Ice Follies 2025

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Ice Follies Celebrates Local Creativity in Honor of North Bay’s Centennial | February 7 – 21, 2025

For Immediate Release:

[North Bay, ON, January 8, 2025] – Ice Follies, Northern Ontario’s premier biennial festival of contemporary and community-engaged art, returns to the frozen expanse of Lake Nipissing from February 7 to 21, 2025. This 11th edition of the festival highlights local artists as part of a special celebration of North Bay’s Centennial, showcasing the area’s deep cultural roots and artistic talent.

In addition to its signature on-ice installations at Shabogesic Beach, this year’s festival expands its footprint to include Olmstead Beach on Trout Lake, with special events designed to bring the festival closer to more of the city’s residents.

Under the theme “Ozhaashikwaa” (The Ice is Slippery), Ice Follies 2025 reflects on the resilience and adaptability required to navigate the shifting landscapes of our community and environment. This year’s installations explore themes of connection, collaboration, and history, offering a uniquely Northern perspective.

Reflecting on the origins of Ice Follies and its enduring legacy, festival founder and participating artist Dermot Wilson remarked: “In 2003, when I first stepped out onto the ice of Lake Nipissing, I thought ‘this is like a blank canvas…white cloud-filled sky and equally white plain of snow stretching out to an almost invisible horizon’. Over 20 years later, this icy site still helps artists and audiences alike to discover the freedom and expansive embrace of the Canadian winter.”

Not-to-Be-Missed Festival Highlights:

  • Opening Night Performance by Aanmitaagzi (February 7): A powerful community event to kick off the festival at Shabogesic Beach.
  • Family Day Activities on Shabogesic Beach (February 17): Free community engagement for all ages.
  • Listening Party Events (February 15 & 16): Hosted at Olmstead Beach on Trout Lake, these intimate evening gatherings will feature sound-based art and storytelling, creating a unique and immersive festival experience.

As always, Ice Follies is free to attend and open 24/7, offering visitors the opportunity to experience the installations in the unique interplay of light and ice, whether during the day or under the stars.

About Ice Follies:

Founded in 2004, Ice Follies transforms the frozen shores of Lake Nipissing into a dynamic gallery of contemporary art every two years. Co-presented by local arts organizations Aanmitaagzi, Near North Mobile Media Lab and White Water Gallery, the festival creates space for audiences to engage with contemporary works that reflect upon Northern Ontario’s unique cultural and environmental identity.

For more information on Ice Follies 2025, visit: icefollies.ca.

Ice Follies is made possible thanks to the generous support of our funders, sponsors and community partners. We gratefully acknowledge our 2025 funders: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Canadian Heritage, NOHFC, FedNor, City of North Bay and Tourism North Bay.

Media Contact:

Jameson Toye
Ice Follies Communication Officer
705-476-6402
medialabnorthbay@gmail.com

Winter Solstice Celebration on December 20th

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We’re hosting a Winter Solstice Celebration at Big Medicine Studio on December 20th from 5 – 8 pm. Join us for an evening of songs, stories, and celebration as we explore and share our multi-disciplinary arts project All My R(el)ations.

All My R(el)ations is a multi-year, inter-generational community-engaged arts project that explores and investigates historic Anishinaabe stories from this region through various forums and artistic disciplines. Focusing on themes of hunger, feasting, sharing, celebration, culture, healing, and transformation, these stories range from the imagined to the personal, often including the lived experiences of the participants and artists.

Art pieces and stories developed during our fall community-engaged workshop series will be presented and refreshments will be served. Hope to see you there!

For more information, please contact Sid or Penny at (705) 474-2227 or aanmitaagzi@gmail.com. You can also check out our event page on Facebook.

Fall Workshops are Back!

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Aanmitaagzi is back with another series of community-engaged workshops for Fall 2024. The workshops are part of our current project, ALL MY R(el)ATIONS, which explores and examines the themes of relationality and resource capacity/scarcity. Through them we will be gathering, creating, and developing stories, installation materials, and performance pieces that will feed into the larger project and future presentations.

The workshops are free to attend, and no experience is necessary. All ages are welcome.

2024 FALL WORKSHOP SERIES

Movement Class with Penny Couchie
Mondays & Wednesdays from 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Contemporary dance and movement explorations to unleash our power and creativity. For movers of all ages and abilities.

Written & Visual Explorations with Aanmitaagzi
Mondays & Wednesdays from 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Join Aanmitaagzi’s artists in exploring the stories and themes of All My R(el)ations through semi-guided written and visual activities such as poetry, spoken word, storytelling, drawing, painting, body-mapping, embroidery, textile work, and crafts. Materials will be provided, but you can also bring your own too!

All Ages Multi-Arts with Sherry Guppy & Sid Bobb
Tuesdays from 3:30 – 5:30 pm
A multi-arts drop-in class for artists of all ages. Activities will include drawing, painting, storytelling, crafts, dance, textile work, and more! Materials will be provided.

Community Dinner
Thursdays from 5:15 pm – 6:00 pm
A time to gather and share a meal with our artists, workshop participants, and community members each week.

Pow Wow Making & Jam Night with Sid Bobb & invited guest artists
Thursdays from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Weekly drop-in making & jam sessions for all things pow wow. Bring your regalia, beadwork, or other unfinished projects to work on or bring your voice and/or an instrument for singing, drumming, and dancing! Sid Bobb and other invited guest artists will be on hand to help out and join in the fun.

For more information, please contact Sid Bobb or Penny Couchie at aanmitaagzi@gmail.com or (705) 474-2227.

ASAP presenting at ON THE EDGE Fringe 2024

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The poster for the ALL MY R(el)ATIONS presentation for the ON THE EDGE Fringe Festival's 2024 Duality Program.

ALL MY R(EL)ATIONS
Presented by ON THE EDGE Fringe Festival
August 13th @ 8 pm
181 Oak St. W

Aanmitaagzi is extremely excited to be invited by the ON THE EDGE Fringe Festival to once again participate in their 2024 Duality program.

For this year’s program, we will be presenting a live multi-arts performance from our current multi-year project ALL MY R(el)ATIONS. The presentation will include dancing, storytelling/spoken word, singing, drumming, and art installations, and will take place on the green space beside the Dionne Quints Museum (181 Oak St. W). The performance is about 40 minutes long and will begin around 8 pm. There is no admission fee and all are welcome. This is an outdoor performance so be sure to dress appropriately for the weather and to bring a chair or blanket to sit on.

Artist Statement

The artists and participants of this year’s Summer Arts Program have been working hard over the last six weeks to prepare for this presentation. The collaboratively created and performed work is an investigation and expression of indigenous dance and our myths. We have spent weeks singing, dancing, regalia making, story-telling, and travelling to pow wows. This performance has grown out of these activities and what lies in our hearts and minds.

The Aanmitaagzi Summer Arts Program (ASAP) is an 8-week intensive in indigenous performing and visual arts. Now in its seventeenth year, the program faculty is led by award winning and renowned professional indigenous artists and educators. Participants learn, share, express and create alongside our professional multi-arts team.

ALL MY R(el)ATIONS, our latest work-in-progress, explores our historic abundance in opposition to systemic oppression and poverty. How much of what we have now, is a ration; a small shadow of what we once had? What are we entitled to? What dances, stories, songs and language is our birthright?

ALL MY R(el)ATIONS explores historically rooted ways in which we make a return to abundance by connecting to ourselves and all of Creation.

This work is co-created and performed by:

Albany Benson, Sid Bobb, Penny Couchie, Ouske Couchie-Bobb, Niganii Dokis, Sherry Guppy, Autumn Hookimaw, Skyler Hookimaw, Mya Katt, Waseskwan Linklater, Malia Mathias-Mizzi, William McGrath, Darren Nakogee, Finn Rice, and Shania Splane.

With Special Guests:

Blair Beaucage, Katie Couchie, Brennan Govender, Olivia Shortt, Cody Sutherland, Ronnie Turner, and more!

Aanmitaagzi wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Canada’s Canada Summer Jobs Program, Mushkegowuk Employment & Training Services, the North Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre’s Apatisiwin Program, and the ON THE EDGE Fringe Festival for generously supporting this project and the 2024 Summer Arts Program.

Misdemeanor Dream in South Dakota

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Production image for Misdemeanor Dream

After several weeks of rehearsals and prep, Spiderwoman Theater’s Misdemeanor Dream is hitting the stage in South Dakota! From February 20 – 24, the company will be at the University of South Dakota (USD) in Vermillion, presenting a series of workshops in addition to two evening performances on Friday and Saturday in the campus’s Knutson Theatre. South Dakota is the first of three stops on Spiderwoman’s three-week midwest tour.

Misdemeanor Dream is a multi-generational, multi-disciplinary theatre project which brings together Indigenous performers, designers, and cultural practitioners from communities across Turtle Island. Weaving uncomfortable conversations with irreverent humour, it sheds light on personal and community stories of chaos and reclamation, of tricksters and spirits, of journeys through the star worlds and the between worlds.

Aanmitaagzi has been working on this project with Spiderwoman since the beginning, and our Co-Artistic Director Penny Couchie, who is the choreographer for Misdemeanor Dream, travelled to New York City earlier this month to be part of the rehearsal process. After briefly returning home, Penny and other members of the company are now in South Dakota to help with the production, including putting up the installation & set pieces that were developed at Big Medicine Studio and helping to facilitate the workshops.

Here are a couple of images of the installation at USD, the set being built, and the storyweaving workshop facilitated by Muriel Miguel, Penny Couchie, and Imelda Villalon.Photo of the Misdemeanor Dream installation at USD.

Photo of Aanmitaagzi members showing the installation work for Misemeanor Dream.Set building for Misdemeanor Dream in SDMisdemeanor Dream storyweaving workshopAanmitaagzi would like to acknowledge and thank everyone that has supported and been a part of this project over the years. It has been an amazing project to work on and we are thrilled to continue to be a part of it.