Research Interests:
A performance event celebrating 25 years of Tomson Highway's play The Rez Sisters is used as a sample case to analyse issues of indigeneity, performance and identity for a group of Aboriginal actors, academics and community members.... more
A performance event celebrating 25 years of Tomson Highway's play The Rez Sisters is used as a sample case to analyse issues of indigeneity, performance and identity for a group of Aboriginal actors, academics and community members. This specific performance event demonstrated how several different communities can coalesce around a single unifying script. In addition, this performance event articulated how the play affected individual Aboriginal women and the event utilised several cultural features that reflected a specific community's protocols. As context, the author considers how institutional support and a policy of indigenization provided the possibility of an academic event to honor one of Canada's most celebrated Aboriginal playwrights.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Drew Hayden Taylor has been writing plays for years that use comedy and stereotypes to address intercultural issues. Taylor’s fourth play in his Blues quartet, The Berlin Blues, like the preceding three plays – The Bootlegger Blues... more
Drew Hayden Taylor has been writing plays for years that use comedy and stereotypes to address intercultural issues. Taylor’s fourth play in his Blues quartet, The Berlin Blues, like the preceding three plays – The Bootlegger Blues (1991), The Baby Blues (1999) and Buz’Gem Blues (2002) – contains a thread of physical comedy, word play and revelations that coalesce around the intercultural aspects of negotiating racial divides. In his latest Blues play, we find a somewhat stereotypical German couple, bent on building their German’s fantasy theme park in Ojibway territory. Predictably, this capitalist venture is greeted in the community with both scepticism and optimism. The German’s envision “Ojibway World”(22), complete with the “Medicine Ferris Wheel,” “four directions shuttle service,” “Turtle Island Aquarium,” “Whiskeyjack Pub and Bar” and a hotel called “Haida-way” and the “Weesageechek Water Slide”(19). Considering the German couple’s predilection for indianische anything, this plot-line is to be expected. The other elements of the plot include stampeding buffalo that take revenge, a loosely developed love story and an Aboriginal man’s “buy-in” to this capitalist dream. The carnivalesque elements and the fantasy-world setting are Taylor’s attempts to transcend the normative, but unfortunately, the binaries of Aboriginal/German worked to keep this reader fixated on entrenched cultural stereotypes that lack flexibility.
Research Interests:
In this review of Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage, Michelle La Flamme brings her experience in the field of Indigenous performance to a focused reading of the newest edited volume on Indigenous theatre. La... more
In this review of Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage, Michelle La Flamme brings her experience in the field of Indigenous performance to a focused reading of the newest edited volume on Indigenous theatre. La Flamme outlines the significant pedagogical, dramaturgical, and personal insights on performance practice that are offered by Indigenous actors, directors, and educators committed to decolonizing theatre. She traces the strengths of the book and, at the same time, notes ways in which Indigenous performance scholarship might develop as it makes room for new forms and voices.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Trauma in Aboriginal performance art practice implicitly reveals the precariousness of any established Aboriginal history. In the reenactment of trauma - individual pain confronting collective pain - performance art does not make meaning... more
Trauma in Aboriginal performance art practice implicitly reveals the precariousness of any established Aboriginal history. In the reenactment of trauma - individual pain confronting collective pain - performance art does not make meaning or create closure. Marcia Crosby
Research Interests:
In this review of Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage, Michelle La Flamme brings her experience in the field of Indigenous performance to a focused reading of the newest edited volume on Indigenous theatre. La... more
In this review of Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage, Michelle La Flamme brings her experience in the field of Indigenous performance to a focused reading of the newest edited volume on Indigenous theatre. La Flamme outlines the significant pedagogical, dramaturgical, and personal insights on performance practice that are offered by Indigenous actors, directors, and educators committed to decolonizing theatre. She traces the strengths of the book and, at the same time, notes ways in which Indigenous performance scholarship might develop as it makes room for new forms and voices.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This collection of essays offers critical discussions that illuminate some of the power behind playwright Marie Clements’s vision. There are many ways to associate her work with different debates and questions that have animated Canadian... more
This collection of essays offers critical discussions that illuminate some of the power behind playwright Marie Clements’s vision. There are many ways to associate her work with different debates and questions that have animated Canadian literary criticism. Whether her work is linked to larger postcolonial concerns regarding the “coming to voice” of Aboriginal writers, framed within the rising interest and acceptance of Aboriginal theatre that has rocked the country since Highway’s seminal work Rez Sisters, or understood within a larger discourse around feminist writing, these essays suggest there is much interest in both the medium and the message in her work. Clements is also one of many Aboriginal (and postcolonial Canadian) playwrights whose work offers a revision of Canadian narratives predicated on the notion that Canada was “won” by the colonial imperative. Much fruitful discussion can come from understanding Clements's repeated thematic interest in this contentious Canad...
Research Interests:
The paper begins by discussing some Aboriginal teachings offering the author’s working definition of Medicine based on the teachings that elders have shared. These cultural traditions reflect a belief in the power of performance and the... more
The paper begins by discussing some Aboriginal teachings offering the author’s working definition of Medicine based on the teachings that elders have shared. These cultural traditions reflect a belief in the power of performance and the possibility of performance as medicinal. The paper applies some of these teachings about Medicine to suggest that the form and experience of these theatrical events can be understood as contemporary good Medicine. These performances and plays by Aboriginal people bring balance to the witnesses through honouring the deceased by way of naming rituals, they bring balance to communities by showing the humanity of Aboriginal women, and they provide a cathartic ritual or ceremony for the release of trauma.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This is not about the swinging café door à la Fred Wah, this is about the Wall and hitting it hard… The Master's houses are not built with straw and one huff and one puff or several “Whaps” will not allow the ease of entry within and... more
This is not about the swinging café door à la Fred Wah, this is about the Wall and hitting it hard… The Master's houses are not built with straw and one huff and one puff or several “Whaps” will not allow the ease of entry within and through these walls… there is no ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A performance event celebrating 25 years of Tomson Highway's play The Rez Sisters is used as a sample case to analyse issues of indigeneity, performance and identity for a group of Aboriginal actors, academics and community members.... more
A performance event celebrating 25 years of Tomson Highway's play The Rez Sisters is used as a sample case to analyse issues of indigeneity, performance and identity for a group of Aboriginal actors, academics and community members. This specific performance event demonstrated how several different communities can coalesce around a single unifying script. In addition, this performance event articulated how the play affected individual Aboriginal women and the event utilised several cultural features that reflected a specific community's protocols. As context, the author considers how institutional support and a policy of indigenization provided the possibility of an academic event to honor one of Canada's most celebrated Aboriginal playwrights.
Research Interests:
Drew Hayden Taylor has been writing plays for years that use comedy and stereotypes to address intercultural issues. Taylor’s fourth play in his Blues quartet, The Berlin Blues, like the preceding three plays – The Bootlegger Blues... more
Drew Hayden Taylor has been writing plays for years that use comedy and stereotypes to address intercultural issues. Taylor’s fourth play in his Blues quartet, The Berlin Blues, like the preceding three plays – The Bootlegger Blues (1991), The Baby Blues (1999) and Buz’Gem Blues (2002) – contains a thread of physical comedy, word play and revelations that coalesce around the intercultural aspects of negotiating racial divides. In his latest Blues play, we find a somewhat stereotypical German couple, bent on building their German’s fantasy theme park in Ojibway territory. Predictably, this capitalist venture is greeted in the community with both scepticism and optimism. The German’s envision “Ojibway World”(22), complete with the “Medicine Ferris Wheel,” “four directions shuttle service,” “Turtle Island Aquarium,” “Whiskeyjack Pub and Bar” and a hotel called “Haida-way” and the “Weesageechek Water Slide”(19). Considering the German couple’s predilection for indianische anything, this...