Dalhousie Art Gallery presents It’s About Time: Over 70 years of Black Dance and Performance History in Canada 

Halifax, NS — Dalhousie Art Gallery is pleased to present It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 and Now, a nationally touring exhibition curated by scholar, artist, and educator Dr. Seika Boye. Originally commissioned by Dance Collection Danse, Canada’s only dedicated dance history archive and publisher, the exhibition brings long-overlooked histories of Black dance and performance in Canada into focus, tracing how dancers, choreographers, communities, and cultural movements shaped social life across the country, across concert stages and dance halls, studios and clubs, protests, and public gatherings.

Built through extensive archival research and community knowledge, It’s About Time responds to a persistent gap in Canadian cultural narratives and resources. As Boye notes: “What is suggested when there aren’t resources to share about something is that it didn’t happen. And of course, I knew that wasn’t true.”

The exhibition draws together materials across multiple archives and collections, foregrounding biographies of influential performers, media representation and reception, and the community spaces that served as hubs for dance, while also examining legislation that attempted to restrict Black leisure culture and the activism and community-building that followed.

By inviting contemporary artists to respond to the archive, the project expands its artistic community as it travels the country and deepens connection with local audiences in each host city. These artistic commissions also open up broader questions about what an archive can be, how it can stay active, relational, and accountable to the living communities and artistic legacies it holds. “I want to ask questions about how we can involve artists in the ways that their legacy is built,” Boye says.

The Dalhousie presentation expands the exhibition’s regional depth through newly featured materials and images from the Nova Scotia Archives, presented alongside contemporary responses by Nova Scotia–based visual artists Ibe Ananaba, Anja Clyke, Allen D. Crooks, kay macdonald, and Preston Pavlis. Together, these works consider how the archive reverberates in the present, and how dance, music, and performance continue to hold space for memory, resistance, joy, gathering, and self-determination.

It’s About Time is associated with Gatherings, a SSHRC-supported research initiative advancing archival and oral-history approaches to performance history in Canada. The exhibition is also presented with the support of the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University.