This year’s Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts is packed with events that will fuel you with energy, connection, and critical reflections and help you carve a path toward a better world.

The festival kicks off on May Day (International Workers’ Day), with the hosts of Sandy & Nora Talk Politics recording their top-charting podcast before a live audience at the Bus Stop Theatre. The show’s political analysis and banter will accompany live music performed by internationally renowned Palestinian-Canadian pianist John Kameel Farah.

Hot on the heels of the festival opener is an all-star hip hop concert featuring Wiki, an icon of New York City’s rap underground. He’ll share the stage with Brooklyn’s Lord Unknown and local legends DJ Uncle Fester and Tachichi. Trade wars may be fuelling sentiments of nationalistic pride, but Mayworks is reminding us that the beef isn’t between artists or workers. “If anything, this is a time to emphasize cross-border solidarity and collaboration to counter the chauvinism and delusions of superiority that are leading the world into increasing conflicts,” says Festival Director Sébastien Labelle. The attention to struggles across the Canada-US border is echoed in a screening of “Union” in partnership with the Atlantic International Film Festival. The Sundance Film Fest winner documents the first successful union drive at a US-based Amazon facility. While the outcome is still uncertain, the facility has yet to succumb to the same fate as the Quebec-based facilities closed by the mega-corporation following a successful union drive closer to home.

The Yin to solidarity’s Yang is also explored in the Mayworks program by examining isolation. XOSECRET presents a Virtual Reality experience that takes participants through a cautionary fable that imagines Nova Scotia surrounded by rising seas resulting from climate change. Noella Murphy’s solo play “Flower Bed” uses clown humour and puppets to tell an autobiographical account of how it feels to be taken out of the “productive workforce” due to chronic illness and abandonment by the medical system. Meanwhile, Sara Coffin’s movement choreography “Archive of Loneliness” is set to voice messages left by a long-term care resident isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As always, Mayworks is no stranger to diversity. Its film program is composed entirely of shorts by Indigenous women, in addition to a showcase of Black animators presented in partnership with the Animation Festival of Halifax. In collaboration with Live Art Dance, Mayworks also zooms out for a wider look with “Altération,” presented by Kira Arts. The Montreal-based company presents a circus and dance hybrid show featuring a multiracial cast of performers examining how humans relate to each other and the non-human world around them.

Finally, Mayworks reprises its very popular Working Class Heritage Tours of downtown Halifax, which this year will be made all the more visible by an accompanying quilted banner crafted by artists Sarah Mosher and Hannah Genosko.

“The world may look bleak,” says Labelle, “but there’s no shortage of hope in the many ways we can come together and express ourselves creatively. May Day both celebrates and invokes the coming of a new dawn toward the world we desperately need.”