TRAction co-leads Sandra Lamouche and Melanie Kloetzel offered an interactive talk entitled “Cross-Cultural Collaborations: Analyzing Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy“ at the 2024 Healthy Dancer Canada conference, held this year at the University of Calgary. With support of Canada Council for the Arts, UCalgary’s Institute for Transdisciplinary Studies and Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy project involves taking audience-participants on an immersive performance ‘tour’ through a crafted landscape as well as a post-performance focus group with a trained clinical psychologist.
In the conference session, Lamouche and Kloetzel offered video, imagery, discussion and lecture to provide conference attendees with a second-hand experience of this project, as well as offering analyses of the audience-participant data collected by the project team. The research presented in the session springs from an ongoing collaborative relationship between the two project leads, one from the Bigstone Cree Nation and the other an Anglophone settler. Working across these cultural contexts has been essential to this project, as well as positioning the work in direct relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.