Sandra Laronde creates dance for those forbidden from dancing
The founder of Red Sky Performance is being honoured with a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award
Sandra Laronde is the textbook example of a multi-hyphenate artistic powerhouse. She's an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist as well as the founder of Red Sky Performance, an Indigenous contemporary performance company that blends dance and theatre, which has performed close to 4,000 shows.
But the 2025 Governor General's Performing Arts Award winner — who's being recognized with a Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award — has one special ability that isn't often included in that list, though it has shaped the majority of her prolific output. More than mere backdrop, Laronde sees the natural world as a character, a metaphor and sometimes a story within itself.
This clear-eyed POV can be seen in the themes of various works of what she describes as "live, physical theatre" — her signature storytelling performances that blur the line between dance and acting.
There's the show about the great horse cultures of the plains called Tono, which debuted in Banff in 2008 and delves into the plains culture in both Canada and Mongolia.
There's also Red Sky's 2015 show, Backbone, which explored how a range of mountains that spans the Americas is like "a spine," she told CBC Arts, "something intact, fluid, continuous, with no borders or boundaries."
A member of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai, Laronde counts the land as something equally important in her own life's story, too. In that same CBC article from 2015, she shared snapshots of places that "help her maintain a relationship with the landscape." One shows a pink-edged sunset on Lake Temagami, the Ontario lake where she was born and raised. Another shows the snow-striated peaks of the Rocky Mountains around Banff, where she was once director of Indigenous arts at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and where she also found inspiration for the lauded Backbone.
Pushing the boundaries of live performance and celebrating contemporary Indigenous arts are strong elements contributing to Laronde's legacy, which feels all the more powerful given that the Canadian government banned many aspects of Indigenous cultures for decades.
"A lot of things I do at Red Sky Performance with Indigenous dance — we're supposed to dance for people who cannot," Laronde said in a 2022 CBC documentary. "Our dances here in Canada were outlawed, illegal, banned." While Laronde shares that dance never went away — it only went underground — her work pushes past the erasure of history while helping the medium to evolve.
"I am forever grateful to have grown up on a land with such endless inspiration and beauty and spirit," Laronde said in a video message released by the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards. "I am surrounded by incredible collaborators."
"This recognition means a lot to me. It makes me want to dig deeper to bring up that light and that which is meaningful, and that which is powerful and transformative."
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