Dancing Pathways is a dream to build an interactive ground mural on the paved walkways of Riley Park.

Foolish Operations was successful in assembling the required funding to launch the first phase of the project, which is all about free fun interactive workshops, community consultations, and celebrations using non-toxic and non-permanent chalk and to build a maquette design. The maquette would then be presented to all stakeholders early in the fall of 2025 to gather the necessary support in order to paint the murale (modifications if required, funding, permits, professional team hired, etc.). Phase two (painting the mural) would happen in the summer of 2026.

Phase One:

“Dancing Pathways” [Phase One] takes place from March to September 2025. Over the summer months, the project invites community members to participate in a series of 10 free and accessible movement and drawing workshops, a creative planning dialogue group and 2 community celebrations. Participation will be free and materials will be provided (chalk, paper, etc). Specially trained bilingual (French and English) dance facilitators will empower and inspire workshop participants to express and develop their own unique movement styles and ideas through collaborative dance and drawing prompts. The team includes a professional wheelchair dancer-facilitator to make the experience especially welcoming for people using mobility aids. Multilingual volunteer hosts will provide representative translation services to welcome, orient, and support English language learner participants.

Dancing Pathways creative ideas from workshop participants will be developed collaboratively and collected in the form of footprint and arrow diagrams sketched with non-toxic chalk on the walkways of Riley Park. We anticipate that participants may devise intricate twists, turns, and hops, potentially drawing inspiration from traditional or social dances such as the “do-si-do” found in French Canadian and other folk dance forms.

Visual artist Wen Wen Lu will advise on ways to integrate the multiple “dances” created by participants at the conclusion of the workshop series into a representative maquette for the proposed permanent pathway mural. 

This first phase has received the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia, Metro Vancouver, the APIC program Fédération de la jeunesse canadienne-française (FJCF) and Fédération culturelle canadienne-française (FCCF), supported by the Government of Canada. Access to the Riely Park Fieldhouse by Foolish Operations is made possible through the Fieldhouse Activations Program of the Vancouver Park Board.