Watch: Three NWT dancers interpret 2023’s wildfires

You’ve had the after-action reviews. Now, meet the interpretive dance.

Northwest Territories residents have found – and needed – lots of ways to process the wildfire-driven evacuations of 2023. Tens of thousands of people were displaced, some for more than a month.

In a film released online this week to coincide with the COP30 climate conference, NWT dancers try to channel that 2023 energy into what performer Tomiko Robson calls an “artist-driven response to the impacts of the climate crisis.”

The film is called @tension. Fia Grogono and Tommy Jorge, who created and filmed it, call it “an emotional reliving” of Yellowknife’s 2023 evacuation.

The dancers try to “embody the events and anxieties associated with their experience of the 2023 wildfires,” the duo stated in a news release about their work.

Grogono said the film – pronounced “attention” – evolved from a “need to process the lived experience of facing northern wildfires and evacuations.”

“It’s a film to support our community to feel and heal and do better next time,” she was quoted as saying.

“Dance and breath are languages people can feel in their bodies, so using these mediums gives us a way to convey both the urgency and the tenderness of these experiences in the face of the ever-growing climate crisis.”

Robson, the video’s co-choreographer, said she “wanted to explore the process of being displaced, of being moved instead of moving.”

“The dislocation and the recovery, plus my ongoing concern about how many times humans and the land can recover, drove my movement investigation,” Robson said.

“This film is an invitation to witness and question these cycles, to recognize resilience but also address our vulnerability.”

Courtney Howard, a Yellowknife emergency room physician who chairs the Global Climate and Health Alliance, also appears in @tension.

Cabin Radio’s newscasts of August 14 and 15, 2023 – when Hay River and Fort Smith had evacuated and Yellowknife’s crisis was building – form part of the soundtrack.

The video’s producers say it captures the dancers moving “through phases of anxiety, freeze response, grief, healing, and community care as they explore the dislocation and reconnection to home, land and each other.”

“Through contemporary dance,” the news release continues, “the film translates the escalating wildfire crisis into an intimate experience that defies borders and calls us into care and community on both local and global levels.”