SPLASHmob Training: Joy is a Home with Many Rooms
Saturday, July 6 to 12:
Joy is a Home with Many Rooms
Are you ready to RISE?
Participate in the annual SPLASHmob, 2025!
Creation and practices with Sid Ryan Eilers.
The InFrinGinG Dance Festival, a celebrated annual event in Nanaimo, champions diversity, inclusion, culture and community through contemporary dance and interdisciplinary art. The Festival creates space for shared understanding and expression, welcoming participants of all identities to engage in, or witness, movement, sound, storytelling, and creative exploration. The Festival’s annual, closing event, the SPLASHmob is an interactive, joyful public performance that culminates in a splash into an inner-city lagoon.
Joy is a Home with Many Rooms, titled by dance artist, Sid Ryan Eilers, is a joyful, no-experience-needed, movement project inviting everyone to co-create a performance during the days leading up to the festival.
Led by EILERS Dance Theatre—a queer-led company rooted in care, expression, and embodiment—this is a welcoming space especially for trans, nonbinary, gender non-conforming, and gender-fluid youth and their allies.
Inspired by Sid’s acclaimed programs TRANScendARTS and Queer Conscious Moving Bodies, this experience blends dance, creativity, and connection. Together, these practices build a multifaceted “home” where joy can be safely experienced and expressed in many forms. Whether through movement, quiet reflection, or communal expression, participants are encouraged to inhabit their identities fully and freely. Joy is a Home with Many Rooms is more than a creative workshop—it is a community-building initiative, a radical act of inclusion, and a living expression of the right to exist, express, and thrive. Expect storytelling, movement, writing, and reflection—all in the spirit of self-expression, community, connection, and joy and a refreshing lagoon dip!
Come move, connect, and celebrate who you are! Together, we’ll build a playful, powerful, splashy event to share with the entire community!
Please note that getting in the water is optional, whether it is to the ankles, to the waist or the full dunk and splash.
Watch a video invitation about the project.
Participate on a sliding scale fee structure.
Please pick up tickets at the event.
We have adjusted the schedule for flexibility. You may attend any of these sessions.
We ask you to attend as many as possible with the intention of performing on Sunday, July 13, 4:15 at swy a lana lagoon.
OPTIONAL REHEARSALS:
1st Rehearsal: Sunday, July 6, 10:00pm–1:00pm, Studio
2nd Rehearsal: Monday, July 7, 6:30pm–8:30pm, Studio
3rd Rehearsal: Tuesday, July 8, 6:30pm–8:30pm,
Swy a lana Lagoon
RECOMMENDED REHEARSALS:
4th Rehearsal: Friday, July 11, 6:30pm–8:30pm,
Swy a lana Lagoon
5th Rehearsal: Saturday, July 12, 1:00pm–4:30pm,
Swy a lana Lagoon
OPTIONAL REHEARSAL:
Possible 6th Rehearsal: Sunday, July 13, 3:00pm-4:15pm,
Swy a lana Lagoon
FINAL PERFORMANCE
Sunday, July 13th, 4:15pm (Public Performance)
Festival Sponsors
