For a week in September 2026, I was invited to be writer-in-residence at The Festival of New Dance. These days, I mostly write and think about the impact of fossil fuels and disinformation on our shared future on this increasingly polluted and polarized planet. It’s been a while since I’ve flexed the arts journalism muscles I developed earlier in my career, and I did wonder if those muscles had atrophied.

But, once the lights dimmed and dancers started to move, those worries lifted and I looked around and wondered why more writers, politicians, fishers, taxi-cab drivers, poets, cashiers, etc. weren’t there to experience the magic. Maybe it’s not magic per se, but simply slowing down one’s breath, together with others, in a dark theatre as movement, light, sound, and narrative spool out in front of you, kicking at your senses and ping ponging memories and ideas across time and space. I’m sure there’s a technical term for that. ‘Art’, perhaps? Whatever you call it, the Festival of New Dance has been doing this for audiences in St. John’s for 35 years.

The first morning featured a workshop with dance historian Amy Bowring on how to read dance performance. Bowring maintains the archive Dance Collection Danse. She says the 1970s were the high point of dance writing in Canada. Back then, there were several dance magazines and dedicated dance journalists as well as performances, festivals, and films. But writing about dance has faded along with the collapse of much Canadian media. The closure of local radio stations, the loss of regional newspapers, national glossies, industry and art magazines, and cultural weeklies like NOW magazine, EYE, Georgia Straight, are all part of the same demise of Canadian culture.

Consequently, dance as an art form has become less visible and accessible, and may now be viewed as a largely esoteric, elitist pursuit. Bowring wrote in in Bottom of the Heap: The Position of Dance on the Editorial Agenda, was that readers were at a disadvantage in their awareness of dance because of the lack of coverage and, at the same time, couldn't impact the editorial agenda because they didn't know what they were missing. “So, we're losing the advocacy and awareness, the marketing power, that comes with reviews and previews.

Simultaneously, we're losing one of the major methods of recording dance activity that has existed -- newspaper and periodical coverage of dance is an incredible resource for historians, and I do worry about the kind of evidence of dance that will exist from the first quarter or more of the 21st century.”

I also think and write about the capture of Canadian journalism by US tech platforms and how it contributes to a swamp of sovereignty-weakening, climate-action-blocking disinformation, but until the FND, I hadn’t thought about the loss of arts journalism and its impact on Canadian culture. Why aren’t we (the Canadian ‘we’) doing something about this? For the same reasons, I suppose, we aren’t doing anything about rampant fossil fuel expansion. I digress.

The insights I gained from Bowring’s workshop were to let your mind wander and allow yourself to respond personally to the performance. With that in mind, I set off to write in the dark at the opening night program Elemental.

The evening launched with a haunting piece by BC artist Samantha Sutherland that moved me to tears. Inspired by wildfires in her home region of the Kootenays, the performance was called ʔa·kinq̓uku - the translation of the word for fire in the Ktunaxa language. Sutherland began as a hunched figure scratching though leaves and pine needles spread across the stage. Her movements were robotic and insect-like as the fire ignited. When her movements became more frenetic and the soundscape was pulsing and crackling with the intensity of an inferno, I was reminded of this summer’s viral wildfire video of CP engineers trapped in their train as a wildfire raged around them. The pulsing sound, light, and the dancer’s movements had me struggling for breath.

As Sutherland emerged from the fire, her costume shedding ashy layers of decay and death, I was reminded of a spring day with my daughter in the post-wildfire landscape of Conception Bay North. We’d set off to swim in the Broad Cove River, our determination faltering as we walked through the former forest, now a stand of lifeless charcoal sticks. When we stepped off the trail and onto the burnt black ground, we didn’t know how far our feet would sink. It was completely disorienting. Was there anything left underneath the surface to support our weight? There was, but to access the water, we  had to push through blackened sticks and fallen trees and by the time we emerged at the riverbank, our arms, legs and swimming towels were smudged with ash. Yet the river ran clean, its vitality so brutally normal despite all the loss and death surrounding it.
While floating in the water, I noticed miniscule violets that had sprouted up along the riverbank. And once I saw those tiny miracles I noticed bright green ferns unfurling in sunken gaps between the calcified trees.

This memory and the associated grief from last summer’s wildfires washed over me as I watched Sutherland. The next act, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Big Steppers, pulled my emotions to the opposite end of the spectrum. They are an energetic and joyful South Indian contemporary dance group drawing on the Kuthi tradition with dancers, ranging in age from 10 to 45. Up to 20 dancers performed on stage at times in their piece Thulli: The Journey of a Droplet. Instead of the confluence of droplets that usually arrive on our shores as RD & F, this joy-filled performance traced the story of a single droplet falling onto the Newfoundland coast. My scrawled notes say, “sexy drizzle.” The kinetic vitality of the dancers was integrated into a stunning video work by Nikhilesh Paliath. His distinctive vision of waves and currents crashing against the Newfoundland coast contributed greatly to the celebratory power of Thulli reminding me that we are lucky to live in such a wet place while many areas in the world are facing drought.

The euphoria unleashed by the Steppers was the perfect set up for the final act: Weathering Chapter 4 by Robyn Breen. This four-hander wove darkly humorous choreography with an ironic pop-music soundtrack to spoof the torment of NL weather.

With pithy cameos by the tech team, Weathering Chapter 4 was a laugh out loud romp that reminded us how foolish it is to let the weather bother or define us. Breen’s humour reminded me of Susan Sontag’s writing on the essence of camp, which she defined as a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration…Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity...” Using uber familiar pop anthems and antics involving pants full of plastic leaves and flowers popping out of unexpected places, (IYKYK). Breen created a powerful, shared experience, assuring us that we’re all in it (NL weather) together and we may as well laugh it off. Elemental was an evening rich with a range of emotions, new perspectives, and a shared sense of belonging.

The following evening featured a performance called Bolt. Creator Jeanette Kotowich (Nêhiyaw/Mêtis), describes the piece as moving “through us as a living archive – it exists deep in our subconscious, where ideas flow across the landscape, and past meets future; Three mesmerizing dancers and a DJ “rigorously improvised” a narrative to a scored sound and lightscape. The scope of movements and kinetic combinations in Bolt is astounding. Some of the stranger ones: hopping like a robot dog, light tube fire building, flying collapses, and jagged flattening.

The experience is filmic at first, while the dancers criss-cross the floor separately, barely intersecting each other’s paths, but it eventually evolves into something weirder and more visceral as they begin to react to each other’s movements, eventually becoming intertwined; holding hands and blindfolded, trapped together in a clump of limbs, playing at moving forward only via the sound of each other’s foot falls until the DJ hits the cowbell and they reconfigure and try again.

The soundscape provided moments of lift off, introspection, parody, and at times built to industrial machine level noise before falling away completely exposing the dancers’ panting and laboured breathing. Bolt was exhaustive, exhausting, stirring, and puzzling.

About halfway through, there was a spoken word transition that featured Kotowich. Some of the words were: ‘I stepped out onto the dusty trail’, ‘tongue’, ‘burning owl’, ‘sweat’, ‘midnight sky’, ‘eagle’, ‘liminal brain’, ‘pickaxe’, ‘lizard’, ‘beaver’, ‘eyes closed’, ‘between us, you and them and the horizon, forever more.’ That spoken word intervention painted in additional layers and arrived right when my brain was searching for meaning. The text also spoke to the work’s scale, akin to the performance of an epic poem. It also allowed me to let go of the search for precise meaning. Dancer George Stamos has described this letting go as “knowing not knowing.” What else besides dance helps you do that? In the talkback afterwards, Kotowich described the relationship between the audience and the dancers as sacred. Certainly, what we witnessed in the theatre that evening felt revelatory. When I asked about her sources of inspiration she said, and I paraphrase, Bolt refers to a positive electrical charge, it draws on the activation of lightning in Indigenous culture. A bolt connects things together. A horse bolts. The spirit of the horse and play is important to the piece.

Experiencing Bolt was challenging. I felt the narrative more than I understood it. A narrative I surmised to be about resistance, a call to hit the road, value kinship with the nonhuman and with each other as we journey into an uncertain future together. The next night, I attended George Stamos’ Sister Nightlight which began with three dance films featuring Stamos and dancers who’ve mentored and inspired him. The films were beautiful, absurd, and profound. They pushed and pulled at the edges of what the film medium can do and when (unmediated) Stamos strolled downstage making purposeful eye-contact with the audience, a kind of electric charge went around the room confirming the power of human connection via live performance.

What followed was silly, next-level camp, and moving with insights into the power of storytelling and movement to elicit memories and make meaning. Stamos started underneath (yes, underneath) a large duffle bag, squirming around the stage while telling a fantastic childhood story. His skill as a storyteller is such that he transported the audience to a beach where his family is camping. He is young and questioning his sexuality and spying on his sister before having a phantasmagoric experience with a dancing herd of, mascara wearing deer, a spinning house, and his grandfather in a dress. As the performance continued, he sang ditties, “I wish I was a rock in the sea, I wish I was a mole in the ground…” and the audience was charmed. Eventually, he shimmied into an outrageously campy, gold and turquoise, mermaid-vibe costume that he’d extracted from the duffel. At the end, encased in this awe-inspiring fabric concoction, centre stage, Stamos is totemic and regal, sipping from a flask, making the audience titter with his sly observations and assuring us that instead of asking, ‘what is this about?’ we should simply embrace the shared experience of entering a portal into his imagination.

In an interview later, I asked Stamos about the role of strangeness in his work. He said that his understanding of performance has evolved from presenting yourself as a blank slate upon which you layer meaning to become someone different, to an understanding that performance is an opportunity to be your one true and sacred self. Someone you don’t get to be all the time. He said, we are mostly estranged from our true selves but when you tap into that truth, it can be strange but also true.

I am grateful for the opportunity to develop a writing response lab pilot with The Festival of New Dance and WritersNL. It was challenging but also nourishing and a reminder that all artists need shared, overlapping experiences, regardless of medium, to build that sacred relationship with the audience and to access truth. The FDN writing response lab pilot was also a personal reminder to slow down and leave my writing cave more often to embrace the unfamiliar and chase the shared experiences that bind us together in this magical, joyful, drizzly place. That is the essence, after all, that I’m working to safeguard with my research and writing.

Angela Antle is writer and researcher with Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador's Oil to Equitable Energy Collaboration, a Rachel Carson Fellow (LMU-Germany), and a member of Empowered Futures (Norway). Her research intersects energy communications and justice, disinformation, petrocultures, and political discourse. She produces the podcast GYRE and writes about energy futures for theindependent.ca. Her debut novel The Saltbox Olive won the 2026 Winterset Award.