Image: Talking Stick Festival
Review by Sarah Higgins
The Talking Stick Festival took place from February 19 to March 2nd. Below is a review of three performances at the 2019 festival. Stay posted on productions by Full Circle: First Nations Performance and the 2020 festival by visiting their website
Note on identity: I’m a middle-class, well-educated white settler woman who works in the theatre, and I joined all these audiences with the privilege and limitations that come with that perspective.
Looking for Tiger Lily
Anthony Hudson’s Looking for Tiger Lily is a deft weaving of the theatrical, the personal, and a sharp wake up for settler audience members. Hudson leads the audience through his own history with the ease of a born storyteller, braiding pop culture, family history and the wider history of Indigenous peoples in North America to explore the immense complexity of identity. The story balances between the multiple facets of Hudson’s identity (ancestry, upbringing, pop culture, clowning, queerness), which means there are moments of connection for everyone. It is a generous story, told through the performance onstage as well as video: a biting vocabulary lesson on what words settlers can’t use and an indictment of the blatant racism in Peter Pan/America. Looking for Tiger Lily is hilarious and honest and angry. It makes me uncomfortable as a settler (for which I’m grateful), and it is perfectly paced. There’s no doubt that this drag clown knows how to craft a story, and how to tell it with confidence, vulnerability and delight.
Dancing Across Generations
This moving triptych viscerally and beautifully brings the past into the present. In “Sky Dancers: Bridges”, Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo pays tribute to the thirty-three Mohawk ironworkers killed the 1907 collapse of the Quebec Bridge. The emotion in her movements and her face is palpable. In “Yindyang”, the screen becomes a river, and its sounds transport us into a story of Jo Clancy’s Australian First Nations ancestor. On top of the atmospheric music the incidental sounds, those that come from the dancer herself, are powerful. They build a world of footsteps and breath and the sharp susurration of a leafy branch.
In the third piece, a work-in-progress collaboration between V’ni Dansi (Vancouver) and Dancing Earth (Santa Fe/San Francisco), the dancers become nature, become family. Striking images are build in fabric: a scarf, the length of the stage, stretching like history between the members of this family. The dance explores medicine plants, and the specificity of movement chosen by these dancers to each embody a plant is incredibly effective. It allows the audience to experience the focus and love with which these artists observe the world. To that end, there is a part of the story when the grandmother tells her family about the plants. Having that moment earlier in the piece before the dancers became the plants may help illuminate which plants the dancers are becoming: a chance, perhaps, for knowledge-sharing.
White Noise (workshop production)
Taran Kootenhayoo’s family drama White Noise is hilarious, loving, angry, and honest. The dialogue is sharp and real—Kootenhayoo really listens to how people speak. It snaps with quick pacing, and the voices of all the characters, though rooted in stereotypes, are well-rounded. The incorporation of social media is smart and engaging. Having the screens on stage literally reflect what the kids are posting throughout the evening roots the story in this time and place. It’s a connection to the millennial generations that is not seen enough onstage.
The questions that White Noise asks are not just big, they’re world-shaping. How do we listen to someone else? What does truth and reconciliation look like in lived experiences? And how do we save the planet before it’s too late (or are we already there)? These unanswered questions get the audience thinking—but there is opportunity for them to be pushed even further. In particular with the climate change aspect, which at the moment is only mentioned the once. This is the beauty of a workshop production, however: it isn’t the end of the story, just a moment of its evolution. Keep this one going, Kootenhayoo. We need to hear it.
Revised note on identity: I’m a middle-class, well-educated white settler woman, and I left these shows with the beginning of a perspective on that privilege, and a hunger to broaden my perspective—because each of these shows is an essential (and very well-told) story for us, for everyone, to hear. Thank you, Talking Stick, for giving space for these stories.
Sarah is a writer and theatre artist currently based in Vancouver. She completed her Masters in Creative Writing from UBC in 2016, and now she works at a circus and carves out time to write. Her play [sign] — a bilingual story of grief, family and climate change in English and American Sign Language — is being produced by Promethean Theatre in Vancouver this summer. www.prometheantheatre.ca www.sfhiggins.com