About us
Sarasa Performance Laboratory Inc. (formerly Miyawata Culture Inc.), is an Indigenous company based on the Poundmaker First Nation, in Saskatchewan, Canada.
The company is multi-disciplinary whose work primarily is based on Performance but also includes video, Book publishing, Plains Indian Sign Language, and Ceremonial gatherings.
Workshops, cultural gatherings and ceremonies take place year-round, as well as ongoing book and video projects. Each summer they host a Performance Lab session and festival of local and international performers and these sessions are open to a limited number of spectators and visitors.
Its performance work, led by Cree/Nehiyo director Floyd Favel and Dr. Sabina Sweta Sen Podstawska, includes theatrical investigations into Indigenous performance as an artistic genre with its own techniques and methods and open to all people. This work takes place on its own land base, in its own Indigenous structures within an Indigenous community.
Principal artists are Mr. Favel, who studied theatre in Denmark at the Tukak Teatret and in Italy at the Centro di Lavoro di Grotowski. Dr. Sabina Sweta Sen Podstawska is an Odissi dancer based in Poland. She holds a PhD in Drama and is an associate professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. There is also an informal group of ongoing performance collaborators as well as a core group of traditional knowledge keepers as advisors.
Our vision
“The sacred ceremonies do not belong to Indians alone, they can be done by all who have the right attitude and who are honest and sincere about their beliefs in Wakan Tanka (Great Spirit) and follow the rules. Survival of the world depend on sharing what we have, and working together. If we don’t the whole world will die, first the planet and then the people.”
Ceremonial Chief, Frank
Fools Crow, Lakota 1890-1989
These words inform our approach and practice in our art. We believe that the growth of arts and culture in the world depends on a multi-practice where colonial boundaries and limits are overcome in a positive manner.
Our performance practice is envisioned as ‘Indigenous Performance-Younger Sibling of Tradition’. Performance and art as a holistic practice allied to Indigenous language and
cultural revitalization and Healing. Indigenous community and Indigenous structures and land based is also central to our ethos.
our team
Floyd P. Favel
Mr. Favel is a theatre theorist, director, teacher, and essayist. He studied theatre in Denmark at the Tukak Teatret, a school for Inuit and Sami Peoples, and in Italy with Jerzy Grotowski, a Polish theatre director and one of the more influentional theatre figures of the 20th century. As the curator of the Poundmaker Museum, he won the 2018 International Indigenous Tourism Award and he is the director of the Poundmaker Indigenous Performance Festival, a global Indigenous fetival. In 2021 he produced and wrote the documentary Ashes and Embers, a film about the Delmas Indian Residential School fire of 1948, which was premiered at the Presence Autochthone International Film Festival in Montreal, and was screened at the Imaginative Film Festival in Toronto. His book of collected essays on theatre methods and journalism was published in the Polish language in 2022 by UNIWERSYTET SLASKI w Katowice, Poland. This is the first book published that articulates and outlined an Indigenous theatrical method. Since 2014 he has taught Indigenous Storytelling as an adjunct professor at Concordia University, Montreal.
Sabina Sweta Sen-Podstawska
Dr. Sabina Sweta Sen-Podstawska is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Culture Studies, the University of Silesia in Poland. She holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Exeter, an MA in South Asian Dance Studies from the University of Roehampton in London and BA-MA in English Literature and Culture from the University of Silesia. Her research embraces sensory-somatic awareness in Odissi dance, body-mind relationship and psychophysical training and performance, transculturalism, minority cultures, and Indigenous dance and theatre in Canada. She has published articles and book chapters on related topics. Her current research focus is in storytelling, emotions, psychosomatic, spiritual and place-based experiences and practices in Odissi dance. She is also involved in an ongoing practice-based research collaboration with Cree theatre director and cultural leader Floyd Favel. Born to a Silesian mother and Bengali father, raised and living in/between two cultures, she has always been passionate about studying and sharing artistic expressions of cultures and identities through both research and performance. As a dancer and performer, trained in Odissi, she continues her embodied explorations primarily through Odissi dance crisscrossing disciplines, mediums and spaces.
Alexandra Nordstrom
Alexandra Nordstrom is an art historian, curator, cultural worker and writer based in Montreal, Quebec. In 2020, she graduated with a Master of Arts in Art History from Concordia University. Multidisciplinary in nature, her work focusses on the resurgence and study of Indigenous knowledge systems and culture with a particular focus on Cree Worldviews, land-based learning, and creative practice. Currently, Nordstrom is a PhD candidate in the in the Department of Art History at Concordia working under the guidance of Dr. Heather Igloliorte and Dr. Michelle McGeough. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research examines the resurgence of Indigenous hide-based practices in North America and explores how cultural knowledge is transmitted through land-based arts and material practices. Nordstrom is a co-curator of the Poundmaker Museum and Gallery and is one of the co-directors of Sarasa Performance Laboratory Inc. (formerly Miyawata Culture Inc.). Nordstrom’s curated exhibitions include Matrilineal Memory (2023) at She:kon Gallery, Miyo Nepin (2022) at Fort Battleford National Historic Site, Braiding Our Stories (2019) at the VAV Gallery, and Poundmaker: Life, Legacy and Liberation (2019) at the Poundmaker Museum and Gallery. Her writing has been featured in Room Magazine, C Magazine, RACAR, and the catalogue of the 6th Contemporary Native Art Biennial / Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone. She is also the photographer and designer of an upcoming book that documents the embodied gestures of Plains Indigenous Sign Language, which will be published by Sarasa Performance Lab next year.
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