Performing Turtle Island

Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage

Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Kathleen Irwin, Moira J. Day, Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Kathleen Irwin, Moira J. Day

• Editorial: U of R Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780889776586
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Performance Art

"A valuable and timely collection." —Alan D. Filewod, author of Committing Theatre Following the Final Report on Truth and Reconciliation, Performing Turtle Island investigates theatre as a tool for community engagement, education, and resistance.Understanding Indigenous cultures as critical sources of knowledge and meaning, each essay addresses issues that remind us that the way to reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous peoples is neither straightforward nor easily achieved. Comprised of multidisciplinary and diverse perspectives, Performing Turtle Island considers performance as both a means to self-empowerment and self-determination, and a way of placing Indigenous performance in dialogue with other nations, both on the lands of Turtle Island and on the world stage. "Brilliantly introduces pedagogies that jump scale; a bundling project for future ancestors revealing knowledges for flight into kinstillatory relationships." —Karyn Recollet, co-author of In This Together: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Hip Hop"An important resource for those who want to introduce or incorporate Indigenous artistic perspectives in their course or work." —Heather Davis-Fisch, author of Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance "A very significant and welcome contribution to the growing body of work on Indigenous theatre and performance in the land now called Canada." —Ric Knowles, author of Performing the Intercultural City

Part I

Critical Self-Representation in Production and Training

Stranger in a Strange Land: Views from an Indigenous Lens

Michael Greyeyes

The following was presented as a keynote address during the Performing Turtle Island conference at the University of Regina and First Nations University of Canada, September 2015.

I have the great pleasure to call American director Anne Bogart one of my teachers. In 2005, in upstate New York, I worked with her and members of Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI), a theatre company she founded with Japanese director, Tadashi Suzuki. Working in the spacious studios of Skidmore College, a liberal arts university where SITI hold their annual training program, it was a brutally hot summer, I recall.

I was then a tenure-track assistant professor at York University—where I am now the graduate program director of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program. The work we pursued in the sweltering July heat was career changing. I was introduced to two major forms of study that summer: the actor training of Suzuki, and Viewpoints, the movement improvisation practice first developed by Mary Overlie and subsequently rearticulated by Bogart. Together Overlie, Bogart, and Wendell Beavers are now recognized as the co-developers of Viewpoints, a movement practice taught across the United States and, increasingly, in Canada.29

Both forms radically changed my approach to teaching. Viewpoints, which provides lenses through which to examine the various structures of theatrical activity, is also a system of analysis that allowed my professional and lived experiences as a dancer, choreographer, and then-nascent director to take root. As part of subsequent research as a theatre maker and educator, through Viewpoints I found a way to convey experiential knowledge to my students and collaborators in a tightly structured way. I have taught Viewpoints ever since—at York University, at the Banff Centre (for five years), at the Soulpepper Academy in Toronto (two seasons), and for a number of years as part of Volcano Theatre’s summer Conservatory in Toronto.

Although I chose to study in Saratoga because of my interest in Viewpoints, it was Suzuki’s highly physical actor work that caught my imagination. The Suzuki method involves, among many other things, rhythmic stomping. Because every culture in the world stomps, it seemed natural to incorporate this pedagogy into my own movement practice as its genesis spoke to me powerfully. Suzuki and his company developed the work as an outgrowth of their highly stylized performance work. An example of this is his adaptation of The Trojan Women (first premiered in 1974) that electrified the world. As he and his actors developed new forms of physical staging and subsequently needed to replace actors as they left the company, they instituted training to bring new company members up to speed on how various characters moved in his works. Suzuki’s technique is rigorous. For example, in Saratoga I would typically sweat through (at minimum) three T-shirts in a single training session. During such exertion there are moments when you wonder how you will continue standing or moving through a given exercise. I’ve seen participants with tears rolling down their face as they performed an exercise, somehow grinding through a bad day on the deck. The technique blew my mind! In it, I found a movement practice that effectively replaced the emotional/physical/intellectual void left once I had retired from dance.

Today, both these forms are intrinsic to my work as an educator and theatre maker. They are demanding, highly structured, and invigorating. I returned home to Canada after that summer in 2005 energized in a way that was palpable both to me and, I believe, to my students. Recently, I introduced a new class of devised theatre students at York University to one of Bogart’s simple consciousness-raising spatial relationship exercises. I could see eyes widening as we unpacked the exercise. Then I saw the fire in them as their imaginations and critical thinking were piqued.

Bogart taught us a great deal that summer. One story she shared was about her journey as a young director. She told us that she was obsessed with German theatre. Everything about the Germans caught her imagination. They were the cutting edge of theatre making and all she desired was to go to Berlin and immerse herself in their milieu. After years of trying, she finally scraped the money together to travel to West Germany, but as soon as she got there, she realized she’d made a mistake. She was an American director. Her ethos, her tastes, her mores and knowledge were based in the culture of her homeland, the United States, and its theatrical past: vaudeville, early American Expressionism, jazz. She told us that she had to travel to Germany to realize she was an American director. I was struck by that.

I’ve been away from home—my territory in Saskatchewan—for a long time, working across Canada, the United States, and abroad. For example, in the summer of 2015 I was working in Cape Town, South Africa, for over two months filming a miniseries in four parts called Saints and Strangers.30 It was a long way from home, but it was necessary for me to go, just as travelling to Skidmore College in New York State was necessary for me eleven years earlier. As I discovered, being so far from home refocuses your eyes so that you can see your home and your place in it differently.

South Africa is a stunningly beautiful country. There is a quality of light there that is difficult to describe; it has a tangible magic. The film industry has long realized this and many film projects and television series have been and continue to be shot there to take advantage of its beauty. There are also significant financial incentives offered by the South African government. These include low wages for the film crews, terms that readily convince Hollywood producers that the twenty-three-hour flight is worth the investment.

But my journey actually begins with a script description of the character I was cast to play in the project in Cape Town. It reads, “Canonicus, a Sachem of the Narragansett, stands. He is tall and muscular.” Honestly? As I finished reading this I put the half-eaten doughnut I was holding in my hand down on the table. The previously delicious sugary dough rapidly losing its flavour now mixed with a distinctly acid taste in my mouth. Great. Just great.

The project in question, a four-hour miniseries for the National Geographic Channel, was called Saints and Strangers. Written by Eric Overmeyer and Seth Fisher, it is a provocative retelling of the voyage of the Mayflower and how the Atlantic coastal nations reacted to the settlement of Plymouth. It is a period piece, which meant the actors playing First Nations (in the American parlance: Native Americans) would be wearing period clothes and that, inevitably, there would be a sequence in which the men are shirtless. The project had just such a moment, and the character descriptor had given me all the warning I needed. I had to get back into pre-Columbian shape! Historically, our communities were active, healthy, and vibrant—and we looked it. But in mid June of 2015, when the script arrived, I was none of these. I was exhausted, overworked, and desk-bound. Plus I’d gone soft in the middle. I had become the thing I’d always feared: an out-of-shape movement professor.

A casting director who had previously cast me in a number of productions had suggested my name. Because of this, I did not have to audition for the part. Evidently she did not realize that I no longer looked like the pictures, so plentiful on the Internet, showing a buff, twenty-something actor recently retired from a professional dance career. Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me. Over the course of about twelve weeks, beginning here at home, I began to train physically and I changed my diet completely. To overcome a few nagging injuries, I started slowly. Then I began to gain strength and some momentum. The changes were subtle at first but became palpable by the time I was about to film the first scenes in South Africa. It was revelatory.

As an Indigenous performer I have an uneasy relationship with period-film work. On the one hand, such work represents more than half of my professional output as an actor. On the other hand, I resent how we are depicted in period films, as it entrenches, for a worldwide audience, the idea that our cultures and communities exist primarily in the past—as a vestigial trace.

Because I do not work on many film or television projects, as my work as professor and as artistic director of Signal Theatre precludes it, I entered the process with a certain degree of wariness. Also, as an established performer, I am judicious about where I lend my name and put my efforts. However, Saints and Strangers represented an interesting opportunity. First of all, the storyline appealed to me. It looks at the passenger manifest of the infamous Mayflower vessel through a new lens, asserting that half of the passengers were religious zealots fleeing persecution in England, while the other half were con men fleeing justice. It proposed that the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth provided the American nation with a DNA blueprint which still resonates to this day. Secondly, Rene Haynes, the film’s casting director only involves herself in projects with artistic and political integrity. All these factors intrigued me, so I said yes.

Working on this miniseries was also significant because of the writing. Non-Indigenous writers usually create Indigenous characters having little connection to our respective cultures. There are exceptions to the rule—John Fusco is an obvious example.31 However, without cultural knowledge or experience, writers usually have only one choice: since they can no longer safely depict us as savages, they represent us as some version of noble. Thus portrayed, the depiction of our community is monolithic. We’re all wonderful! However, there is no such family or community in existence. Where is the crazy uncle, the demented grandmother, the maniac cousin? Of course, these are all clichés too, but writers from outside the community steer away from them for fear of offending or painting us negatively. Saints and Strangers took another path. In it, the Indigenous characters vary w...