Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy
Credits
Choreography: Melanie Kloetzel and Sandra Lamouche
Production Support: Melanie Kloetzel/kloetzel&co.
Devised Script: Melanie Kloetzel and Jocelyn H. Leiver
Script Adaptation (Meditation): Camille Mori
Voiceover: Jocelyn H. Leiver
Music: Sherryl Sewepagaham (performed by Luminous Voices) and Phyllis Sinclair (from the album Ghost Bones)
Sound Design: Calum Maunier and Melanie Kloetzel
Performers: Sandra Lamouche, Jocelyn H. Leiver, Hannah Isbister, Shondra Cromwell-Krywulak, Taylor MacLeod, Alèn Martel
This project received funding from a UCalgary Transdisciplinary Connector Grant, as well as through a Mobilizing Alberta: Catalyzing Community Action grant. The project received key support from the Office of Sustainability, the UCalgary Division of Dance, and the Centre for the Research in the Fine Arts (CRFA).
Synopsis
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy (Just Breathe, Mother Earth) is a collaborative project led by Cree artist Sandra Lamouche and settler artist Melanie Kloetzel.
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy offers intimate groups of 25-30 individuals an immersive journey into and out of climate anxiety. As the audience-participants are physically guided through a crafted landscape, they experience hope, deceit, folly and serenity, while also uncovering alternatives to a shocking fate.
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy presents audience-participants with the opportunity to engage with the climate crisis as a nexus where economics, ecology, health and Indigenous knowledge meet. Using tactics of disorientation, satire, and state-based tasks for audience-participants, those joining the Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy journey experience both the deep inequalities and inadequate nature of Eurocentric cultural responses to the climate crisis, as well as the cultural possibilities that exist in reconnecting to the land via Indigenous worldviews.
Each Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiyjourney concludes with an hour-long debriefing session. These sessions, facilitated by clinical psychology traineeCamille Mori, help the audience examine the feelings that emerged during the immersive journey, as well as connect to others who may be feeling disempowered in the face of the climate emergency.
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy premiered in 2023, and has been performed over twenty times between 2023-2025. In 2025, the project team released a film version of the project, to be shared through facilitation sessions and in learning environments.