FEET MUSIC

On Mar. 9, 2025, the Femme Folk Festival hosted a Feet Music event at the Visitor Information Centre inside Waterloo Park.

Marjorie Hopkins, the founder and artistic director of Kaleidoscope Irish Dance & Movement, hosted this event to introduce Seán-nós dancing to the attendees, an old-style percussive dance from Ireland.

“It’s community-oriented, so it was a time when everybody would dance,” Hopkins said. “You’d step out, you’d do your thing, you’d step back, but did it together as a community.”

She hoped to teach people how to dance and be more comfortable stepping out, regardless of their experience with dance.

Cassidy Hicks, producer of Femme Folks Fest, has experience dancing in the past and suggested Hopkins to host an event for the Femme Fest. This smaller group allowed for more direct learning and a deeper appreciation of Seán-nós music and rhythm.

“As someone who loves dance, I think the dancing is an interesting part. But I also like sharing the stories of community that come from dancing and watching people realize that maybe they can do more than they thought they could,” Hopkins said.

Hopkins did a phenomenal job instructing the attendees on the steps and movements they needed to perform for each piece of music she played. As the Irish tunes echoed throughout the building, everyone tapped and shuffled to Hopkins’ guidance, feeling the weight of tradition and the joy of movement.

“This event is largely audience-driven. I will talk about where the steps come from and who I’ve learned them from because lineage matters in that way,” Hopkins said.

Survival: Pollinator Wisdom in the Bend of the Equinox

On Mar. 9, 2025, The Femme Folks Fest hosted the Infrastructures for Survival: Pollinator Wisdom in the Bend of the Equinox workshop, hosted by Shalaka Jadhav, an urban designer and member of the Creek Collective.

“This is a workshop where we’re thinking about spring equinox and how it can be a critical time for us to think about change and transformation, and so the way that it’s structured is a sort of close reading of the cycles of plants,” Jadhav said.

It started with a brief self-introduction before going into an activity where all the event participants chose a series of words from various seed packets and transformed them into poems. The poems reflected the importance of pollinator plants within the ecosystem and how their life cycle represents our social, political, and personal movement within society.

Participants then were given worksheets to reflect on which stage of a plant’s life cycle mirrored their individual journey. This exercise highlighted the parallels between human experiences and the natural world- we grow, adapt, and eventually complete our cycles, like plants.

To conclude the event, Jadhav gave the participants a miniature plastic tray and allowed them to take some seedlings home to commemorate the event. With the seedlings in hand, the participants left with a piece of the workshop and a living reminder of the transformation and renewal of life.