Native theatre’s curtain call
Twenty years later, the medium is set for a new stage
BY Drew Hayden Taylor
Photography courtesy of Native Earth Performing Arts
It was a little over 20 years ago today that Tomson Highway taught the band to play. In those scant two decades, a lot has changed, and it does seem as if native theatre has been going in and out of style. It all began way back in 1986. Most theatre historians will say the contemporary native theatrical renaissance began on a cold November evening. The 25th, I believe. The wind may have been out of the east. That’s when an impoverished theatre company named Native Earth Performing Arts produced an unknown play about seven native women’s preoccupation with bingo, at a native community centre in Toronto. The play was called The Rez Sisters.
Oh, there had been other plays by native authors prior to that, Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths being the most notable, but for one reason or another, they had not tapped into the larger Canadian theatrical consciousness. Plays by Manitoulin Island’s De-Ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre Group had been entertaining summer audiences since the early 1980s, and Native Earth had been producing urban-based collective plays for years, but nothing kidnapped the public’s attention the way Tomson’s masterful work did.
From those humble beginnings, the world for native theatre artists changed. Like the Big Bang theory, native theatre rapidly expanded exponentially. The following year, the same company that struggled to produce the play found the interest and financing to take it on a cross-country tour. In 1988, The Rez Sisters was invited to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one of only two Canadian plays that summer. And the next year, its sequel, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, once more shook up the Canadian theatrical community. It should also be mentioned that The Rez Sisters won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play. It was also nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Not bad for a play about bingo by an unknown Cree playwright.
Many tales are told in the Aboriginal theatre community of how, during the early weeks of that original production, staff and cast had to give tickets away on the street in front of the Native Friendship Centre to guarantee an audience. Since then, Canadian (and many foreign) stages have been set ablaze with performances by and about native people. Now, in any given year, half a dozen or more productions of native writers’ work can be seen on stages across the country—stages not operated by native people, main stage companies that have embraced the Aboriginal way of theatrical storytelling.
Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, Saskatoon’s Persephone Theatre, Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre, Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay, Factory Theatre in Toronto, just to name a few, have taken a bite out of the native theatre apple. Perhaps the pinnacle of this interest came in 1991, when three of Canada’s biggest theatre companies joined forces and co-produced the remount of Dry Lips. The Manitoba Theatre Centre, the National Arts Centre and the Royal Alexandra Theatre are rumoured to have spent over $1 million on the production.
But, some ask, do those plays still have the same bite as when we and the industry were young and full of piss so many years ago? It’s hard to say. Our stories told of the results of 500 years of colonization, of residential schools, of being put on reserves or thrust into the city, of a sort of internal diaspora. Theatre became a sort of cathartic release after so many years of being silenced. It was a way to bitch artistically. Back during those formative years, Tomson Highway, Daniel David Moses and I garnered most of the attention. Tomson kicked the door open and broke the hinges: The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips are still the standards by which the rest of our plays are judged. He was the John Lennon of the group.
Daniel David Moses was George Harrison. Quiet, introspective, and his work was very different. There was a definite poetic flavour to his plays, probably because he was a poet by nature and profession. Coyote City and Almighty Voice and His Wife have an almost serene, ethereal quality.
And then there was me, somewhere between Ringo and Paul. I was more prolific, but my material was more kitchen-sink drama, lacking the esoteric nature or vision of their work. They were and are true artists in every sense of the word, whereas I was perfectly content to be a good storyteller. I was also the only one not to have gone to university. And not to be gay. Talk about feeling left out....
There were, of course, many other writers who contributed to native theatre’s success during those early years: Ben Cardinal, Shirley Cheechoo, Joyce B. Joe, Tina Mason and John McLeod, just to name a few, who had exhibited early promise but never proceeded much beyond their first play or production for a variety of reasons—possibly because most were never published or properly promoted. One of the ironic twists about being a native playwright involves the concept of self-marketing. In the native community, it’s considered impolite and un-native to promote oneself over anybody else; the community is more important than the individual. So, many first-time and one-time First Nations playwrights would get the attention of a native theatre company, but lack the self-confidence or the know-how to proceed much beyond that. In the world of playwrighting, it is literally a case of the squeaky Indian getting the grease.
It wasn’t that long ago, maybe eight or so years into the contemporary Aboriginal theatrical renaissance, when a former artistic director of a theatre for young audiences, who had just returned from an extended trip to Europe, confessed something to me at a barbecue. She said: “The only interesting theatre these days is coming out of the native community.” Those were indeed exciting times.
Awards were being won. Every new production garnered much publicity. Plays and books about native plays were being published. It was theatre that asked some tough questions about Canada and its original inhabitants. And more and more new writers were coming forth with stories and tales to be told. Frontiers were being crossed, and Canada was listening to us. And paying us for the right to listen (though that’s a relative term in the non-lucrative world of theatre). We all shared in each other’s success. It was like being on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s.
Many things have changed in the intervening years. Native is now part of the established Canadian theatrical community. There are now a lot more professional native theatre companies spread across Canada, but there are concerns that the quality of theatre isn’t as earth-shattering as it once was.
Tomson Highway’s first main stage in a dozen years, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, met with limited response two years ago, though many agreed it was still vintage Highway. He now spends half the year in the south of France, eating cheese and writing mostly novels and children’s stories. Daniel has been living the life of quiet academia at Queen’s University, with little of his unique theatre making it to the masses.
Perhaps the last great hurrah by a native playwright was when Ian Ross burst onto the scene, winning the Governor General’s Award for his play fareWel, in 1997. Since then, he too has been keeping a low profile, producing little other than some Winnipeg-based radio and print commentaries.
Native theatres themselves are suffering from the leaner economic times. A study tabled at a conference on native arts in Banff, Alberta, last summer noted that one of Canada’s most influential native theatre companies, the 20-year-old Les Ondinook Theatre, run by Yves Sioui Durand, was a fixture on the Montreal and national theatre scene until it shut its doors in 2006. Funding difficulties were rumoured to be the reason. Two other companies, located in Western Canada, face funding issues that threaten their futures.
To be fair, the waters of First Nations theatre are not completely still. Turtle Gals, with their amazing Native Earth show, The Scrubbing Project, made us all gasp at the possibilities of what could be done. It was a unique blend of song, theatre, political commentary, combined with a sense of sheer enjoyment of performing that made it extremely infectious and satisfying.
And this season in Ottawa, Métis writer Marie Clements will premiere her new show, Copper Thunderbird, at the National Arts Centre in May, courtesy of new artistic director Peter Hinton. This plateauing could also be a sign of acceptance. The rebels have joined the establishment. It has been two decades, and the initial shock and wave of interest in what Canada’s First Nations had to say and how we said it have passed.
Today, the real indigenous theatrical excitement is coming from below the border. Since the birth of The Rez Sisters, Canadian native artists have been conscious of how much more fully developed the industry is up here than in the United States. Until recently, most native theatre performed in America has been imported from Canada. At almost every native theatre festival held down south (the few that have occurred), two-thirds to three-quarters of talent (playwrights and occasionally actors and directors) have been of Canadian Aboriginal ancestry. In fact, one company’s board of directors complained to its artistic director about the constant importing of Canadian First Nations talent.
This is primarily because we have those 20 years of theatrical history to call upon. We know what we’re doing. Often, in the U.S., when there is a call for scripts to be developed, it’s the Canadian native playwrights who submit completed first drafts. According to a native artistic director, many native American writers (admittedly not all) usually submit one or two scenes. Or just an outline. Or a paragraph. Theatre is not new to us. We know the game.
In America, they are just waking up to the possibility of what native theatre holds, while we already have that training, and the talent.
That’s why it seems these days it’s Americans who have been pushing the native theatre envelope. Last year, Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, produced a comedy of mine. It is one of the five largest repertory theatre companies in America and that production was rumoured to have had the largest budget of any native play ever done in North America. Native Voices, the predominant producer of native theatre in California, regularly develops half a dozen plays a year at its L.A. festival, and produces, on average, two a year. It is developing an excellent reputation for the work it does and the support it provides. Since 1999, Native Voices has held 49 workshops and presented 40 staged readings of new plays by native playwrights, with seven professional productions—three by Canadian writers.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a well-respected theatre company ironically called Mixed Blood Theatre is embarking on an ambitious endeavor. It has contracted 15 native playwrights from across Canada and the United States to write four- to eight-minute short original plays detailing a social or political issue. It’s the theatre’s attempt to “produce an opinionated snapshot of Native America in 2007.” Then it will produce an evening of all the short pieces in 2008. One of the guidelines suggests: “Write as if your whole audience is Indian.”
Perhaps the future of native theatre lies farther abroad, across the eastern and western oceans. In the last six months, I’ve had one of my plays, Someday, translated into Arabic at a university in Jordan, and also into Czech. The same play is part of a course at the University of Madras in India. There have been productions of various native plays in countries as diverse as Germany, Italy and Japan. I wonder how the word “bingo” translates into Japanese?
Western theatre has been driving people to exotic places for over 2,500 years, and we’ve been riding in that car for only two decades. It’s hard to say what the future of native theatre will bring. There are still so many more stories out there to tell, and so many more storytellers waiting for their chance. Theatre is the next logical step in traditional storytelling. It’s the ability to take the audience on a journey using your imagination, your body and your voice. It can be timeless. Like narrow ties, I’m sure native theatre will continue to go in and out of style.
