After traveling to 12 different communities over the course of a month, The Voice of the River: Grand River Community Play tour officially came to a close at Chiefswood Park in Ohsweken on Saturday, August 23, 2025.
Put on by the Canadian Centre for Rural Creativity and Grandview Theatre, The Voice of the River celebrated the power of community, of creativity and of the Grand River.
Peter Smith, co-producer, writer and director of Voice of the River, said that the project first began during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was invited to join the Grand River Histories Project with the Regional Tourism Organization 4 (RTO4).
“We met every week with people from the Grand River, but I had no real relationship with the river at that point because I’m a storyteller,” recalled Smith. “So for around two months, I listened to stories from students, from Elders, from Indigenous people, and from people from one end of the river to the other. I thought it was amazing and eventually somebody asked, ‘well, you’ve been listening to all these stories, what do you think?’ and I said, ‘this may sound crazy, but I think there’s a 310-kilometre-long play in all of this.’”
Smith said that while he didn’t know how it could be done or how it would all play out, he simply started collecting stories.
“I met people in community halls, in church basements and on the streets and just started asking them what the stories were from their communities,” said Smith. “I started in Dundalk and I worked my way down the river. Six Nations became involved, the Water Walkers were part of it, people from Caledonia and Glen Morris, and from all these small little villages all got involved. I would just drive into the town, find somebody and start talking to them.”
He explained that eventually, a company started to form and things began taking shape after he brought in several friends like Cathy Nosaty, Pat Flood, Ray Salverda and Peter Muir.
“We just kept gathering people, and we just started doing stuff, and it’s really been the ride of a lifetime,” he said. “It’s become a template, I think, for other projects that span over a large geographic area like a watershed, but also for people to start realizing that we are all connected. It was said many times in the play, but also by the people that are working in this project, that if there’s a hope for what comes out of this, it’s that we get back to being one big community.”
Along the way, the group hosted workshops in the communities the play would be visiting. The workshops often involved creating large puppets and costumes, stitching together unique story-telling quilt squares, and building set pieces and props. Before each play, community members who were attending the viewing would take part in a parade with various puppets, flags and banners as well.
The creative team, along with a core group of actors experimented with different types of storytelling. From spoken word poetry to song and dance, ceremony and silence, art installations and technology, and even the Grand River itself, there was no shortage of mediums explored throughout the project.
Smith said that one thing that stands out about The Voice of the River, is that it was always changing from community to community and that the entirety of the project was bursting at the seams.
“It still feels like it’s evolving, like it’s never quite finished. Even tonight, there were scenes that had never even been seen before, and with actors of varying degrees of talents,” he said. “And in every community, there were different scenes and there were songs that were written by musicians, and there were stories that were told or images that were brought forth that were all different. The whole project was just bursting at the seams with people wanting to be heard and really wanting to tell an authentic story from their hearts, it was a real journey.”
Saturday’s event featured a marketplace, a picnic, a celebration of the tenth anniversary of Two Row on the Grand, a parade of beings, The Voice of the River play, and a concert with David Maracle.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
