Native American Performance and Representation

6. Acts of Transfer: The 1975 and 1976 Productions of Raven and Body Indian by Red Earth Performing Arts Company

chapter 6 Acts of Transfer The 1975 and 1976 Productions of Raven and Body Indian by Red Earth Performing Arts Company Julie Pearson-Little Thunder native traditional stories and cultural explanations are frequently prefaced by the phrase, “The way I heard it was . . . ”1 This qualifier points to a Native ethos, or value system, that readily acknowledges the possibility of alternative viewpoints or explanations.2 However, this phrase has another function as well. It invokes live presence as authorizing the information about to be related. It draws attention to the fact that the person telling this story was once a listener, physically absorbing and storing the information he or she is about to share. Authorization of knowledge by means of live presence is a feature of “the repertoire”—Diana Taylor’s term for embodied practices.3 These practices, which include spoken language, ceremony, sports, ritual, and games, amongst others, have long been ignored by the West as a source of potential historical knowledge.4 According to Taylor, this neglect arises, in part, from western scholars’ fondness for the archive, the “supposedly enduring materials” of manuscripts, buildings, artwork, archeological remains, and the like.5 Yet the repertoire can also make historical claims, since it acts as a fluid and mobile means of storing and transmitting collective knowledges and histories, values and memories (between past and present).6 Because the repertoire occupies a central place in U.S. tribal cultures, it played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century Native theater . From the sixties through the mid-eighties, Indian theater companies, wishing to commit to a season of productions, faced a task akin to following the Trickster Rabbit to his home. No e-mails requesting scripts by Indian productions by red earth performing arts company 111 playwrights could be exchanged with playwrights or play development organizations. No anthologies of Indian-authored plays could be pulled from the bookshelf. This shortage of written scripts obliged Native theater companies to create their own scripts or to convert materials written by non-Indians into theater pieces. In both instances, Native theater workers turned to the repertoire—song, dance, gesture, and Native habitus—as well as to enactment, to transform textual representations into Indian theatrical space.7 Of course, theatrical performance is also part of the repertoire, a means of presenting certain kinds of content while displaying the performers’ skills for a live audience. But as Taylor emphasizes, performance may also function as an “act of transfer” conveying “social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity” from one group of individuals to another and from one generation to the next.8 In the context of theater historiography, understanding performance as an act of transfer may yield new and deeper understandings of Indigenous and other alternative theater practices. The term “act of transfer” is particularly intriguing with regard to Native theater, where it invites application as a theoretical lens in its own right. As Taylor observes, the archive and the repertoire often “work in tandem ,” to transmit history in different but usually complementary ways.”9 In this chapter, I read the archive of two early Native theater productions, through the repertoire and acts of transfer, to analyze the Indian theatrical space of Raven and Body Indian. These plays, presented in 1975 and 1976 respectively by Red Earth Performing Arts Company, differed radically in style, content, and authorship. But both drew extensively upon the repertoire and acts of transfer in all aspects of their production—from rehearsal and staging to performance and audience reception. In 1974, the newness of Native theater as genre created such excitement that the appearance of a Native play in one part of the country tended to inspire the development of other companies or productions in a ripple effect. Thus, Red Earth, known as REPAC, might be considered an act of transfer of Native theater to the Seattle Indian community by the Native American Theater Ensemble, or NATE. NATE arrived at the University of Washington campus in 1974, armed with Foghorn, a politically charged agitprop by the group’s director, Hanay Geiogamah.10 John Kauffman (Nez Perce), Phyllis Brisson (Assiniboine), and Terry Tafoya (Isleta/Warm Springs)—attended the production. All three had been 112 Julie Pearson-Little Thunder performing Indian poems and stories in local venues, but Foghorn was their first encounter with an Indian-authored play.11 After the show, the Seattle actors and the touring company struck up...