The 11th Talking Stick Festival in Vancouver BC

The annual Talking Stick Festival is once again celebrating and showcasing Aboriginal artists across Vancouver from February 20-March 4th. Yes! Two weeks of live music, dance, theatre, powwow, workshops and more will be happening in venues citywide. Created by Full Circle: First Nations Performance, the festival is a unique showcase and forum for contemporary Indigenous artists to share their work. From fullcircleperformance.ca:

Since its inception, the festival has become a place to honour Aboriginal tradition in contemporary forms, the artistic wealth of the people, and the promise of their future in Canada. The festival is a smorgasbord of Aboriginal artistic expression including, but not limited to music, dance, and spoken word and provides a stage for emerging and established artists.

This year, the musical highlights of the festival include Native by Nature: The Aboriginal Music Project with Dave Larocque and Kinnie Starr on February 25th at VCC and, later that night, A Tribe Called Red's Electric Powwow which will be thumping at W2.

Spoken word artists will go head to head on February 22 at Cafe Deux Soleils in From Talking Stick to the Microphone Vol. 2 and Mohawk poet Janet Rogers is presenting on February 28th at the First Nation House of Learning, UBC.

There's also a number of compelling and potentially very useful workshops for artists being presented including How We Define Traditional & Contemporary Practice on February 27th and Grant Writing How-To on February 28th.

I could go on - there's events happening every day for two weeks! For a complete listing of all of the events, visit fullcircleperformance.ca and The 11th Annual Talking Stick Festival on Facebook.

See you there Vancouver!