Raven Mother will honour founder of dance group and teachings passed on through the generations

The 17th annual Coastal Dance Festival will be presented by the Dancers of Damelahamid March 1 to March 3 at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, B.C.

“This year is really a reflection of sort of the resurgence of our practices since the pandemic and a lot of the relationships that we have with our festival artists,” said Maragret Grenier, festival executive and artistic director.

Of the 12 performers, including several international Indigenous artists, will be several excerpts performed by the Dancers of Damelahamid’s that will preview an upcoming full-length production titled Raven Mother set to premiere in Vancouver this October.

Raven Mother was written to honour Grenier’s mother Margaret Harris, co-founder of the dance group.

“When our family began this work in 1967, that was under the vision of my grandmother, Irene Harris and the leadership of my parents Margaret Harris and Ken Harris,” said Grenier. The Dancers of Damelahamid was launched once the Potlatch Ban was lifted. Irene felt an urgency to share the traditional practices before they were lost.

She was instrumental in revitalizing the teachings of West Coast First Nations’ culture through song, dance, stories and regalia making.

“My mother was trained by my grandmother, and it was really the first time that these dances had taken place since prior to the Potlatch ban,” Grenier explained.

She wanted to honour her family by creating a performance that displayed their impact on generations of artists.

To capture the significance of these intergenerational teachings, Grenier collaborated with members of her family and other artists to create a traditional Gitxsan transformation mask for Raven Mother.

It begins with a larger raven mask that opens to reveal smaller interconnected human faces inside.

“They come out one at a time and the dancers each dance them,” said Andrew Grenier, production manager for the Dancers of Damelahamid.

“They represent a different female generation of Margaret’s family. The outer mask is representing Margaret’s mom, it’s the raven, and the very inner mask is a sun, which represents her grandmother, and then the three masks that come out, one of them represents Margaret herself… and then the next one represents our daughter Raven, and then the last one represents our granddaughter. So, we have all five generations … represented in one mask.”

Andrew’s role was to help create the mask, making two of them himself. Close family created the other three.

“I made two of them and the other three were made by these three generations of that family. And so it's a big job to co-ordinate all of that. It's been taking about two years to make that sculpture come together,” he said.

In addition to the transformation dance, the group will showcase a woman’s staff dance “which is like a women’s warrior dance,” explained Andrew.

“You will see a lot of pattern choreography in the dancing. It’s not just people moving around freely. There is very specific choreographed patterns and steps that the dancers will move through to do the different dances, as opposed to it just being a bunch of people individually doing their own thing.”

One of the performers will be the Greniers’ daughter Raven.

“She’s amazing. She’s a visual artist and she has visual art in the show, but also she’s a really good singer and composer,” said Andrew. “She’s composed I think a dozen of the songs in the soundtrack that we’re going to have.”

Raven said the songs she has composed for the show are about the “intergenerational transfer of knowledge” with the use of soundscapes that are authentic to the traditions of her community while “trying to generate new beats and new melodies.”

“There's the Latin song. There's the Snake song. There's the Paddle song. And it all kind of follows a sequence along with the narrative of the production,” Raven said. “It really is informed by the dance and the story behind it and everything. It's very much a collaborative process in creating what songs we were going to do and then from there the lyrics were refined and reworked with the group to make sure it's true to the story.”

Raven explained her grandmother (Maragret Harris) was a member of the Raven Clan from the Manitoba area and her grandfather was part of the Whale Clan on the west coast.

The production of the Raven Mother visually ties these two clans together for her.

“It’s all very interconnected and to the basis of who I am and the teachings I grew up around,” Raven said. “It feels very much like a memorial and honourary piece to my kookum and ye’. It feels like a final production that’s kind of accumulated over a number of years with the transformation mask and everything. Making the transformation song was quite pivotal for me in terms of where I am with my music.”

The Grenier family and the Dancers of Damelahamid, along with other contributing artists, have been working on the production of Raven Mother for the past four years and are looking forward to the opportunity to put parts of it before an audience at the upcoming Coastal Dance Festival.

Tickets for the show can be purchased on the Coastal Dance Festival website or on the Anvil Centre website.