welcome
After four years, the RUTAS international performing arts festival is back! Now in its 5th edition, the festival is stronger than ever. RUTAS will host artists and conversations that inspire us to envision together how we might go from where we are now to a world that includes all of us. International and local artists will infuse our city with fresh perspectives, with art from across the Americas and beyond.
When we sat down to imagine what kind of festival this could be, we knew we had to create a space that allows art to do what it does best – to inspire, to feed our curiosity, to transform and empower our collective consciousness and actions. Art that speaks out and that helps us to re-think and remap the routes for our lives together in a shifting world. This year’s amazing line-up of artists and performances delve into our role and responsibility in effecting change, in working together toward an equitable and inclusive world, in thinking about a collective approach to life. These works are artistically compelling, and deeply engaged with social change. They invite us to share, love, laugh, remember and celebrate our lives together.
Our city, Tkaronto, has been a crossroads for millenia. We wish to express our gratitude for the stewardship of unnamed generations past in tending this place and passing it forward, as we too aspire to do. We recognize the Haudenoshaunee, the Wendat, the Anishnabee, and the Mississaugas of the Credit as traditional keepers of this land.
We also wish to thank our Partners in this Festival: venues Theatre Passe Muraille and Factory Theatre, and Symposium partners York University, Hemispheric Encounters, The Space Between Us, aabijijiwan New Media Lab, Nuit Blanche, and the City of Toronto.
Supporters
Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the Canadian Department of Heritage; additional support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation and TD Bank – the Ready Commitment
About Aluna Theatre
Aluna Theatre is an artistically-driven theatre company based in Toronto creating exciting new work that introduces audiences to diverse and rich performance practices from across the Americas. Aluna’s bold productions in English and Spanish are marked by a distinct theatrical language drawing from our heritages, cultures, and languages, including dance, physical theatre, and multimedia design. Over eighteen years of production, Aluna has received 26 Dora Awards’ nominations for acting, writing, directing, and design – and has won eleven awards. Artistic Director: Beatriz Pizano.
About Theatre Passe Muraille
Founded in 1968, TPM is Canada’s original alternative theatre company, currently developing and producing new Canadian plays. TPM is striving to articulate a distinctly Canadian voice that reflects the complexity of our intercultural society. TPM believes there should be a more diverse representation of artists, audience members, and stories in our theatre. TPM aspires to be a leader locally, nationally and internationally in establishing, promoting and embracing collaborative and inclusive theatre practices. We do this so that we can support and ignite the voices of unique artists, communities and audiences.
About Factory Theatre
Founded in 1970, Factory was the first theatre company in the nation to devote itself to producing 100% Canadian content. Over 50 years later, Factory continues to lead in the development and sharing of Canadian stories having produced more than 300 productions from a diverse source of Canadian playwrights and launching the careers of countless theatre professionals. Factory stands on the land under The Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that binds them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent people – Indigenous and settlers alike – have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. Today, the meeting place of Toronto (Tkaronto) is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. Factory would like to acknowledge with gratitude all the storytellers, stewards, and caretakers – recorded and unrecorded – that continue to host Factory at this gathering place for over 30 years.
About Hemispheric Encounters
Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices brings together scholars, artists, activists, and community organizations from across the Americas to explore hemispheric performance as a methodology, a pedagogical strategy, and tool for social change.
A project developed by the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, Hemispheric Encounters advances understandings of performance as a unique method for addressing humanitarian and ecological challenges shared by multiple communities in the western hemisphere. Among others, these include: the dramatic rise in nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment, the expulsion of refugee migrants from Central America, record-high rates of gender and sexual-based violence; and the doubling-down on economies of extractivism that hasten climate change, environmental degradation, and displacement of Indigenous persons from protected lands. These challenges have also given rise to mass actions across the Americas, from the marches of Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, and #metoo, to Indigenous pipeline protest encampments, to caravans of migrants moving north toward Mexico and the US. Read together, these stagings beg questions about who controls, and who sees oneself as implicated in, wider hemispheric happenings.