SEPT. 24, 2024 (VANCOUVER, CANADA) — re:Naissance proudly presents IndieFest from Nov. 15–23, 2024. Now in its fifth year, IndieFest has celebrated local creatives, amplified the voices of IBPOC and LGBTQ2S+ artists, and pushed for innovation in live performance with genre-defying projects. This year’s theme, “Transformation and Transcendence,” invites audiences to engage with the world in new ways and encourages authentic personal growth. 

“The festival has grown significantly over the past five years, but it remains focused on showcasing Vancouver’s vibrant indie arts scene,” says Debi Wong, founding artistic director of re:Naissance. “Most of the featured artists are local, celebrated for their passion for innovative storytelling. Over the past few years, we’ve expanded to include creatives experimenting with cutting-edge technology and new art forms beyond our roots in opera. We’re using technology to create unique, connective experiences and we’re focused on immersive storytelling that envisions hopeful, generative futures for our communities.” 

The festival opens with the world premiere of Eurydice Fragments by Luke Hathaway and Teiya Kasahara, which has been seven years in the making. The groundbreaking production is a reimagining of the Greek Orphean myth, blending powerful vocal performances, dance, XR, and motion capture technology to explore identity beyond binaries. It follows O, a trans individual navigating self-expression through virtual avatars in a quest for wholeness. This immersive performance challenges audiences to consider the complexity of identity and self-expression in a modern world. The project has been presented in short-form iterations over the past several years, such as Live from the Underworld, which earned international acclaim. 

Eurydice Fragments will open at Signals Studio at the Centre for Digital Media, a brand new cultural hub located in False Creek Flats opened in partnership with DigiBC. The 8,000-square-foot converted warehouse was designed to break the mold of traditional performance venues. As two organizations championing indie creators in tech and arts sectors, re:Naissance and DigiBC are collaborating to explore what’s possible in this new space. 

The festival will also present Ultra Violets by Alexandra Caprara. The full-length dance-theatre work is a physical exploration of the ways queer club culture, plant growth cycles, and sapphic intimacy intersect. Ultra Violets subverts our expectations of what queer becoming looks like, and depicts this process as a cause for celebration using integrated design, dirt, and plenty of disco balls. Set within a world that is part greenhouse, part underground dance club, the work draws on the history of disco and plant life to introduce a fresh perspective on what it means to grow into oneself.

This year’s Future Mythologies — a showcase of excerpts of new works in development that aspire to redefine the future of storytelling — will feature three boundary-breaking works: 

● Polyphonic Garden by Ruby Singh: an innovative blend of biophony (the collective sounds of animals in an environment), geophony (the naturally occurring, non-biological sounds in an environment), and biosonification (the translation of biological activity from Indigenous plants into musical sounds). 

● Soft Tongues by Jami Reimer: an immersive sound composition that weaves recordings of local frogs and their relationship to their environments as the audience follows a frog throughout its life cycle. 

● Future Renaissance by Alina Sotskova: a fusion of contemporary dance, sci-fi, and Renaissance art that synthesize in a cyberpunk setting 500 years into the future. 

See the full festival line-up at indiefest.ca. Early bird tickets for Eurydice Fragments are on sale now at showpass.com/eurydice-fragments through Oct. 8, from $21–38. All festival tickets go on sale Oct. 8. Free admission is available to Indigenous, Inuit, and Métis peoples. 

IndieFest program: Nov. 15–23, 2024 

Eurydice Fragments at Signals Studio at the Centre for Digital Media (577 Great Northern Way) Friday, Nov. 15 at 7:30pm 

Saturday, Nov. 16 at 2pm 

Saturday, Nov. 16 at 7:30pm 

Sunday, Nov. 17 at 2pm 

Future Mythologies: Soft Tongues at Lobe Studio (713 E Hastings Street) 

Friday, Nov. 22 at 7:30pm 

Future Mythologies: Polyphonic Garden and Future Renaissance at The Annex (823 Seymour Street) Saturday, Nov. 23 at 7:30pm 

Ultra Violets 

Dates TBC 

Tickets 

Eurydice Fragments Early Bird: $21–38 / Regular: $25–45 

Ultra Violets $19.99 

Future Mythologies $19.99 

IndieFest 2024 is supported by the City of Vancouver, BC Arts Council, and the Province of British Columbia, and DigiBC. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. We are funded by the Government of Canada - Financé par le Gouvernement du Canada.