Barbara Bickel

Bearing Bloodlines: Ancestral Invocations

Collaborative Ritual Performance with Tannis Hugill

Premier Online Screenings and Talkback will take place in November 2024

2023 dressperformance showing at the Dance Center, Vancouver BC, Canada

Performance Description

Pulsating

opaque blood carries

memory and spirit of

ancestors deep within.

Barbara Bickel and Tannis Hugill are two Caucasian elder women artists who are committed to bringing healing to the legacy of the unprocessed trauma their ancestors brought to North America.  Tragically, their ancestors’ worldview, distorted by trauma, contributed to the brutal treatment of the Indigenous peoples of this continent.  In this performance Bickel and Hugill answer the call to come to know and to reconcile with their European ancestral lineages.  Once also Indigenous, their European ancestors were brutally forced off their lands, with their beliefs and culture erased by conquering armies, again and again. Scarred by centuries of trauma, all these forebears knew was the fear-based belief ‘dominate or be dominated’.

How can we, the children of settler-immigrants to the Americas, create peace in the world if we carry unreconciled divisions in our own blood lines and our familial dead are not at peace within us?  If we do not face the traumas and resulting colonial, cultural and ecological supremacist legacy of our ancestors, we will be unable to embark on effective personal and collective ancestral healing and colonial reconciliation work.

In Bearing Bloodlines: Ancestral Invocations, we the performers, are witnessed by two large puppets, each symbolizing an ancient, caring ancestral guide.  While we enter the realms of our ancestors through embodied trance, their stories are told.  Inviting compassion in this way, the restorative artworking process becomes a transformative, transpersonal, and healing experience for ourselves, our ancestors, and the audience. The performance offers a vulnerable teaching and invitational opening for those disconnected from their ancestors, and the original lands of their ancestors.  This teaching offers the possibility of harmonization and reconciliation between colonial settler descendants, this land, and the Indigenous peoples of this land. It offers a connection to the vibrant source of creation that unites all humans and non-humans across time and space.

Summer 2025 Update

Guided by our ancestors we returned to revisioning “Baring Bloodlines: Ancestral Invocations” in early July of 2025 and answered the call to be in the natural environment with our ancestors. We have found two locations on Gabriola Island, one in the forest, and another at a large flat rock extending into the sea at Drumbeg Bay. Both locations bring forward the early connection our ancestors had with the forests and the waters. Since then, we have been preparing for a video shoot on these sites by entering deeper ancestral healing work with our ancestors through: harmonizing our ancestors with each other with the guidance of Sidheag MacLeod, an Ancestral Lineage Restoration and Repair Arts Practitioner, receiving an Original Contact Welcome from Elder David Laxiya, a Snuneymuxw First Nations Knowledge Keeper, and rehearsing at the outdoor sites with a Gabriola Island sourced support team, Diane, weaver, Janice and Odette. This is all in preparation for the video shoot we will ritually perform on these lands of the Pacific Northwest in late September with filmmaker Gregory Wenst. These steps are supporting us to create a strong foundation for the sacred, creative reconciliatory work we are doing.

Our work has been to trust in our hearts, minds and bodies that this magical, miraculous process is guided by our Ancestors, who we have come to understand are committed to support the crucial generational healing this ritual performance video is intended to reveal.