ILLUMINATE – Aquakultre’s Community Listening Party in collaboration with Half A Concert
September 19, 2026 | 2:00–5:00 PM | It’s OK* Studios, Toronto, ON | Free With RSVP | All Ages
In celebration of the 2026 Polaris Festival, presented by SiriusXM Canada, Polaris presents Uncovered: Aquakultre’s Community Listening Party in Collaboration with Half A Concert, an intimate listening party, oral history gathering, and live storytelling experience led by Aquakultre.
The 2026 Polaris Festival is a month-long celebration of Canadian music as art, bringing together concerts, salons, listening sessions, conversations, artist development initiatives, and the Polaris Concert & Award Ceremony at Massey Hall. Through the Festival, Polaris creates space for audiences to listen differently, gather around important Canadian albums, and explore how music shapes culture, identity, memory, and belonging.
Register For Free to Reserve Your Spot
Aquakulture’s Community Listening Party uses music, memory, and storytelling to trace connections between African Nova Scotian history, Black Loyalist lineage, Africville, and contemporary Black Canadian sound.
Led by Aquakultre, the event invites audiences into the world behind his Polaris Music Prize longlisted album 1783, using selected tracks from the album alongside archival and historic recordings by Black Nova Scotian artists. Through music, story, and collective listening, Aquakultre guides audiences through the songs, communities, cultural practices, and histories that shaped his creative journey.
Presented in collaboration with Half A Concert, the event is rooted in a desire to reveal and recover historical African Canadian performance practices. By engaging with a curated selection of audio and video recordings, oral histories, and live performance,
This gathering asks what music can hold: memory, ancestry, place, migration, resistance, and joy. It creates space for African Canadian communities, Black cultural workers, artists, musicians, historians, students, elders, educators, Polaris audiences, and cultural institutions to listen together and reflect on the cultural lineages that continue to shape Black Canadian sound.
Featured Contributors
Lance Sampson / Aquakultre is an award-winning singer-songwriter, rapper, storyteller, and visual artist from Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. His work is rooted in community, memory, ancestry, and the ongoing search for identity through sound.
Myles Isley a multidisciplinary artist and creative producer. His works, whether artistic or experiential, are reflections of himself, his community, and how he interprets his surroundings. Each of his practices serves as ways for him to transmute his experiences in the world and with himself. Through event production, DJ’ing, writing, photography, and creative direction, he finds ways to translate our shared experiences and create pathways to connection.
Ricky Atkinson a well-known Toronto author, community worker, and former gang leader. After spending 32 years in federal prison for bank robberies and other offences as the leader of the “Dirty Tricks Gang,” he successfully rehabilitated and now devotes his life to steering at-risk youth away from crime.
George Elliott Clarke By my roots – African-American, Indigenous, Nova Scotian/Africadian, Afro-Metis – I’m nourished, but not entangled; and I’m a citizen of the world, in imagination, if not in fact. I earn my daily bread as a professor and writer, but I’ve also worked as a library activities programmer; computerized traffic signals controller; parliamentary researcher; student newspaper editor; community newspaper editor; social worker; parliamentary aide; and, of course, as a professor, first at Duke University and now at the University of Toronto, but with guest gigs at McGill, UBC, and Harvard. As a scholar, I’ve pioneered the study of African-Canadian literature; as a writer, I’ve brought “Blackened English” to poetry, drama, and fiction. And I’ve coined the term, “Africadian.”
David Steeves, is a Toronto litigator called to the bars of Ontario, Alberta, and Nova Scotia. He holds a B.A. from Mount Allison University as well as an LL.B. and LL.M. from Dalhousie Law School where his research was awarded the inaugural Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society Race and the Law Prize as well as the Peter Oliver Prize from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History for the best published work by a graduate or doctoral student. David generally practices in complex civil litigation before all levels of court in Ontario including multiple long trial appearances. With that said, on March 7, 2025 David was proud to represent Lance Sampson and file the first posthumous Application for Ministerial Review of a capital case with the federal Minister of Justice that is currently being considered by the Criminal Conviction Review Group.
About Half a Concert
We are a community-lead concert series based on many of the key aspects of good artistry. What we present is an experience like no other, curated by you.
About Polaris Music Prize
Polaris Music Prize is a Canadian charitable arts organization honouring music as art. Through its Album, Song, and Heritage Prizes, Polaris amplifies Canadian artists based on artistic merit — not genre, sales, or algorithmic popularity.
The 2026 Polaris Festival is presented by SiriusXM Canada and made possible through the support of Experience Ontario, Ontario Creates, the City of Toronto’s Cultural Festivals Funding Program, FACTOR, the Government of Canada, Canada’s private radio broadcasters, and the Festival’s many community and venue partners.
