Indigenous theatre

This collection of contemporary postcolonial plays demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of a body of work that is currently influencing the shape of contemporary world theatre. This anthology encompasses both internationally admired 'classics' and previously unpublished texts, all dealing with imperialism and its aftermath. It includes work from Canada, the Caribbean, South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, New Zealand and Australia. A general introduction outlines major themes in postcolonial plays. Introductions to individual plays include information on authors as well as overviews of cultural contexts, major ideas and performance history. Dramaturgical techniques in the plays draw on Western theatre as well as local performance traditions and include agit-prop dialogue, musical routines, storytelling, ritual incantation, epic narration, dance, multimedia presentation and puppetry. The plays dramatize diverse issues, such as: *globalization * political corruption * race and class relations *slavery *gender and sexuality *media representation *nationalism

Examining representations of gendered violence in Marie Clements' The Unnatural and Accidental Women as they are used for decolonizing purposes, I aim to elucidate the complexity of the linkage between colonization, violence against Indigenous women, and contemporary Indigenous women's dramatic production. Employing Clements' play as an example, this paper contends that plays by Indigenous women do not merely memorialize colonial transgressions, but they also provide an avenue for individual and potential cultural healing by deconstructing some of the harmful ideological work performed by colonial and occasionally postcolonial misrepresentations. Dramatic texts by contemporary Indigenous women, I argue, especially those containing revisionist historical components, revive and preserve cultural memory and function in direct opposition to colonialist disparagement of Indigeneity/Métissage. So, too, do these works educate readers/spectators concerning colonial histories of violence, ultimately facilitating a process of relearning, which can lead to reconciliatory understandings thereby creating potential for collective healing. Marie Clements' understudied 2005 play The Unnatural and Accidental Women, this essay will argue, both dramatizes marginalized and murdered indigenous women reclaiming their voices and acts as a mechanism through which living marginalized indigenous women can reclaim their voices, all against the power regimes of the contemporary settler colonial society. My essay elucidates the extent to which Clements' play speaks to the systemic violence to which Indigenous women are subject on a regular basis, not only in North America, but in all White settler societies, while also emphasizing Indigenous resistance to the problematic settler colonial logic of elimination that has resulted in the sociocultural diminish-ment of so many Indigenous cultures. The violent conquest that facilitated the settlement of White settler societies has been well documented not only in the American context, but in literature from Australia and New Zealand. So, too, is it widely recognized that Indigenous women living in White settler societies are overrepresented as victims of gendered violence, in both intra and intercultural contexts.

"Andegna (The First) was developed and performed during the fall and winter of 2009–10 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This article examines the complex social, political, and cultural contexts that informed the training, workshops, and process of creating an ensemble and performance in a time of national transformation. Urbanization and the crossing currents of Africa, Islam, Christian Orthodoxy, capitalism, the West, and technology prompted the re-conceptualization of performance, its function, and expression. In this article Thomas Riccio highlights the methodologies of reinventing an indigenous performance that is respectful of local traditions yet contemporary and accessible. He discusses how performance provides a forum for revealing social, political, and cultural trauma, and itself becomes an act of affirmation – an assertion of protest and healing that makes visible, immediate, and tactile the histories and unresolved issues haunting modern Ethiopia. Thomas Riccio, is Professor of Performance and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, having previously been Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, Resident Director and Dramaturg, the Cleveland Play House, Assistant Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre, Visiting Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam and the Korean National University for the Arts, and Artistic Director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska Native performance group. He has worked extensively in the area of indigenous performance, ritual, and shamanism, conducting workshops, research, and devising numerous performances in Africa, Russia, Siberia, Korea, China, Vietnam, and Alaska. He was declared a ‘Cultural Hero’ of the Sakha Republic in central Siberia.
Key terms: Litooma, reclamation, reconciliation, indigenous performance, social change, activism, theatre and religion."

This paper examines Indigenous-settler performance-making processes in Choctaw artist Randy Reinholz’s residential school adaptation of Measure for Measure, Off the Rails, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and City Opera Vancouver’s Missing, a chamber opera dedicated to British Columbia’s missing and murdered Indigenous women with libretto by Métis/Dene playwright Marie Clements. Based on my experience observing rehearsals for both productions and in conversation with the central Indigenous creators, I have analysed the ways in which performance-making processes can foster intercultural relationship-building, recognize and engage with the land upon which they occur, and initiate a company’s long-term commitment to Indigenous artists. This work theorizes how Indigenous resistance can be enacted, either dramaturgically or otherwise, from within Indigenous-settler performance-making processes. It also examines the ways in which privileged settler researchers, like myself, can responsibly engage with Indigenous research paradigms and epistemologies.

Mainstream postcolonial theory has had a great deal to say about indigeneity as an evolving intellectual conceptualization but only a little about performativity (beyond engagements with speech act theory), and even less about performance. ... By bringing together essays that attend closely to performance and indigeneity, as the two have been articulated in very specific sites and genres, this special issue of Interventions hopes to yield new multimodal insights into topics of perennial interest to postcolonial studies. These include memory, embodiment, history and temporality, as well as the provenance of oral and textual forms. How indigenous knowledges of environments and events are gleaned or transmitted in particular places across time is another recurring motif. Most of the essays are also concerned at some level with the matter of representation - in both senses of the term - but the selection as a whole is much less about identity politics than about the practical workings of indigeneity as a kind of sensibility in artistic, political and social realms.

The book examines the concept of Indigenous theatre as theorized by artist-scholar-researcher Floyd Favel (Cree) from Poundmaker reserve, Canada. It focuses both on his pioneering critical work on Indigenous theatre and essays devoted to diverse aspects of Indigenous cultures in Canada. Favel was the only Indigenous student of Jerzy Grotowski, Polish revolutionary theatre artist, and scholar. The book contains translations into Polish of Favel's select critical essays, poetry, and his play. It also contains four essays on his work and theatre methodologies, as well as on Cree culture and storytelling.

In the midst of climate catastrophe—a warming rate twice the global average, raging wildfires, surging floods—the Canadian addiction to pipelines and oil sands exploitation remains unchecked. The spectacle of a settler colony desperately turning more oil into state revenue, while ravaging Indigenous lands and simultaneously preaching environmental sustainability, could inspire a dark sort of laughter: catastrophe as camp. But could the ridiculousness of our predicament foster new forms of inter-species intimacy and collective transformation? This is the wager taken by Bears, a production by playwright/director Matthew MacKenzie and Alberta’s Punctuate! Theatre which has toured widely since 2018. The play tells the story of Floyd, a Cree-Métis pipeline worker who finds himself on the run from the Mounties after committing an act of sabotage. Floyd narrates his westward escape in collaboration with a chorus of eight dancers who transform into the flora and fauna alongside the Trans-Mountain pipeline route: prairie gophers, berry patches, orcas, and grizzlies. Black light, shifting video projections and electronic beats provide a backdrop as Floyd, in his flight from the state, slowly finds himself turning into a bear. With the help of his Mama, a protective figure who moves freely about the stage, Floyd eventually manages to wipe off the oil that has obscured his connection with his ancestors and with the land. Yet Floyd’s journey is not an escape into a romantic ‘nature’ or a commodified Indigenous spirituality. As Floyd moves through devastated landscapes, the chorus animates a black-light vision of our collective future, and calls for solidarity between humans and other beings. Can we find a way to stand together for justice, as the play exhorts us, within a dark mess of our own making?

ABSTRACT Examining representations of gendered violence in Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women as they are used for decolonizing purposes, I aim to elucidate the complexity of the linkage between colonization, violence against Indigenous women, and contemporary Indigenous women's dramatic production. Employing Clements’ play as an example, this paper contends that plays by Indigenous women do not merely memorialize colonial transgressions, but they also provide an avenue for individual and potential cultural healing by deconstructing some of the harmful ideological work performed by colonial and occasionally postcolonial misrepresentations. Dramatic texts by contemporary Indigenous women, I argue, especially those containing revisionist historical components, revive and preserve cultural memory and function in direct opposition to colonialist disparagement of Indigeneity/Métissage. So, too, do these works educate readers/spectators concerning colonial histories of violence, ultimately facilitating a process of relearning, which can lead to reconciliatory understandings thereby creating potential for collective healing.