Back for a fifth year, re:Naissance presents IndieFest from November 15–23, at venues around Vancouver.
IndieFest celebrates local creatives, amplifies the voices of IBPOC and LGBTQ2S+ artists, and pushes for innovation in live performance with genre-defying projects. This year’s theme, “Transformation and Transcendence,” invites audiences to engage with the world in new ways and encourages authentic personal growth.
“The festival has grown significantly over the past five years, but it remains focused on showcasing Vancouver’s vibrant indie arts scene,” says Debi Wong, founding artistic director of re:Naissance. Most of the featured artists are local, celebrated for their passion for innovative storytelling. Over the past few years, we’ve expanded to include creatives experimenting with cutting-edge technology and new art forms beyond our roots in opera. We’re using technology to create unique, connective experiences and we’re focused on immersive storytelling that envisions hopeful, generative futures for our communities.”
November 15-17 at at Signals Studio at the Centre for Digital Media: The festival opens with the world premiere of Eurydice Fragments by Luke Hathaway and Teiya Kasahara, which has been seven years in the making. The groundbreaking production is a reimagining of the Greek Orphean myth, blending powerful vocal performances, dance, XR, and motion capture technology to explore identity beyond binaries. It follows O, a trans individual navigating self-expression through virtual avatars in a quest for wholeness. This immersive performance challenges audiences to consider the complexity of identity and self-expression in a modern world.
November 21-22 at Signals Studio at the Centre for Digital Media (685 Great Northern Way):
Ultra Violets by Alexandra Caprara. The full-length dance-theatre work is a physical exploration of the ways queer club culture, plant growth cycles, and sapphic intimacy intersect. Ultra Violets subverts our expectations of what queer becoming looks like, and depicts this process as a cause for celebration using integrated design, dirt, and plenty of disco balls. Set within a world that is part greenhouse, part underground dance club, the work draws on the history of disco and plant life to introduce a fresh perspective on what it means to grow into oneself.
Signals Studio at the Centre for Digital Media is a brand new cultural hub located in False Creek Flats opened in partnership with DigiBC. The 8,000-square-foot converted warehouse was designed to break the mold of traditional performance venues. As two organizations championing indie creators in tech and arts sectors, re:Naissance and DigiBC are collaborating to explore what’s possible in this new space.
Future Mythologies, a showcase of excerpts of new works in development that aspire to redefine the future of storytelling, will feature three boundary-breaking works:
November 22 at Lobe Studios (713 E Hastings Street):
Soft Tongues by Jami Reimer: an immersive sound composition that weaves recordings of local frogs and their relationship to their environments as the audience follows a frog throughout its life cycle.
November 23 at The Annex (823 Seymour Street):
Polyphonic Garden by Ruby Singh: an innovative blend of biophony (the collective sounds of animals in an environment), geophony (the naturally occurring, non-biological sounds in an environment), and biosonification (the translation of biological activity from Indigenous plants into musical sounds).
Future Renaissance by Alina Sotskova: a fusion of contemporary dance, sci-fi, and Renaissance art that synthesize in a cyberpunk setting 500 years into the future.
For the full festival line-up, details and tickets visit indiefest.ca.
Free admission is available to Indigenous, Inuit, and Métis peoples.