Native American Performance and Representation

7. Embodiment as a Healing Process: Native American Women and Performance

chapter 7 Embodiment as a Healing Process Native American Women and Performance Shelley Scott theatrical roles that may be termed autobiographical have a heightened importance in work by Aboriginal women. They can be uniquely therapeutic for both the performer and the spectator, as well as aesthetically and thematically powerful. In this chapter I focus on the examples of Shirley Cheechoo’s one-woman show A Path with No Moccasins, and Rosalie Jones’s dance-drama No Home but the Heart. I also discuss Monique Mojica’s play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots and allude to some further examples. The autobiographical nature of the performance is quite different in each case and takes on various shades of complexity , but I will argue that in each example, the central commonality is the importance of healing and the manifestation of that mission in the body of the performer.1 In reference to black women writing for the stage, African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears has explained that to write is to “define ourselves, by ourselves, and create stories to keep that definition within the limits of our own controls.”2 Sears (who was the director and dramaturge for Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots) suggests that writing for theater is a form of healing, a longing to tell one’s story, a process that is also a symbolic gesture to recover the past, to gain a sense of reunion and release: “We have created our own theatre from a language that was forced upon us, and we season it with our own sense of rhythm, ritual and music. Not a song and dance, but a heightened language and ritual.”3 Métis writer Maria Campbell, among many others, has argued that the storyteller has an essential place in the healthy spiritual life of the community.4 To illustrate, Native dramatist Jordan Wheeler explains, “The victory in the aboriginal story is when harmony can be achieved between the character and his or her environment. . . . During five hundred years of contact, the 124 Shelley Scott lives of aboriginal people have borne the onslaught of pain and tragedy. The result is a beleaguered, traumatized people suffering deep wounds. At present the aboriginal community is healing, and stories that reflect the struggle, and the resulting harmonious existence with a given environment , help the healing process.”5 It is not surprising that this healing through storytelling should take place in the theater. Tomson Highway suggests that the Native “oral tradition translates most easily and effectively into a three-dimensional medium. In a sense, it’s like taking the ‘stage’ that lives inside the mind, the imagination, and transposing it— using words, actors, lights, sound—onto the stage in a theatre.”6 Theorist Barbara Godard writes that it is useful to think about oral literature as performance, because it: distributes the emphasis equally between text and context, between text and receiver. Artistic performance sets up an interpretive frame within which the messages being communicated are to be understood. Performance as frame invites special attention to and heightened awareness of the act of expression . . . [F]ormal patterns have the power to engage the audience’s participation, binding its members to the performer as co-participants in an event.7 It is also unsurprising that a number of Native works for theater have taken the form of the autobiographical monologue, or one-person show, since this particular form is so closely associated with issues of self-identity. Highway’s analogy of taking the creative story inside one’s head and projecting it onto other bodies can also apply to the process of taking one’s intangible sense of identity and personal experience and transposing it into a physical form. For example, I find it telling that, while Highway is best known for his large-cast plays, he chose to use the monologue form when it came to sharing the very personal story of his own brother’s death.8 Autobiographical and one-person shows have a strong tradition in Canadian theater, and much of their power resides in the phenomenon of the actor-writer “playing” himself or herself. In performance, it is the artist’s physical presence, his or her body, that becomes the signifier of authenticity and the site of lived experience. Women, especially, often associate their experience of their own bodies with a lack of control, a sense of alienation and even loathing, which is further compounded by histories of abuse. To reclaim one’s own body, to physically...