Rebecca Belmore is a member of Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe). Her works are rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities and make evocative connections between bodies, land and language.

A major retrospective of Rebecca Belmore’s work, prepared by the Art Gallery of Ontario, toured Canada in 2018-19. Her group exhibitions include: Whitney Biennial (2022); dOCUMENTA 14 (2017), Athens, Greece; Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, Niigata Prefecture, Japan (2015); Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Art Museum, New York (2007); Land, Spirit, Power, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON (1992); and Creation or Death: We Will Win, Havana Biennial, Cuba (1991).

Belmore was a recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2016 for her outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada, Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2013, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2009, and Honorary Doctorates from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2005, Emily Carr University in 2018, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2019 and the Université Laval in 2021.
 

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe independent curator, image and word warrior, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, Canada. Based in Toronto, Nanibush is the founding director of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of Indigenous curators, writers and artists that last took place at Venice Biennale. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book, Moving the Museum which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the inaugural Curator of Indigenous Art. She has curated survey, group, and retrospective exhibitions including: Robert Houle: Red is Beautiful (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, Washington); Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental (touring Canada and the U.S.) and Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971 - 1989 (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). She received her M.A. in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto where she has also taught graduate courses. She will be the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY in the Graduate Department of Art History in 2025. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics, history, feminism and sexuality.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.

A recording artist over the span of twenty-two years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.

Since 2004, he has mentored over three hundred high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
 

13 TONGUES
by CHENG Tsung-lung
 

As a child in the 1980s, Cloud Gate Artistic Director, CHENG Tsung-lung would contribute to the family business by helping his father sell slippers on the streets of Bangka/Wanhua, the oldest district of Taipei. Bangka/Wanhua was known for its vibrantly diverse and bustling street scene that embraced religious and secular life, rich and poor, work and play, and legal and illegal activities. The young CHENG was transfixed by his mother’s accounts of the legendary 1960s street artist and storyteller known as “Thirteen Tongues,” who had adopted Bangka/Wanhua for his informal stage. It was said that “Thirteen Tongues'' could conjure up all the Bangka/Wanhua characters - high and low born, sacred and profane, men and women - in the most vivid, dramatic, and fluently imaginative narratives. Thirty years on CHENG’s fascination for “Thirteen Tongues” became his inspiration as he transformed his childhood memories into dance.

Beginning and ending with the sound of a single hand bell, the music accompanying 13 Tongues ranges from Taiwanese folk songs to Taoist chant to electronica. The stage is awash with projections of brilliant colours, shapes, and images, and the dancers gather, interact, separate and re-gather in a thrilling representation of the clamour of street life. As the religious heritage of ancient Bangka/Wanhua fuses with the secular space it is today so time appears to dissolve. The spirit and human realms also coalesce as the audience is taken on an immersive journey - via imagination and storytelling that recalls the art of “Thirteen Tongues” - through centuries of human endeavour, behaviour, and belief.

Cloud Gate is the name of the oldest known dance in China. In 1973, choreographer LIN Hwai-min adopted this classical name and founded the first contemporary dance company in the greater Chinese-speaking community. In 2020, CHENG Tsung-lung succeeded LIN as the company’s Artistic Director. In 2023, Cloud Gate celebrated its 50th anniversary.  

Cloud Gate has set out to engage with local history, culture, and subject matter and draws on classical, folk, and modern dance from both Western and Asian traditions. Its dancers receive training in meditation; Qi Gong, an ancient breathing exercise; internal martial arts; modern dance; and ballet. Under the leadership of CHENG, the training has expanded to more dancing styles, such as street dance. Manifesting in choreographies, the company transforms ancient aesthetics into a thrilling and modern celebration of motion.

Cloud Gate has toured worldwide with frequent engagements at the Next Wave Festival in New York, the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, the Moscow Chekhov International Theatre Festival in Russia, the Movimentos International Dance Festival, and the Internationales Tanzfest NRW, directed by the late Pina Bausch in Germany. The international press acclaims the company as “Asia’s leading contemporary dance theater” (The Times), and “One of the best dance companies in the world” (FAZ). Cloud Gate is also honored as the “Outstanding Company” for the 2018 National Dance Awards, UK.

Choreography: CHENG Tsung-lung
Music: LIM Giong
Art Design: HO Chia-hsing
Lighting Design: SHEN Po-hung
Projection Design: Ethan WANG
Costume Design: LIN Bing-hao
Voice Coach: TSAI Pao-chang

Premiere: March 11, 2016; Taiwan International Festival of Arts at National Theater, Taipei, Taiwan

Commission: National Theater & Concert Hall, Taiwan

From street hawker selling slippers to internationally recognized choreographer, CHENG Tsung-lung succeeded LIN Hwai-min as Artistic Director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan starting in 2020.

CHENG took his first dance class at the age of 8. Upon graduation from the Dance Department at Taipei National University of the Arts, he joined Cloud Gate in 2002 and became the Artistic Director of Cloud Gate 2 in 2014.  

CHENG has been awarded prestigious prizes for his choreography internationally as well as at home, such as the No Ballet International Choreography Competition (Germany), the Premio Roma Danza International Choreography Competition (Italy), the MASDANZA Choreography Competition (Spain) and the Taishin Arts Award (Taiwan). He has also worked with companies worldwide, including Sydney Dance Company, the Transitions Dance Company at the Laban Centre, London, Expressions Dance Company, Brisbane, and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

CHENG’s work is deeply rooted in both ancient and modern Taiwanese culture — and he is a strong supporter of Cloud Gate’s extensive engagement with grassroots audiences across Taiwan— yet it also embraces global influences. He is praised by the Stage Newspaper with “an eye for a cinematic moment.” His 13 Tongues (2016) integrates folk dance, religious rites, and Taoist chant to conjure the streets where he worked as a child. Lunar Halo (2019) is performed to an ethereally haunting soundtrack by Icelandic musician Sigur Rós and explores the complex area of human connection and technology. Sounding Light (2020) was written in response to COVID-19 pandemic-induced isolation and reflects on the precariousness of both the human and the natural world. Visually stunning, Send In A Cloud (2022) displays in shifting colors a panorama of dancers’ life journeys. The most recent choreography WAVES (2023), a collaboration with Japanese media artist Daito MANABE, explores societal and individual facets affected by the rapid progress of technological advancements.

CHENG has been a fixture of Routledge’s respected annual survey of dance practitioners, Fifty Contemporary Choreographers (2020), alongside the likes of William Forsythe, Akram Khan, Hofesh Shechter, and leaders in the form. 

Image Credit: CHENG Tsung-lung. Photo by LEE Chia-yeh.

T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss is an Indigenous Matriarch of the Skwxwu7mesh, Sto:lo and Hawaiian people. Through her work as an ethnobotanist, artist, activist and community-based educator, they strive to share Indigenous customs, teachings, and futures and to connect Indigenous peoples. Wyss’s thirty-year career encompasses a vast array of practices, from weaving, making remedies, medicine walks to the realm of Indigenous Digital Futurisms. Her interactive, community-based work is insightful and informative of their contemporary conditions.

Interweaving their skills as an ethnobotanist and an interdisciplinary artist, Wyss maintains a practice to decolonize their life and their art by learning about their culture and using traditions practiced by their ancestors.

This is witnessed in their recent exploration of cultural weaving using materials traditionally used by Salish People such as red and yellow cedar, Salish Woolly dog fibre, stinging nettles, and fireweed fluff. Furthermore, their current community teachings and research is focused on restoring and remediating Indigenous species and natural space by encouraging others to build their Indigenous food forests and to nurture local biodiversity respectfully and sustainably.

Wyss is a collaborator, deeply involved in community building and finds dialogue with communities crucial in exchanging knowledge and critical in preserving Indigenous understanding of the land and ecosystems. Wyss has taught these teachings to public institutions and organizations and has participated in creative projects that share different indigenous cultures in stewarding this effort in preservation. Outside the importance of preserving what surrounds them, she believes in the importance of taking care of and feeding oneself, in redefining oneself as a way to care for Mother Earth, Chescha7 Timixw, and Ch’iaxw- their sacred protocol.
 

Anne Riley is a Indigiqueer multidisciplinary artist living as a Slavey Dene/German guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. She is a member of Fort Nelson First Nation. Her work explores different ways of being and becoming, touch and Indigeneity. Riley received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and has exhibited across the United States and Canada. From 2018-2020 she worked on a public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver with her collaborator, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss. Riley and Wyss’s project, A Constellation of Remediation, consisted of Indigenous remediation gardens planted throughout the city. Riley and Wyss were long listed for the 2021 Sobey Art Award. Since this project, Riley participated in the Drift: Art and Dark Matter residency and exhibition, creating works that consider the possibilities of making and being beyond the confines of western institutions and extractive processes. Currently, they are an MA Candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen's University. Their thesis research is focused on Indigiqueer Feminist Dene love. 

Lisa Myers is a curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Myers has a Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial practice from OCAD University, Toronto. Through many media and materials, her practice examines place, histories, futures, and collective forms of knowledge exchange. Since 2010 she has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking and stop-motion animation. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in venues including Urban Shaman, Winnipeg; Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Curatorial projects include Carry Forward (2017), Beads, They're Sewn so Tight (2019), and Powerful Glow (2023). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (formerly Faculty of Environmental Studies) at York University. Myers is a member of Beausoleil First Nation and she is based in Port Severn and Toronto.