The 2026 Sechelt Arts Festival brings together artists to consider stories of Rising Waters. As a Festival dedicated to connecting art to local ecologies, this year’s theme emerges from the real transformations that we are witnessing in our communities, and along the vast shorelines that connect us. Atmospheric rivers, coastal flooding, melting snow-caps and warmer climates have become common, shared and recurrent experiences. And in the midst of these narratives of catastrophe and grief, artists as storytellers are helping us think with these rising waters.

In celebrating the Autumnal Equinox, the Festival will bring together artists across performance, theatre, dance, film, visual and written arts to center stories that remind us of past receding glaciers, of the new connections brought by coastal flooding, and to future practices that we will adapt into as we experience a wetter and warmer planet.