Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English Volume 1 (review)

'The use of words is dangerous, risky.'

(Star)

Aboriginal Theatre and Drama is the first of the twelve-volume Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English series. The included material in each of the volumes of the series is largely reprinted, culled from a variety of academic and professional publications and organized chronologically within the new collection, with a small number of new essays rounding out the historical, revisionist, 'survey'-oriented projects. Rob Appleford is one of Canada's most recognized scholars on Aboriginal theatre, and thus a logical choice to edit this collection. The other contributors largely fall into two 'camps': non-Aboriginal theatre academics and Aboriginal theatre practitioners. Among the former are some of Canada's finest scholars, all non-Aboriginals: Alan Filewod, Ric Knowles, Rob Nunn, Reid Gilbert, Sheila Rabillard. Among the latter are some of Canada's most recognized and talented artists, all Aboriginal: Star, Daniel David Moses, Tomson Highway, Yvette Nolan, Drew Hayden Taylor, Armand Garnet Ruffo. (A final contributor, Geraldine Manossa, is a researcher and teacher at the National Aboriginal Professional Artist Training Program in British Columbia.) Appleford has gathered the first rank here, and each contribution rewards. Yet one of the strongest impressions is a collective one, as the 'divide' between the two sets of voices could hardly be more striking.

One after another the academic voices wrestle with the perhaps irresolvable challenge of non-Aboriginal analyses of Aboriginal cultural process and product. Repeatedly we are reminded that the use of words is, indeed, dangerous. Filewod begins his entry by noting, 'In particular we ['white scholars'] are faced with the challenge of understanding our complicity in the historical processes of colonization which have suppressed aboriginal responses – both by repression and under the guise of encouragement.' Nunn cites Terry Goldie (as do several of the other authors) in the effort to articulate his strategy: 'Goldie concluded by advocating a role for the White critic: not silence, which can be oppressive too, but "a very loud silence, which analyzes the silencing and which provides opportunities, not to speak for the silenced, but to allow the silenced to speak."' Although there are varying degrees of comfort with this option, each of the academic writers adopts a strongly self-reflexive position in relation to the artists and material they explore, with the result that each of these accomplished entries is as concerned with – and articulate about – ideological culpability and methodological rigour as with analysis and interpretation.

Conversely, the Aboriginal artists included in the volume uniformly express their ideas with a directness that is at once intense yet casual; these entries emerge as arrested speech (literally so, for instance, in the documentation of an oral presentation by Yvette Nolan). Preoccupied with the dynamics of Aboriginal storytelling, industry and critical stereotyping, and the violence of the 'dangerous, risky' English language on the articulation of Aboriginal culture, these practitioners blend highly practical issues of personal and professional survival with a consistent determination to discover contemporary relevance in ancient – and, often, disappearing – traditions. There is some romanticization here – enacting, at times, precisely the tropes the scholarly authors are desperate to avoid – yet the material exhibits the same level of self-reflexivity found in the academic articles, only leavened by ironic humour or charged by angry frustration (or both). Occasionally, one can almost, if not quite, hear Drew Hayden Taylor's character Amos (from The Baby Blues, discussed by Nunn) commenting on non-Aboriginal attention: 'They love stuff like this.'

Late in his article, Knowles asserts that 'Mojica enacts a move ... to a performative, embodied genealogy that might be considered to be ... a First Nations project of keeping the ancestors alive and granting them agency in the present.' In this might also be found the distinction between the 'very loud silence' of the deeply engaged and sophisticated but unavoidably other voices of non-Aboriginal scholarship and the very differently sophisticated voices of the Aboriginal practitioners, whose engagement is of...