We’re excited to partner with Playwrights Workshop Montreal once again to offer our Personal Legacy Workshop and Seedpool Residency to Quebec artists, funded by the Conseil de la formation continue Arts et culture de l’Île-de-Montréal (CFC). The workshop and residency will take place on-line and in-person at the PWM Studio, located at 7250 rue Clark, suite #103, Montreal.
How to apply
Fill out this Google Form by 11:59 PM on 17 October 2025.
Your application will ask you to provide the following information:
- Full name
- A brief artistic bio
- A brief description of what draws you to the ALP process.
- A brief description of your skills, curiosities, and creative practice as they relate to the Personal Legacy Process developed by ALP.
About the ALP Workshop and Residency Process
ALP accompanies artists from all disciplines as they unearth personal and cultural histories using conventional research and embodied recovery tools, cross-cultural exchange, and performative story-making. The workshops birth new discoveries and plant creative seeds that cultivate interdisciplinary works for performance and/or exhibition. We gather diverse ethnicity, lifestyles, and artistic practices and engage in a guided, physical process of exploring and exchanging the experiences, values, and traditions of a personal Ancestor chosen by each participant.
This workshop will be animated by ALP Artistic Director Diane Roberts, co-facilitator Julie Tamiko Manning, and one more co-facilitator to be announced. We are building an ensemble of 12 participants.
The three phases of this series are:
Virtual Research Lab
1 evening per week for 3hrs for 7 weeks. The Virtual Workshops will run from 17 November – 30 January 2026 (20hrs total). This component focuses on the research of your chosen Ancestor using embodied and digital technologies. You will research and write an ancestral i-story supported by our co-facilitation team.
In Studio Workshop
9 – 13 February 2026 (35hrs total). Drawing on Afro-sporic and Indigenous performative traditions, the co-facilitation team will lead you to embody a compelling moment from your Ancestor’s life. Read more about
the six stage process here.
SeedPool Project
2 – 6 March 2026 (20 hrs total). This project will engage artists in a creation process drawing on the seeds planted in the first two processes. Artists will be invited to collaborate in our new digital platform to co-create new propositions in virtual space. Visit the SeedPool Gallery to view works.
How We Work
Each workshop is uniquely shaped by the skills and interests of the co-facilitation team as well as the needs and focus of the participants. Unlike other workshops that may create a top down learning structure, the ALP methodology draws on a shared authority. We use the image of a village to describe how we work and the village trains together to uproot and share protocols from our root cultures. Roberts and her team hold space for participants, and the participants hold space for each other and each other’s Ancestors. It truly takes a village to bring these stories–which have, through various historical processes, been hidden or made inaccessible.
Performers learn skills in grounding, listening, authentic exploration of space, body language and impulse, and character development.
Writers and creators learn to tap into their creative source through embodied research, exploring personal and collective history.
Arts and cultural organisations discover a meaningful process for connecting diverse Indigenous and cultural artists and communities.
Communities and community organisations find a safe space to have difficult conversations about the relationship between individuals, groups, nations, and races.
The Arrivals Legacy Project (ALP) is a national interarts organisation founded in 2015 and incorporated in 2021 whose head office is based in Montreal. Our mission is to enable BIPOC creators to access and re-root their creative impulses by attuning to the wisdom of their ancestral stories through embodied research and reciprocal knowledge exchange.
The SeedPool provides a powerful digital playground for ALP artists to offer up fragments, ideas and/or musings in video, audio, written, and photographic forms. A virtual collaborative space, the SeedPool extends the village spiral beyond the Personal Legacy workshops, enabling Alumni artists from wherever they are to exchange impressions and expressions from their emerging Ancestral sources and weave new stories.
The intention of the space is to give workshop alumni opportunities to creatively reflect on some of the conundrums and story fragments unearthed in the workshop intensive. In the SeedPool, artists upload artefacts (a poem, an image, a song, a question, an invitation). Another SeedPool artist asks permission to pick up that seed and answer the call/question in a creative response. From this, a new artefact or seed is co-created. As SeedPool moderator, Roberts and the curatorial team will observe, inspire and, at times, provoke these interactions with the hopes of addressing the following questions:
- What draws me to another’s artefact or seed?
- What question/call or need do I attach to my seed to elicit a desired response?
- How do I stay open to the unexpected?
- What are the hidden stories/histories, intersections that might arise in this collaborative exchange?
All of these questions create a new dramaturgical pathway for artists to consider.
Visit the SeedPool Gallery here. Visit the Moving Together/Arriving Together Creative Partnerships Toolkit to see how some of our artists have engaged with the SeedPool and each other.
