​1^st Annual

LUCENT Festival

Oct. 25 – 27 at 8EAST

A Festival of Indigenous and improvising artists

8 East Pender Street, Vancouver

Presented by the NOW Society

All events: by donation $10/$20/FREE

Our Resident Artist this year is Olivia Shortt!

This year’s theme: playing the forest

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October 27 3:30 – 5:00 pm

Talk with Resident Artist Olivia Shortt

Reception will follow

Other Festival Events:

October 25 8:00 pm

Improvisations with:

T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss – mushroom instruments

Olivia Shortt – baritone saxophone

Mauricio Pauly – autoharp, lap steel guitar, electronics

Niko Whitworth – bass

October 26 3:30 – 5:00 pm

Improvisation workshop with Olivia Shortt

October 26 8:00 pm

Branching Songs Ensemble

Julie Andreyev – tree-a-kin and lightning stick instruments

Simon Lysander Overstall – tree-a-kin instrument, software programming

Lara Felsing – land-based materials

Keira Madsen – tree voice instrument

Myles V Feltenberger – looper instrument

Improvisations with:

Olivia Shortt – baritone saxophone

James Meger – bass

Sophie Dow – dance

About the Artists:

(They/Them): Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) Olivia Shortt is a storyteller and performing artist working across Turtle Island and internationally. They are a vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, video artist, drag artist, curator, administrator, and producer. Shortt was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine and was described as a “glittering, rising star in the exploratory music firmament.” They have appeared on CBC Kids ‘Gary the Unicorn and their voice has been used off-screen for Stephen King’s ‘In the Tall Grass’ and Season 3 of ‘Chucky’; they made their Lincoln Center debut in 2018 with the International Contemporary Ensemble; they made their film debut, onscreen playing saxophone, in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film Guest of Honour; and recorded an album with their duo Stereoscope, two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB (an underground laboratory specializing in Neutrinos and dark matter physics in Northern Ontario, Canada). Shortt performed and premiered Raven Chacon’s (Diné) ‘For Olivia Shortt’ at The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC) as part of Chacon’s series of solo works ‘For Zitkála-Šá’ during the 2022 Whitney Biennial and has performed the work at The Holland Festival (Amsterdam) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC).

https://www.olivia-shortt.com/

T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss (Skwxwu7mesh, Sto:lo, Hawaiian, Swiss) is an educator, interdisciplinary artist and Indigenous ethnobotanist engaged in community based teaching and sharing. Throughout Wyss’s 30 year practice, Wyss’s work encompasses storytelling and collaborative initiatives through their knowledge and restoration of Indigenous plants and natural spaces. Wyss has been recognized for exchanging traditional knowledge in remediating our relationship to land through digital media, site-specific engagements and weaving. Wyss has participated and exhibited at galleries, museums, festivals and public space such as Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris, Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery and the PuSh Festival  to name a few. Their work can be found in various collections such as the National Library of Canada, Special Collections at the Walter Phillips Gallery, and the Vancouver Public Library. They have lead the transformation of Semi-Public (半公開) during their Fellowship at 221a and they are the 2021 ethnobotanist resident at the Wild Bird Sanctuary. They have assisted in developing an urban Indigenous garden currently showing at the 2021 Momenta Biennale in Montreal.

Treaty 1-born Sophie Dow is a multidisciplinary creative, inspired by dance, music, film, collaboration and Michif/Assiniboine + French/Ukrainian/German roots. An avid adventurer, Sophie exudes passions for busking, yoga and traveling on top of holding a degree in Dance Performance and Choreography from York University. Sophie presently fulfills roles as: Artistic Associate of O.Dela Arts, The Chimera Project & V’ni Dansi/The Louis Riel Métis Dancers, residency coordinator at Dance West Network, fire spinner & board member with Ember Arts Fire Society,  a creative director of Prince Edward County’s Flight Festival of Contemporary Dance, board member with the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance and the Toronto Dance Love-In, musician with The Honeycomb Flyers, a licensed practitioner of Traditional Thai Massage, a trained facilitator & student of BreathWave, a student of cranial-sacral therapy, a freelance dancer/choreographer/sound designer and a puddle jumping trickster.​

The Branching Songs Ensemble—Julie Andreyev, Tree-a-kin, Driftwood and Lightning Stick instruments; Keira Madsen, Tree Voice instrument; Myles V Feltenberger, Looper instrument; Simon Lysander Overstall, Tree-a-kin instrument and software programming—is a sound art group, experimenting with sound technologies combined with land-based practices to create experiences about trees and forests. For Rehearsal for a Forest, the Ensemble uses custom land-based instruments made from cast-offs of local trees and plants, found feathers, stones, shells and other materials combined with electroacoustic techniques. One of the instruments called the Tree Voice, responds to the electromagnetic activity of plants or trees. The Ensemble uses improvisational approaches, responding to each other and the Tree Voice instrument.