Be(ing) Moss closes Vines Art Festival with meditative performance on nature's spirit

Soya and Chantal's interactive performance Be(ing) Moss will close the Vines Art Festival on August 15 at John Hendry (Trout Lake) Park, offering a meditation on humanity's relationship to the natural world through dance, stillness, and earth-based art.

The piece draws on contact-improvisation dance and explores an idea central to animistic Shinto, Buddhist and Taoist philosophies, and Indigenous ways of knowing: that everything possesses a spirit. "We will start with the grounding small dance, which is that we will be standing, and on the outside, it's seemingly a very still practice," Soya explained. "But we're noticing how our bones, our neural system, and the earth are interacting in the resonance."

The performance unfolds in phases, with dancers moving to embody how moss responds to natural elements—opening fully when water comes, curling when sun dries it out. "When I am touching the moss, it feels no different from hugging a friend," Soya said. The second phase incorporates contact-improvisation dance while the performers invoke the spirits of moss in their movement.

The work draws inspiration from Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants and earlier work Gathering Moss, which explores moss through both scientific and Indigenous frameworks. Kimmerer wrote: "In Indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story."

Soya emphasized concepts of eco-queerness and eco-sensuality in her understanding of nature. "I think ultimately what it is, is to be able to see that we as humans are part of nature," she said, "and seeing we and other species, other beings, are interacting with nature and that it is not something we're saving—getting out of this very human-centric, very 'saviour complex' way of seeing nature, but being with other beings as equal parts."

Be(ing) Moss runs August 15 from 1 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at John Hendry (Trout Lake) Park as the closing event of the Vines Art Festival.