Volcano is a Toronto-based performance company that creates work experimentally, collaboratively, and with an eye to transcending borders of all kinds – international, artistic, and cultural. We teach, we learn, we share stories.

You are standing in a forest. The sky is blue, the trees are tall, but something is missing. There is no tangle of small plants. No mass of mushrooms. No flowers. And then you realize – this forest is not natural. It is a grid, planted by humans on exhausted land.

Our job at Volcano is to go into this forest (our neighbourhoods, our cities, our countries), and plant small things that can spread: trilliums, wild leeks, ideas, awareness.

Stories.
Stories that connect.
Stories that can make this forest healthy.

• With gratitude to Robin Wall Kimmerer for her inspirational book, Braiding Sweetgrass

"An ethical drive to use art to illuminate the moral challenges of our age runs like a red thread through every Volcano production. Ross Manson has a matchless ability to put his finger on the big questions … Every Volcano production channels a humane sensibility of our complexity, our fragility, and our potential – nevertheless! -- to be moral agents in our world.”

- Melissa Williams, PhD
Specialising in democratic theory and comparative political theory, University of Toronto
Founding Director, University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics.

LAND & LABOUR:

Volcano’s home base is beside Lake Ontario, a place where, since a time beyond memory, humans have gathered to tell stories. This is a place shared by many, but before European boats arrived, it was already home to three great alliances of indigenous peoples.

In Anishinaabe storytelling, this land is where the first human arrived - Skywoman. And this first human found the land was already full of life. Their task was simply to learn – from these animals and plants – how to live in balance.

This land is also where the Haudenosaunee alliance created the Great Law of Peace – one of the first democratic codes in human history. Because you need peace to share resources so that your children’s future is safe. 

The Wendat confederacy is the third great alliance, where power was gained by consensus-building, rather than wealth, and individual freedom was central. That alliance was scattered, after the boats came, by war, famine and disease. Wendat peoples now exist across the entire continent.

The old Wendat word for village, became the name of this country.

We would also like to acknowledge the unpaid labour that played such a key role in building Canada. The European institution of human enslavement went on in the Canadian colonies for about 200 years, and was only made illegal in 1834.

In Canada, enslavement was of both Black and Indigenous people. These enslaved humans worked for the Church, for merchants, for farmers, for politicians. They worked as servants, laborers, farm hands, also as skilled artisans.

Canada owes an enormous unpayable debt to these people who laboured for free for 200 years to help build our country.

We offer these acknowledgments to spark understanding, empathy and awareness, and we look to the wisdom of the original caretakers to help us learn how to share this land. Because now, we are all here together, and we need to draw upon one another’s wisdom for the years ahead.

More history of the land around Toronto, and the treaties governing it, can  be found on the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation website.

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