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Indigenizing Theatre: An interview with Kamloopa Fire Creator Kim Senklip Harvey

Kamloopa is an Indigenous artistic ceremony that follows two urban Indigenous sisters, Kilawna and Mikaya, and their new friend, Edith, as they struggle in their own ways to understand themselves and their cultures. As they each come to terms with what it means to reconnect with their homelands, ancestors, and one another, it becomes clear that this story is not a hero’s journey; it doesn’t follow the “typical” three act play in structure or story arc. The artistic ceremony focusses on kinship relations, rather than a central conflict: this is a journey between women, a journey that happens within, between, and outside of themselves. It’s a journey that happens on Indian time: existing now, bringing the past, and holding the future. As the three women move through the world, they face issues of assimilation, disconnection, and loss, and the audience is witness to every ignorant, painful, funny, and awkward moment of what it means to find your way home again.

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“Shows so Fringe-y they deserve their own categories” – PRISM reviews the 2018 Vancouver Fringe

Reviews of “Redemption” and “Big Sister”

Reviewed by Laura Anne Harris

Photos by Vancouver Fringe

“Redemption” by playwright James Walter Charleston is a solo show performed by Jim Sea. The piece focuses on three main characters: a prisoner who has been convicted of sexual assault, a southern lawyer who puts prisoners into reform therapy programs, and a therapist who works with prisoners to reform their behaviour. Continue reading “Shows so Fringe-y they deserve their own categories” – PRISM reviews the 2018 Vancouver Fringe

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Stones Skipping Across Water: On Klara du Plessis’ Ekke

 

Klara Du Plessis
Ekke
Palimpsest Press

Review by Anna Geisler

Even our finite world is brimming with choices, possibilities, transformations—this struck me as the main tenet in Klara du Plessis’ debut collection, Ekke. Her resonant poems, influenced by landscape, place, the body, and art, explore the exciting and multitudinous influences that act upon us in this seemingly concrete world. 
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Where Statues Once Stood: On Rachel Cusk’s Kudos

Review by Will Preston

There’s a moment towards the end of Kudos, the final installment of Rachel Cusk’s groundbreaking Outline trilogy, when the whole work—hundreds of pages of characters and conversation—abruptly and elegantly folds in on itself, smaller and smaller until, like a magic trick, it fits inside a single, luminous image. On her way to dinner in an unnamed European country, our narrator, Faye, is pulled off on a detour by her companion. Their destination is an old church that was completely ravaged by fire some fifty years earlier: the paintings and statues destroyed, the stonework “split into two by the heat.” Instead of restoring the church, Faye’s companion explains, the damaged interior was left untouched and reopened for worship. On her first visit, she had found the blackened interior so distressing she had wanted to scream. But then she realized the scorched walls were covered with something like images, ghostly shapes and textures left by the flames:

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Redefining Home: A Review of Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant

Dear Current Occupant 

Chelene Knight

BookThug

Review by Mormei Zanke

Chelene Knight’s new memoir Dear Current Occupant, defies traditional genres of writing through its inherent hybridity and fragmentation. The book delves into Knight’s childhood past, exploring her experience of growing up while moving in and out of twenty homes in East Vancouver. Knight weaves poetry, essays, letters, and photographs together to create a work that is halting and profoundly moving. Knight’s fragmented approach succeeds in exploring the truths of her past more than any conventional, linear method could.

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Decolonial Confession: A Review of Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries

Heart Berries
Terese Marie Mailhot
Doubleday Canada
Review by Cody Caetano

Often when I’m reading memoir, I’ll remember a quote from a misguided Neil Genzlinger, who penned “The Problem With Memoirs” for The New York Times in 2011: “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir… Sure, [Amazon] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of” (italics mine). It is important to note that marginalized memoirists, especially early-career Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and queer folks, have fraught histories with Genzlinger-types, their “old rules” and antiquated tastes that mar the merit of writing, publishing, and participating in the predominantly white spaces of the literary world. And then along comes Terese Marie Mailhot, a Salish First Nation woman from Seabird Island Indian Reservation with the assertion that memoir “functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing” (137). And it is in vulnerability that Mailhot effectively rejects the moth-eaten straightjacket that would otherwise restrict the inventive, decolonial confession of Heart Berries.

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