Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Moderator: Heather Davis-Fisch
Sponsored by The Cole Foundation
Remapping Blyth in 2017: Indigenous Performance Confronts Canada 150
My dissertation-in-process is a rural feminist and decolonial historical analysis of the Blyth Festival Theatre. Since 1975, Blyth has produced an entire summer season of Canadian plays (except in 2020), emphasizing new work. Throughout this history, important productions challenged past representations of the “imagined community” of Canada found on Blyth’s stage (Anderson 8).
At CATR’s 2023 conference, I propose discussing two Indigenous-led productions at the Blyth Festival in 2017, when many Canadians celebrated the nation’s so-called 150th birthday. The two plays include Curve Lake First Nation playwright Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Berlin Blues and Mohawk and Tuscarora playwright Falen Johnson and Abénaki/Euro playwright Jessica Carmichael’s play Ipperwash. These plays not only call attention to the existence of Indigenous people who have been stewards of this land for much longer than 150 years but also reframes the history of the physical site of the Blyth Festival Theatre through what decolonial theorist and historian Lisa Brooks calls Native Space. Within the first few seasons of Blyth’s performance history, troubling caricatures of Indigenous people are present in three works. Throughout the remaining decades, there has been a complete lack of Indigenous representation on Blyth’s stage. The performances of The Berlin Blues and Ipperwash in Canada’s bicentennial year confront Blyth’s past performance history while prompting more general questions about Canadian identity. Blyth artists and audiences are asked to reflect on questions similar to those offered at the end of an article by Falen Johnson for Intermission Magazine:
I wait and wonder what will happen next. Mostly I wonder how Canada will react the next time there is an uprising. Because next time will happen, it’s just a matter of when. In this post–Canada 150 world, will you stand with us, Canada? Or will you just remain quietly, politely silent?
– Johnson
Taylor Marie Graham, Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) University of Guelph, Sessional Professor at University of Waterloo & Western University
Bio: Taylor Marie Graham (she/her) is an award-winning theatre artist and educator living in Cambridge, Ontario / Haldimand Tract. Her creative and scholarly work often explores rural feminist identities and the decolonization of bodies in space.
To learn more about Taylor’s work, please visit: www.taylormariegraham.com
Decolonizing Canadian Theatre Through Indigenous Collaboration
Extractivism is the logical corollary of capitalism, itself a distillation of Western colonial values underpinning the imperial occupation of Turtle Island. These values are evidenced in the Doctrine of Discovery and the invocation of Terra Nullius as a justification for seizing Indigenous lands precisely because these lands were not used in ways that European colonizers recognized as productive. While contemporary theatre artists aim to embrace Truth and Reconciliation and make space for Indigenous artists in productions and programming, extractivist ideologies continue to make our theatres into dangerous spaces for these artists. From the idealization of rigid hierarchy to mantras like “the show must go on,” along with the real financial limitations theatres face, contemporary Canadian theatre risks harm to all its participants, not just Indigenous artists. Unsurprisingly, many Indigenous artists (and potential artists) do not see themselves interpellated by audition calls or welcomed by existing theatre companies. To change who works in our theatres and performs on our stages, we must radically change how we do theatre.
In my paper, I will discuss three recent projects that have allowed me to work with Indigenous artists: a CBU course-based student production of Joseph Dandurand’s Please Do Not Touch the Indians Mik’maq, a professional production of shalan joudrey’s KOQM, and another course-based experiment with students in Listuguj, QC, based on a new adaptation of Stephen Augustine’s Mi’kmaw creation story. I will describe how these projects sought to alter traditional theatrical hierarchy and process by adopting more collaborative and relational models and prioritizing multi-disciplinary engagement. I will also discuss points of tension between this approach and the temporal and fiscal needs of theatre as an industry and describe how we addressed these challenges. Finally, I will consider how spiritual ritual grounds Indigenous-led theatre, paralleling the spiritual aspects of Western performance that motivated its development and preservation in the classical and medieval periods, leading us back to the potential for theatre to resist – or at the least, not re-enact – the values of colonialism.
Sheila Christie, Associate Professor of English and Drama Chair, Department of Literature, Folklore, and The Arts Cape Breton University, Unama’ki (Cape Breton), Nova Scotia
Reanimating Loss Itself in Tapestry Opera’s Shawnadithit
In 1823, on the northeast shore of the island known to the Mi’kmaq people today as K’taqmkuk (Newfoundland), the Beothuk woman Shawnadithit was kidnapped by colonists. After spending five years as a household servant in the residence of John Peyton Jr on Exploits Island, Shawnadithit was brought to St. John’s to meet with William Epps Cormack, an anthropologist intent on documenting something of her people’s language, life and customs. Their encounter—between one of the last surviving Beothuk and a so-called “salvage ethnographer”—has since accrued mythical status, becoming the subject of poems, plays and novels, including a major treatment in Michael Crummey’s 2001 novel River Thieves.
The overdetermination of Shawnadithit’s story—and the colonial historiography of the Beothuk genocide by extension—has been challenged and re-enlivened in a new treatment by Tapestry Opera led by Algonquin theatre artist Yvette Nolan. Gathering Indigenous artists from across Turtle Island and collaborating with Newfoundland-born composer Dean Burry, Nolan saw in Shawnadithit and Cormack’s encounter an opportunity to revisit Shawnadithit’s story from an Indigenous perspective. Left with no words from Shawnadithit, Nolan and Burry drew inspiration from the drawings Shawnadithit made in her meetings with Cormack. Their new “Canadian-Indigenous Opera,” Shawnadithit, premiered in May 2019. Drawing on insights from the artists, and my knowledge growing up as a settler in this area with direct ancestral connections to the late history of the Beothuk people, I will consider how the opera newly places Shawnadithit’s story in live relationship to the unique circumstances of truth and reconciliation in Newfoundland.
Barry Freeman, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies with a cross-appointment to the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning OISE/UofT
Bio: He is the author of Staging Strangers: Theatre & Global Ethics (2017), co-editor with Kathleen Gallagher of In Defence of Theatre: Practices and Social Interventions (2016) and served from 2011-22 as Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review. During that time, he co/edited 8 special issues and co/authored 15 articles on issues of importance to contemporary Canadian theatre and performance.
