Grenier, Angela Paul, Aaron “Splash” Moody, Atheana Baker, K’esugwilakw and T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss.
For more information, visit thedancecentre.ca.
– Courtesy the Dance Centre
