Tono stops in Calgary on its way to the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver.

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24th Annual High Performance Rodeo
Big Secret Theatre
Thursday, January 7 - Sunday, January 31

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In Tono, by Red Sky Performance, Sandra Laronde worked with fellow choreographer Roger Sinha and a small cast of dancers and musicians to create a staged meeting place for traditions and cultures that span two continents. The show opens with three Mongolian musicians and throat-singers, followed by two First Nations singers.

Laronde is excited to bring Tono back to southern Alberta, which served as the launching pad for this ongoing journey. As part of the Banff Summer Arts Festival in 2008, Tono invited viewers into the colourful sights and sounds of life — humans transformed into horses onstage with the leaps, jumps and gallops of dancers. The show was performed in Beijing in conjunction with the summer Olympics and will head to Vancouver for the Cultural Olympiad after its Rodeo performance.

“We performed in the great halls both in Beijing and in Inner Mongolia,” says Laronde. “The fact that things are done by the thousands was quite different from the scale in Canada.”

When Laronde first began to explore the parallels between indigenous cultures in Canada, Mongolia and China’s Inner Mongolia, she didn’t anticipate the strong reaction and subsequent tours. Despite the difficulties of travelling to countries with different languages and expectations, she discovered that it was easier than she had thought to connect with her audience through dance.

“There were quieter moments in the piece I didn’t think they would get,” says Laronde, “but when it came time for them, people did seem to pay attention.”

Set to a live musical score composed by Rick Sacks, the performance features the Mongolian string instrument morin khurr, or horse-head fiddle, as well as traditional long songs — with few words, and syllables stretched over long durations. They evoke the quiet rhythms of life among four-hoofed creatures and the vast expanse of the land, which could be the Prairies in either Asia or North America. Among the songs is a prayer and lullaby for the founder of the Mongolian Empire, Genghis Khan.

Red Sky is based in Toronto and Laronde is from northern Ontario, but she also spends time in Alberta as the aboriginal arts director at The Banff Centre. Ten years ago, Laronde took part in a summer intensive training program with her Rodeo hosts, One Yellow Rabbit.

For the past 18 months, the same 14 performers have worked and travelled together. Laronde says that despite the differences in languages and cultural upbringing, the group has developed ways to communicate with one another that are more sensory than verbal.

“It is a very tight-knit group of people and we became skilled at reading each other quickly,” says Laronde. “We couldn’t depend on language with three or four languages in the room.”