DAY 4 - FRIDAY, AUGUST 8, 2025
PERFORMANCE & CREATION WORKSHOP
Black Pledge is excited to bring together some of the country’s incredibly skilled and talented artists and teachers for day long workshops. These workshops are exclusively for Black creatives with a relationship to performance.
Compassion care funds for child care, transportation or other needs are available courtesy of Balancing Act. Participants can indicate if they need the compassion fund in the registration form. Lunch will be provided. Email ggrant@theblackpledge.ca for the promo code for no cost registration.
REGISTER
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
The day runs from 10:30am - 5pm. Participants can choose one workshop per day. Workshops are happening simultaneously at the Wild Seed Centre for Art and Activism.
10am - 10:30am - Welcome
10:30am - 11:00 - Opening Ritual
11:00am - 1:00pm - Workshop - Part 1
1:00 - 2:30pm - Lunch (will be provided)
2:30pm - 4:30pm - Workshop - Part 2
4:30pm - 5:00pm - Closing Ritual
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
Nikola Steer
THE ARC OF PERFORMANCE
Step into a space of radical care, creative play, and embodied power. This 4-hour workshop invites Black performers into an arc that moves from gentle intimacy to bold, expansive self-expression. Through movement, storytelling, music, and guided exercises, participants will explore their presence, connect to personal truths, and reclaim the stage as a space for joy, fierceness, and visibility. Facilitated by award-winning multidisciplinary artist and cultural catalyst Nikola Steer, this session is designed to nourish your artistry, honour your complexity, and light up what’s waiting to be seen.
Nikola Steer is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, performer, and cultural leader whose 20+ year career spans dance, visual arts, immersive storytelling, and arts curation. Best known worldwide as burlesque icon Coco Framboise, Nikola has performed on international stages and built a reputation as a trusted mentor and coach for artists across disciplines. Her work celebrates the full spectrum of performance — from vulnerability to fierce, radiant presence — and centres emotional resonance, grounded embodiment, creative reclamation, and radical imagination.
Peter N. Bailey
The [Re]discovered Voice:
Working with the principles of Patsy Rodenburg's Three Circles of Energy™, participants will learn about the importance of presence in delivering text, as well as expand their voice and speech skills, by exploring form and language through poetry and dramatic texts. While valuing the importance of the ensemble, this workshop will empower actors to speak with greater clarity, truth and embodiment.
Peter’s voice and dialect coaching credits include: The Stratford Festival, Canadian Stage Company, Nightwood Theatre, Obsidian Theatre, Crow's Theatre,The National Theatre School of Canada, Canadian Film Centre, and Sheridan College. Peter is also a graduate of the Patsy Rodenburg Associate Programme
D. Brainerd Blyden-Taylor
Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Session on R. Nathaniel Dett & Afrocentric Choral Music
D. Brainerd Blyden-Taylor is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Nathaniel Dett Chorale, Canada's first professional chamber choir dedicated to the creation, preservation, and performance of Afrocentric choral music. Brainerd works frequently as a guest conductor, clinician, adjudicator, and lecturer, and is an active and dedicated church musician.
Raechele Lovell & Lisa Karen Cox
Movement Dramaturgy Workshop
Presented by DiverseWorks Co.
Join director-dramaturg Lisa Karen Cox and choreographer and cultural worker Raechele Lovell for a deep dive into movement dramaturgy as an embodied, political, and relational practice. This workshop invites performance-makers, dancers, actors, and interdisciplinary artists to interrogate the meaning behind every gesture, the architecture of intention, and the dramaturgy that lives in the body and the body as a site.
Rooted in the creative process of their co-devised work Uncovering Roots—an exploration of legacy, survival, and Black inheritance—their approach blurs binaries: between text and movement, creator and witness, instinct and structure. Together, we’ll explore strategies for building performance from the inside out: grounding narrative in breath, rhythm, repetition, resistance, and release.
Expect sweat, stillness, and collective provocation. Bring your questions, your curiosities, and your body as it is.
Raechele Lovell, a passionate Artivist, is rooted on a block of The Haldimand Tract, colonially known as Kitchener, ON Canada. Her journey in the arts began as a child on tour with the polyrhythmic dance and music of her Caribbean heritage, igniting a lifelong quest for creative expression. As a bi-racial artist, with Afro-Caribbean and German Mennonite heritage, Raechele navigates the intricate intersections of identity, culture, and artistry. This rich tapestry of lineage informs her work, intertwining ancestral heritage with contemporary narratives and grounding her in a unique perspective as an Afro-diasporic artist on Turtle Island.
A graduate of Concordia University's Interdisciplinary Studies program, Lisa Karen Cox relishes work that combines music, movement and heightened language. Often playing men and other mythical creatures, theatre credits include: The Penelopiad (Royal Shakespeare Co/NAC); Friar Laurence in Romeo & (her) Juliet and Manfred Karge’s Man to Man (Headstrong Collective); Horatio in Hamlet (Beyond the Cubical Productions); Brutus in Julius Caesar (Spur-of-the-Moment Shakespeare), Katherine in Das Ding (CanadianStage/Theatre SMASH), Flo in Now You See Her (Quote Unquote Collective/Why Not/Nightwood) and 2 seasons at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Lisa was also the choreographer for Nightwood Theatre's Bear with Me and Comedy of Errors, the Assistant Director for We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia...(Theatre Centre), and Salt-Water Moon (Factory Theatre), and the Associate Director for Why Not Theatre's Like Mother, Like Daughter. She has also worked with emerging playwrights through Playwriting Units and Festivals; and explored playwriting and dramaturgy during the creation of Now You See Her (Quote/Unquote Collective/WhyNotTheatre/Nightwood)