EXchanges 2025 with Diane Roberts (Arrivals Personal Legacy Project)
Co.ERASGA EXchanges program presents
Weaving New Legacies of Knowing
with Diane Roberts, and members of her co-facilitation team
May 10th - 11th, 2025
11:00AM - 2:00PM
We are pleased to announce accomplished director, dramaturge, writer and cultural animator Diane Roberts as EXchanges 2025 guest, in collaboration with Arrivals Personal Legacy. This workshop invites you into an exploration of your root cultural voice, rhythm and performance. Through this offering you will be invited to enter an embodied self-reflexive moment to engage your culturally storied bodies in a dynamic dance between self and other. Join Arrivals Legacy Project AD Diane Roberts and members of her co-facilitation team as they lead you through an embodied story-weaving process that explores ancestry as a jump-off point for creative expression.
As a decolonizing process, the Arrivals Personal Legacy process enacts an approach to research/creation that is geared toward particular centres of gravity—rooted in the body and infused by the spirit. It demands a level of engagement that asks the artist/researcher to step into a state of unknowing and to grapple with what is potentially unknowable.
About Diane Roberts
Diane Roberts (Garifuna, Afro-Caribbean) is Founding Artistic Director of the ALP. She is an accomplished director, dramaturge, writer and cultural animator, who has collaborated with innovative theatre visionaries and interdisciplinary artists for the past 30 years. Her directorial and dramaturgical work has been seen on stages across Canada and her reputation as a mentor, teacher, and community collaborator is nationally and internationally recognised.
The roots of storytelling and multi-disciplinary art forms (mixing of ritual song, dance, storytelling, live art, and theatre) drive her arts practice as a director, dramaturg, and cultural animator. Her intuitive style of facilitation draws on specifically crafted creative engagement tools that inspire artists of all disciplines and cultural backgrounds to unearth their authentic creative impulses.
Diane’s celebrated Arrivals Personal Legacy Project, developed during her 7-year tenure as Artistic Director of Urban Ink productions, has birthed new Interdisciplinary works across Canada, throughout the Americas, in the UK, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. This work has allowed her to articulate, cultivate, and realise a vision for theatre that encourages Indigenous ways of knowing as a stepping stone to creative expression. She is a founding member of Obsidian Theatre and backforward collective, founder of The Arrivals Legacy Project, and co-founder and Artistic Director of Boldskool Productions with playwright Omari Newton.
Alongside her professional career, Diane is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies, Fine Arts Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal; a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar; and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship award holder.
About Lopa Sircar
Lopa Sircar started acting when she was in high school. Her work as a performer has taken her to stages across Canada, to Dublin, and to Kolkata, India. She has a great love for contemporary storytelling that unearths truths about what it is be human, across timelines and across generations. A physically-based actor, Lopa builds her characters from the inside out in the traditions of Grotowski and Chaikin. She often inhabits more than one character in a single piece, a skill that came in handy when embodying her grandfather in his various incarnations for The Vermillion Project developed through the Arrivals Legacy Project.
In 2007, Lopa was awarded a Shastri Arts Fellowship to teach voice and to study with one of the fathers of modern Bengali theatre, Badal Sircar. During the fellowship, she performed in her mother tongue, Bengali, with two of West Bengal’s most prominent theatre companies, Satabdi and Pathasena.
Lopa completed her MFA Acting and Graduate Diploma in Teaching Voice at York University in 2011. She also holds a Diploma in Physical Theatre from Tooba Physical Theatre Conservatory. Lopa coaches voice & speech, dialects, and presentation skills privately through her company, Lopa Sircar Voice.
About Rosemary Georgeson (Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene Storyteller and Playwright)
Rosemary Georgeson (Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene) was born and raised in the commercial fishing industry, spending the first half of her life trolling and gill-netting on her family’s fishboats, between Galiano Island and up to Prince Rupert. Since leaving the industry, Rosemary has worked as a storyteller, playwright, and filmmaker. Rosemary’s passion is in bringing youth, Elders, and ancestors together through storytelling. Her stories are deeply rooted in her family history on Galiano Island.
Georgeson has been recognised for her collaboration and sharing of stories with the award-winning play and CBC radio documentary Women in Fish. The recipient of the 2009 Vancouver Mayor’s Award recognising her as an emerging artist in community arts, Rosemary has applied her talents in a variety of situations in the Downtown Eastside and throughout BC & the Northwest Territories and into the Yukon and across Canada.
Rosemary’s first documentary “We Have Stories” screened in the fall of 2013 at “The Heart of the City Festival,” and is also part of “Indigenous Women In Film” Screening / Discussion / Q&A at Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC in early April 2014. In 2014 she was the Storyteller in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library (2014). Learn more on my website.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you for your continued donation and support that helps Co.ERASGA’s annual arts programming and provides economic support to all participating artists.
We humbly acknowledge that most of Co. ERASGA's work, including the Studio Salon Series, takes place on the traditional and unceded lands of the Coast Salish people including the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations, the original stewards and caretakers of these lands.
