Embrace, a play by Hazel Venzon at Nakai Theatre's Pivot Festival: In Whitehorse, she explains, the Filipino community is rather new — having really enlarged over the last five to 10 years. This was exactly what she was looking for — what a new immigrant community might have been like for her mother in Winnipeg. She wanted to capture that moment in Embrace ... that leaving a place for the first time ... that coming to a new place. Venzon interviewed the Whitehorse Filipino community for their stories, what they could remember about leaving, about first seeing Whitehorse. But she also knows that, ultimately, Embrace is a very personal story. “I wanted to understand how [my mother] and I get along or didn’t get along.” In the play, “I play myself and an ‘everyone’ character.” She interacts with real, recorded conversations between her and her mother on stage.
Resource / Link: http://www.whatsupyukon.com/index.php
The Yukon International Storytelling Festival: Founded in the mid 1980s, Angela Sidney, one of the last speakers of the Tagish language, had to travel all the way to Toronto in order to tell her stories to a large audience. This prompted two Yukoners to organize the first Storytelling festival in the Yukon in 1988.
Resource / Link: http://www.storytelling.yk.net/