Towards Locating the Alchemy of Convergence in the Native Theatre Classroom

Here, There Be Landmines

In 2000, the Aboriginal Studies Program (ABS) at the University of Toronto invited me to create its first Native Theatre course. More than a decade later, this stand-alone half course is the only sustained exposure to Native Theatre that U. of T. students can access. Such limited exposure, I believe, is what most university students in either Performance Studies or Native Studies programs across Canada can expect to receive.¹

A dearth of funds and, hence, a dearth of faculty and infrastructure within Native Studies departments has led to a marginalization of theatre studies within these programs as they struggle to remain afloat and maintain core courses in language, world-view, history, science, law, governance, and literature. By the same token, theatre programs, largely built upon the Western “canon,” generally labour under similar exigencies; hard choices must be made. And such choices are often predicated upon perceived value. Aboriginal performative traditions may be “interesting”; indeed, exposure to these may “enhance” or “enliven” one’s artistry, but such exposure is largely regarded as a specialized luxury to delight an adventurous palette. Hence, Native Theatre Studies has been prevented from outgrowing its (institutional) infancy to more rigorously address the staggering developments in performance, script creation, adaptation, dramaturgy, and design that are occurring in professional Native theatre; after all (as with any discipline), students must first absorb the history, social context, world-view, cultural praxis, and traditional aesthetic foundations out of which contemporary projects and their predecessors emerge before they can really begin to appreciate and assess current developments.

Whether I have taught my Native Theatre course in studio to a small group for six hours each week or in a packed lecture hall for two hours each week, the course always serves two disparate groups. Designed for Aboriginal students and/or students of Aboriginal Studies who come in with lived experience and/or solid knowledge of the lifeways, epistemologies, and issues that the course materials address, this course also welcomes students of theatre who have little to no understanding of Aboriginal people, history, or world-view (although many have lived in Canada for their entire lives). Always, then, we occupy a delicate space wherein uneasy intercultural and interdisciplinary meetings must be negotiated with care: here, there be landmines. And lives hang in the balance. Until Canadian universities begin to invest funds, carve out spaces, build infrastructures, and develop actual (not token) respect for the breadth, depth, aesthetic complexity, and affective potency of contemporary Native theatre and (Nation-specific) Aboriginal performative traditions, these landmines will always be present. It is no easy task to transform these spaces of uneasy meeting into sites of transformation and healing for all. What follows here is an account of my own journey in the Native theatre classroom. And it begins with a “bang.”

“Get Out of My Way”: A Classroom Collision

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to th’ legitimate. Fine word ‘legitimate’ Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed, And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow; I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards.

(Shakespeare, Lear, I, ii, 16–22)

With these words, a talented, young actor concluded his final presentation for my class several summers ago at U. of T. Here, he declaimed the narrative that would direct the artistic and personal journey he had storied for himself in response to the challenges issued to him as a “native” settler-son of three generations. Staring down his classmates, he delivered this crass “speech-act” with rakish aplomb in answer to the final question I pose in this course: “What does Indigenous Theatre mean to you? What are the stories you will tell to write into being the world that our grandchildren will inhabit together?”

“Winner take all,” he told us. “Get out of my way. I grow; I prosper.”

I was shaken. Never before had I encountered such overt aggression in any Aboriginal Studies course I had taught. Never had the space felt so unsafe. Then I read his...