2024 SECHELT ARTS FESTIVAL

Beginning in 2024, under the guidance of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council, the Sechelt Arts Festival connects art, ecology and climate change. We envision art as a means of calling attention to relationships – to our local ecologies, to our companion communities, and to the land, air and waters that make this part of the world so remarkable and unique. Art has the ability to help us think through difficult ideas through play, joy, community and belonging. It is in dance, theatre and music that we are able to move through and with ideas; it is through the language of visual art that we are able to give form; and it is through words and texts that we shape sometimes incomprehensible ideas. And for many, the climate and our changing natural environment is one of those ideas. The Festival seeks to weave together environmental, cultural and social ideas as a means of inspiring our communities.

THE SALISH SEA

In 2024 we will celebrate the Salish Sea – its other-than-human inhabitants, its waterways and estuaries, its stories of travel and exchange, and its vitalness to Sechelt and its communities. Sechelt, as the land between two waters, has been shaped by the Salish Sea – our past, present and future bound to her, despite the increasing challenges of rising waterways and warming oceans. It is an opportunity to bring together the arts with local climate and ecology focused organisations, to consider ways that art can help support our local ecosystems into the future.

The 2023 Sechelt Arts Festival wrapped up on October 31

Thank you to Arcadian Productions for stewarding the Festival for the last 20 years. Thanks to all our artists, performers, crew, volunteers, donor, sponsors, and to all of you who turned out to experience the past two weeks and three weekends of music, dance, drama, film, free workshops, and our annual curated art exhibition and heritage exhibit.