Location: Zoom Room A
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8075386377?pwd=QGMSB3uhyUxwIbvOIzkUanoMoqRkOX.1
Online Session
Working Title: When They Left the Dust Remembered: Indigenous Land-Based Dramaturgy / Connection / Disconnection / Cellular Memory/
Metis performer-playwright P.J. Prudat’s latest work in development kiskisiwin nimihko/my blood remembers is a throbbing meditation on the dizzying constellation of cells that feed, form, and carry the human body through its natural life even as they carry the biota with and within which that body interacts, the memory of the bodies that precede it, and the seeds of possibility for future descendants within whose cellular galaxy ancestral memory will continue to reverberate.
Prudat—as archiver, archivist, and fleshly archive– narrates a personal memoir that spirals outwards beyond the temporal and spatial bounds of one life: her interior present rests upon the bones of countless colonial violations. These traumatic events are carried within the one hundred trillion cells that make up Prudat’s being. Carried, too, are the “land, sky, water, [and] fire” that sustained the ancestors whose cells dance in Prudat’s blood and marrow and that will continue to sustain and be stewarded by the descendants whose cells dance with them (Native Earth, Program Note).
This paper brings Prudat’s work into conversation with my own investigations as a land based dramaturg and with several land-based works-in-progress by several emerging Indigenous artists in Tkaron:to. Here, I continue to explore the project of anti-colonial reworlding through somatic praxis (see Castillo 57-58) as it navigates the tensions between connection/disconnection and the generative possibilities they offer to the Indigenous land-based dramaturg whose “approaches to new play development [are] rooted in [recovering and] maintaining relationships with the land, waterways, or skyworld” (Lachance 54).
Jill Carter
Based in Tkaron:to where she was born and largely raised, Jill Carter is an Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi theatre-practitioner, researcher and educator at the University of Toronto. Her research and praxis base themselves in the mechanics of story creation, the processes of delivery, and the mechanics of Affect.