PuSh 2015: The Road Forward

When Marie Clements' The Road Forward played Club PuSh for one night only as part of the 2013 PuSh Festival I ended my blog post on that performance by noting that the show needed to come back and be seen by a larger audience. Mercifully, PuSh AED Norman Armour got the message and at this year's Festival the work returns for a three night run at the York Theatre on Commercial Drive, in a co-presentation with The Cultch and Touchstone Theatre.

First presented as a ten-minute multi-media installation at the Aboriginal Pavilion during the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, the work has developed over the past five years into a full-length theatrical concert. Or is it a rock musical? An illustrated song cycle? As Clements noted earlier in the day in conversation with me on the Cultch's Historic Theatre stage, she doesn't worry too much about generic categories. What's most important is the story that needs to be told; it's the story that dictates the form.

In the case of The Road Forward, the story is based on Clements' research into the archives of the Native Brotherhood (and Sisterhood) of British Columbia (NBCC), formed in 1931 and Canada's oldest active advocacy group on First Nations issues. In particular, Clements was astounded to discover and read through back issues of the NBCC's newspaper, The Native Voice, which became a powerful mouthpiece for and documentary record of Indigenous social justice activism--and not just along the coast of BC, but across Canada and the Americas. Video projections of scanned pages from The Native Voice appear throughout the evening and it is both astounding to see what the NBCC was fighting for 50 years ago and dispiriting to see what battles have yet to be fully won today.

Working with lead composer and musical director Jennifer Kreisberg, Clements, as writer, director and producer, has turned this history into a series of nineteen songs that marry celebration and lament, resistance and requiem, all with a driving drum beat that announces unambiguously Indigenous presence, sovereignty and futurity. This is also represented for us generationally on stage, with the cast of seventeen comprised of elders (for example, Latash Maurice Nahanee and Delhia Nahanee, of the Squamish and Nisga'a nations), their direct descendants (Amanda Nahaneee and Marissa Nahanee), and a wider network of relations. (Regrettably, Kreisberg's son Wakinyan RedShirt was ill with a fever and could not perform alongside his mother.)

The size of the cast, though a challenge logistically (they are squeezed even on the larger York Theatre stage), reflects Clements' commitment to marshalling and presenting to audiences the wealth of Indigenous performance talent from across the Americas. The heart and soul of this particular group are the three magnificent divas--Kreisberg, Cheri Maracle, and Michelle St. John (Clements' co-artistic director of red diva projects)--whose combined fierceness and vocal power quite literally "take [our] words away" (to paraphrase the song, sung by Russell Wallace, that introduces them). Harkening back to the classic African-American girl groups of the Motown era, this trio likewise sings a blues- and gospel-inflected repertoire of survival in spite of suffering, with each woman being given a thumping solo (Maracle on "This is How it Goes," Kreisberg on "1965" and the tiny St. John bringing down the house on "Thunderstruck") that showcases not just her extraordinary pipes, but also her indomitability of spirit. Kreisberg and Maracle also harmonize in haunting fashion on "My Girl's Song," a mournful lament for the Aboriginal girls and women who have been murdered or gone missing along BC's Highway of Tears. I would be remiss if I did not mention the groovy vocalizations of the trio on the classic Patti Labelle anthem "Lady Marmalade," which had me bopping my head and tapping my feet in absolute delight. A shout out as well to bassist Shakti Hayes, who takes a turn at the microphone for "Good God," a bitterly ironic ode to the religious indoctrination generations of Indigenous children were subjected to as part of the Residential School system in Canada.

Not to be outdone, the men of The Road Forward also shine. Special mention must go to co-composer,  lead guitarist, and band leader Wayne Lavallee, who has a classic rock star voice in the vein of Robert Plant (plus the hair to match). Drummer Richard Brown kept a low profile visually at the back of the stage, but we registered his beats aurally throughout the performance. Keyboardist Murray Porter rocks out on the classic tune "Come and Get Your Love," by the legendary Native American and Mexican American rock band Redbone; later Porter is also compelling in inviting us to come aboard the "Constitution Express." That song references an important cross-Canada consciousness-raising event led by George Manuel in advance of the repatriation of the Canadian constitution. Another important speech by Manuel, "If You Really Believe," serves as the basis of a riveting spoken word performance by Ostwelve, who also contributes the rap "All My Relations" to the final title song of the evening, which brings the full company together.

Seeing and hearing this show at the York was a powerful experience--we even got to don 3D glasses at the end to witness Native masks and and other iconic images pop out at us. But it needs an even bigger stage, a venue where we can not only listen, but also dance. It needs, in short, a cross-Canada stadium tour, complete with a red diva projects booth selling T-shirts and CDs. Clements was necessarily sanguine about the show's prospects following this revival when I asked her the what next question earlier in the day, citing the energy and the timing and especially the money to make something like a multi-city tour happen. But if there's anybody who can do it, it's Marie Clements.

P.

PuSh 2015: 7 Important Things and FUSE

There is a moment in 7 Important Things, on at SFU Woodward's Studio T in a PuSh Festival co-presentation with Neworld Theatre, when performer and co-creator Nadia Ross turns to George Acheson, whose life story the two are telling, and points out a deeply ironic truth. Having been kicked out of his home by his father at age 16 in the 1960s for refusing to cut his hair, George, the quintessential hippie-turned-anarchist-Punk, now makes his living as a barber.

In this exchange two parallel threads explored in this work of documentary theatre from STO Union come together. On the one hand, the play is a moving yet unsentimental account of posthumous forgiveness between father and son, whose different versions of martial versus libertine masculinities set the course for George's restless wanderings. At the same time, Ross, as Acheson's interlocutor and surrogate amanuensis, is interested in casting an equally sober eye on not just how George, but western society as a whole, got from there to here. Given the promise of the 60s counterculture, with its anti-consumerist ethos of peace and love, what went so horribly wrong?

In answering this question, Ross and Acheson, who have been performing this show for eight years now and who have refined its spare and suitably low-tech dramaturgy into a fine conversational art, take care not to romanticize George's decision to drop out--especially where his treatment of women is concerned. At the same time, there is a certain smugness of tone to this piece, not least in the improvisatory bits when, for example, Ross riffs on the price of real estate in Vancouver and the "efficiency" of our post-Olympic city, only to rush to assure us that she hopes she's not offending anyone. Offend away, but don't apologize for it; such a move presumes that the audience is so immersed in and duped by the capitalist "society of the spectacle" that we can't understand let alone appreciate a critique of it.

In the talkback following the show, Ross, in explaining her cynicism about the world in which we live today, said that hope is a drug, offering an illusive promise that things will get better in the future while distracting us from fixing the present. Point taken. However, I would just add, in the context of the overwhelming sense of stasis that pervades this show, that nostalgia is an equally powerful--and paralytic--drug.

Following 7 Important Things, I made my way over to the Vancouver Art Gallery for the PuSh edition of FUSE. Usually FUSE is so packed and I arrive so late that I'm unable to see anything. Last night, however, I did get to bust a few moves on the rooftop deck to Sonic Elder, who played a sold-out show at Club PuSh on Thursday. And, on the fourth floor of the gallery, amid its prized collection of Emily Carr paintings, I was thrilled to be able to watch--and dance with--Emily Johnson. Emily, an Indigenous choreographer and dance artist from Minneapolis, is PuSh's current artist-in-residence. I get to have a conversation with her and Marie Clements (whose The Road Forward opens at the York Theatre next week) at the PuSh offices tomorrow, excerpts of which folks will hopefully get to see next Friday morning should they wish to drop by the York.

P.

PuSh 2013: The Road Forward

Marie Clements rocked the house last night at Club PuSh with the premiere of The Road Forward, a multi-media blues-rock musical developed by Clements' and Michelle St. John's red diva projects, and featuring an original score by composer, musical director, and performer Jennifer Kreisberg--who together with St. John and fellow diva Cheri Maracle make up the work's girl power vocal soul. Originally created as a 9-minute piece for the closing performance of the Aboriginal Pavilion at the 2010 Winter Olympics, The Road Forward has since been expanded into a full-length evening that mixes traditional drum songs with Clements' and Kreisberg's newly commissioned set-list, and even a few adapted classics--including a rockin' version of "Lady Marmalade" on which St. John, Kreisberg, and Maracle all get to vocalize like there's no tomorrow.

As Clements tells us in the program, The Road Forward was conceived in response to her discovery, at the offices of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, of 40 years worth of archives from The Native Voice, a newspaper that chronicled and advocated for change in Aboriginal communities across the Americas from the 1930s to the 1970s, and about which Clements knew next to nothing. Archival images from the newspaper--many of them sourced and collected by my student Rachel Braeuer, who served as a research assistant on the project--are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage throughout the performance, and Clements and crew also make a direct link--in images and song--to the role that social media are currently playing in the Idle No More movement, with a live Twitter feed scrolling across a drum face downstage left.

It was a truly moving and galvanizing evening, one that needs to be repeated. I hope that The Road Forward returns (either to PuSh, or to another venue/festival) soon, and also that it tours. It deserves as wide an audience as possible. For the time being, I celebrate Clements' immensely generous vision and achievement, and the supporting roles that both my favourite performing arts organization and the Department of English at SFU (where Clements is currently writer in residence) played in bringing about last night.

P.