Waka/Ciimaan/Vaka Workshop at SFU Woodward's

Nicely complementing my afternoon at the Vines Art Festival, last night I had the privilege of attending a workshop showing of Waka/Ciimaan/Vaka thanks to an invitation from playwright Yvette Nolan, who is one of the writers on the piece (the others are Miria George, Hone Kouka, and Jamie McCaskill). A unique collaboration between Raven Spirit Dance and the New Zealand company Tawata Productions, this work-in-progress brings together Indigenous artists from Canada/Turtle Island, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand/Aotearoa to develop a dance-theatre piece that is a contemporary fable about the devastating reciprocal effects of climate change and environmental capitalism on the peoples and animals of the northern and southern hemispheres.

In a neat reversal of the Biblical flood story (and we're reminded of the Christian narrative intrusion by a Psalm-quoting sailor), our story sees all the water in the world suddenly disappear. We then follow the effects of this event on several rag-tag groups that must come together to survive: a sister and brother and their talking dog; an oil executive and his told-you-so-mother; a shipwrecked crew of sailors; a penguin and polar bear who somehow find each other on their respective shrinking ice caps through the magic of cell phone technology (and who also talk); and two women who have been instructed to make a fleet of canoes for when the water returns. Presiding over all of this is a magical--and exceedingly hungry--albatross (yup, she too talks) who, via a trail of wood chips, manages to lead all the separate groups together to where Waka and Ciimaan have been building the canoes.

Both funny and despairing in tone, at once fantastical and utterly naturalistic in its dramaturgy, and punctuated by moments of simple danced beauty courtesy of co-choreographers Michelle Olson and Te Hau Winitana, this latest version of the piece (which apparently came together in a week) promises a full production, if and when it can be staged, that will be as epic in form as in content. And on the former front I was pleased that in the artist panel following the presentation we got to hear from the show's designer about his plans for and influences upon various intended scenographic effects (a selection of his drawings was also on view outside SFU Woodward's Studio D).

Keep your eyes and ears open for the next iteration of this piece because this is urgent and important work.

P

Salt Baby at Talking Stick

I always forget what an avalanche of Vancouver performance comes after PuSh: the Talking Stick Festival, which opened on Tuesday; Chutzpah!, which opened yesterday; the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival and the Vancouver International Dance Festival, both coming up at the beginning of March; and on it goes. And that's on top of all the regular subscription series and venue programming throughout the city. There's so much to see that one can forget one is supposed to have a day job.

Mercifully, mine allows me to scoot out like I did this afternoon to the Roundhouse to catch the final matinee performance of Falen Johnson's play Salt Baby, first seen in Toronto at Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA) in 2009, and now in Vancouver as part of Talking Stick. Directed by former NEPA Artistic Managing Director and Unplugging author Yvette Nolan, Salt Baby tells the eponymous story of a contemporary Mohawk and Tuscarora woman from the Six Nations reserve in Ontario (Dakota Hebert). Though she has her status card, and though she remains deeply connected to her father (Curtis Peeteetuce) and the spirit of her dead grandfather (Colin Dingwall, excellent in a number of roles), Salt Baby, who can pass as white and who has lived for many years in the polyglot "big city" (presumably Toronto), feels anxious about her heritage, and in particular the exact mix of her Native blood. In part these feelings are exacerbated by Salt Baby's budding romantic relationship with, Al, a young white man (a winsome Nathan Howe) whose initially obtuse and naive and gradually more genuine questions about her family background prompt a crisis of identity in Salt Baby. On a visit home to see her father, Salt Baby begins asking questions about her genealogy that leads her on a quest--via conversations with family friends, a dubious online choose-your-own-adventure-style survey, an even more dubious psychic, and finally a community elder--to discover the truth about her ancestors. But it's the DNA test that Al suggests she take and that her father resists helping her with that looms as the real source of Salt Baby's ontological dilemma: if she takes it, she risks discovering that she is not who she thought she was; but, even more pertinently, she risks reducing her identity to the sum of her genes.

What elevates the will she or won't she plot question above a mere device to maintain narrative suspense is Johnson's recognition that paternity for Salt Baby--and Indigenous peoples more generally--is not just an existential cri de coeur or a mathematical abstraction; it has real-world and historically material consequences. Notwithstanding our twenty-first century rainbow celebration of cross-cultural relationships, the irony is that couples like Salt Baby and Al actually fulfill what was once a de facto government policy in this country: forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples through intermarriage (and see, in this regard, former deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs and celebrated Canadian poet Duncan Campbell Scott's "The Onandaga Madonna"). Indeed, Salt Baby's father, in querying his daughter's need to know, definitively, what tribes she descends from, notes that in the early part of the twentieth century several Indigenous peoples voluntary switched their tribal affiliations in order to keep dwindling band numbers up. (As an aside, I also want to point out that the first homecoming scene between Salt Baby and her father contains what I take to be an overt reference to George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe; upon entering her father's house, Salt Baby kicks off her shoes, noting that walking on concrete in the city always makes her feet hurt. This is an echo of a line spoken by Rita Joe's sister in Ryga, that when Rita first came to Vancouver her feet hurt.)

What makes all of this so dramatically affecting is that Johnson skillfully grounds these larger cultural--and expressly gendered--questions in an honest, funny, and incredibly believable romance between Salt Baby and Al. Indeed, as blissfully ignorant as Al might at first seem (we cringe, during the first scene, when he asks Salt Baby to speak some Mohawk to him), we gradually come to understand that the results of the DNA test are not an issue for him, and, indeed, that he eventually comes to rue his suggestion that she take the test in the first place. A genetic map won't make Al love Salt Baby any more or any less. Whereas for Salt Baby, Al's whiteness, regardless of whether or not she goes through with the test, will always be an impediment--and for precisely the reasons noted above. The burden of reproductive futurity dooms Salt Baby and Al, and it says something that in the scene where this is revealed (as well as a later one, when, after having broken up, Salt Baby and Al reencounter each other at an old hangout following a disastrous date between Salt Baby and an Indigenous man) the mostly teenage audience audibly sighed.

While I feel that the play is about 10-15 minutes too long, I was gripped throughout. All of the actors are superb, and the production is deftly directed by Nolan, who inserts some notable elements of physical movement in between scenes, most memorably a seductive dance between Salt Baby and Al just before they have sex for the first time. (As another aside, I am pleased to see that Nolan's The Unplugging, which received its premiere at the Arts Club's Revue Stage in 2013--and which I write about here--is getting a remount in Toronto, in a co-production between NEPA and the Factory Theatre, later this March.) A shout out, as well, to the simple yet highly evocative set design by Norm Daschle and Johanna de Vries, which makes effective use of a series of wooden containers and a suspended bamboo frame upstage to conjure different spaces; for example, sheets hung from the frame and between which Salt Baby and Al snuggle post-coitally become a nifty top view of Al's bed. The sound design (by Devon Bonneau, who also did the lights) also features a funky mix of songs by Indigenous artists, including Jennifer Kreisberg, whose Road Forward collaborator, Marie Clements, I was sitting beside in the theatre.

The Talking Stick Festival continues through March 1, with plenty to see. Check out the offerings here.

P.

Plugging The Unplugging

Just a brief note to say that The Unplugging, a new play by Yvette Nolan, began preview performances at Arts Club Theatre's Revue Stage on Granville Island last night. Richard and I, along with our good friend Cathy, visiting from the UK, were in the audience.

In the play, Nolan (former Artistic Director at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto), has adapted an Athabaskan legend, as recorded by Velma Wallis, called Two Old Women, in which the complaining protagonists of the title are cast out into the wilderness during a time of hardship after they have become too much of a burden on the rest of the community. Forced to rely on each other, and their storehouse of strength, stamina, and skills, the two women thrive against the odds, to the point where the community that has cast them out comes calling for their aid.

In Nolan's version, set in the very near future, she has tapped into the current cultural zeitgeist re our anxiously wired, digital culture (see TV's Revolution), imagining a post-apocalyptic world without electricity. Bern and Elena must re-discover the lost ways of their Aboriginal foremothers, "becoming," in the words of Nolan's script, something new. But the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Seamus, threatens their fragile new community of two. Jenn Griffin (as Bern) and Margo Kane (as Elena) are powerful stage presences, and they are ably supported by Anton Lipovetsky as Seamus. Lois Anderson is the director, with dramaturgical assistance having been provided by Rachel Ditor and my buddy DD Kugler.

I'll have more to say about the play after it officially opens next Wednesday, October 17th, and I get a chance to return for an additional viewing. But I did want to acknowledge how generous Yvette has already been in sharing the script with me--and the students of my Introduction to Drama class at SFU, who will be studying it and the production over the next two weeks.

I also wanted to say that I think the tag line and poster design for the show are among the most savvy that I have encountered in a long time. See below.

P.