Location: PNX140
Abstract:
Page to Stage is a workshop facilitated by Tara Morris (Suwsiw), a PhD student in Theatre and hul’q’umi’num’. This offering invites participants into a transformative educational framework where knowledge is shared through story, and tools are rooted in Indigenous cultural knowledge and language.
Grounded in hul’q’umi’num’ language reawakening and guided by Tara’s family legacy, particularly the contributions of her grandmothers, this workshop explores how rehearsal and performance can become spaces where inheritance, belonging, and cultural continuity are activated through embodied practice and shared movement. This session draws on Tara’s Indigenous knowledge and facilitation experience and Kirsten’s theatre and linguistic scholarship and international performance background to offer an interdisciplinary approach to rehearsal, embodiment, and storywork.
Participants will engage in storytelling exercises that emphasize oral expression, movement, and the embodied use of language. These activities support learners in building fluency through speaking, listening, and physical engagement with hul’q’umi’num’ and other Indigenous languages. The workshop creates space for creative exploration and collaborative learning rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing. The workshop responds to CATR 2026’s theme by proposing rehearsal as a methodology for reimagining futures, challenging colonial inheritances, and activating intergenerational knowledge.
The workshop welcomes educators, artists, and scholars interested in embodied pedagogy, Indigenous language work, and performance as relational practice.
Biographies:
Tara Morris (Suwsiw) explores theatre as a site of language reawakening, cultural renewal, and community-rooted performance, bridging Indigenous story work and global practice through embodied research, teaching, and SSHRC-funded collaboration on Coast Salish language revitalization.