Sep 5
9月5日
(North of the Vancouver Art Gallery)
2:30 PM - 3:15 PM
Sep 5
9月5日
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
About the Program
Keeling is a multidisciplinary arts project hosted by siblings Corrina and Jessica Dawn. They visit with the songs and stories collected from their ancestors of Gàidhlig, Breton, Acadian, Queer, and unknown origins, along with a catalogue of their own compositions and a sprinkling of deep folk cuts from their childhood. Their performances land somewhere between a concert and a cèilidh - in Gàidhlig, ‘to visit' through music and stories.
WORKSHOP - Granville Street 700 Block
Òrain-luaidh: Waulking songs and other traditional work music
Learn & sing traditional Gàidhlig waulking songs, along with other forms of work music passed down through generations. These songs helped make repetitive labour lighter through rhythm, repetition, and shared company, turning work into a collective musical experience.
Gàidhlig is part of a wider family of six surviving Celtic languages that also includes Irish, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, and Manx. Despite more than 200 years of attempted erasure by colonial forces, the language has been preserved through literature, music, and oral storytelling and songs. Although Gàidhlig is classified as an endangered language, it was once the third most commonly spoken language in Canada after English and French. Unama'ki (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia) is among the few places on the planet where it continues to be actively spoken in community outside of the Gàidhealtachd in Scotland, and there is a small but mighty community of speakers and learners here in Vancouver.
Along with their ongoing practices in illustration, sculpture, dance, and theatre, Keeling explores the ways that visiting with our own ancestral music can help us reimagine a sense of cultural identity without supremacy, and might invite us into kinship & connection as we fumble towards meaningful healing and redress in the context of the legacy of colonization and cultural erasure; first, in their families places of origin, and then here on sḵwx̱wú7mesh and hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking territories. They hope learning these almost-lost songs can be one of many pathways towards right relationships with the land and people where they live, and that sharing them might help to create small moments where our bodies can remember some of the most important parts of being human - presence, playfulness, attunement to one another, and a sense of wonder and belonging.
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Performance / Vendor / Sponsorship Opportunities
TAIWANfest Vancouver is grateful to be held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish Nation), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). We acknowledge our privilege to be gathered here, and commit to work with and be respectful to the Indigenous peoples of this land while we engage in meaningful conversations of culture and reconciliation.