Articles 7 & 8
[Here are the final two articles in the American Theatre series, “Staging Our Native Nation.” (A
list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100
living Native American writers and theatermakers, appears at the end of this
post.) As usual, I strongly recommend
that Rick On Theater readers who haven’t read
the foregoing pieces in this collection go back and read the earlier articles;
the previous five installments began on 24 March and ran every three days until
this concluding post.]
NATIVE IRON WORKERS AND 9/11 LINKED BY
‘MANGLED BEAMS’
by Christie Honoré
[As far back as the mid-1880s, men of the Iroquois
nation, mostly Mohawks (upstate New York, southern Quebec, and eastern
Ontario), worked steel in construction. It began with bridge-building along the St.
Lawrence River and moved into high-steel work on the skyscrapers of the early
20th century. And where else is the
modern skyscraper most prominent in this part of the world? Why, New York City, of course, whose skyline has
been dominated by tall buildings since before World War I. The iron workers for most of those iconic New
York City edifices have been Iroquois Indians for now well over 100 years.
[As you’ll read in Christie Honoré’s “Native
Iron Workers and 9/11 Linked by ‘Mangled Beams,’” these same Native American high-steel
workers, descendents of the men who built the Twin Towers in the 1960s and
’70s, were engaged in the recovery and clean-up at Ground Zero after the
terrorist attack on 11 September 2001.
Honoré’s article, the seventh in my series from American Theatre’s “Staging Our Native Nation” special feature
from the April 2018 issue, is about the new play, Mangled Beams, by Dawn Jamieson, which tells the stories of four of
those steel workers. It begins previews
on 13 April at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at the A.R.T./New York
Theatres on West 53rd Street in
Manhattan. (The production will run
through 29 April.)]
In
Dawn Jamieson’s new play, four Iroquois high-beam walkers reckon with trauma
past and present.
To
find compelling inspiration for her next play, Cayuga-Iroquois [the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York] playwright Dawn Jamieson
didn’t have to look very far. She was a member of the board of
directors of the American Indian Community House in New York City [on
the Lower East Side] when Native American iron workers came to town to join in
the search-and-rescue effort around Ground Zero after 9/11.
“They
were welcomed and given the support of other Native people, some who had come
from the same reservations,” Jamieson said. “Later, some of the workers came to
attend a support group there. After a few years, I contacted and interviewed
some of them.”
Brad
Bonaparte, a worker who died from cancer developed after exposure to the air at
Ground Zero, became a particular inspiration. The characters in
Jamieson’s Mangled Beams—opening April 19 at A.R.T./New York, in a
production from NYC-based American Indian Artists Inc., a.k.a. AMERINDA [in the
East Village]—are four Haudenosaunee (Iroquois [upstate New York]) high-beam
walkers who contribute to the Ground Zero cleanup efforts. Along the way, these
iron workers—whose trade tends to be passed down from father to son in Native
American families—strive to reclaim their identity by untangling beams laid by
their own ancestors.
Diane
Fraher, the Osage [Great Plains] and Cherokee [American Southeast] artistic
director of AMERINDA, was eager to support Jamieson’s project. “We are a
community-based organization, so we have known Dawn for quite some time. She’s
worked very hard on it for a number of years.”
Now in
its 31st year, AMERINDA is a Native American arts organization working to make
the indigenous perspective accessible to a wider audience through the creation
of new works. Throughout the next few years Fraher plans to focus on supporting
female playwrights like Jamieson who have emerged from the New York
contemporary Native American art movement. “It’s a little known art movement
here in New York City which is very vital and dynamic, with this really really
rich texture to it that stretches back generations,” said Fraher.
Jamieson
has felt firsthand the positive impact the movement has had on Native artists.
“The support and encouragement are invaluable, as well as the feeling of being
part of a vibrant whole—an ensemble, a network, a support group, an audience, a
movement,” she said.
But
despite the progress made both by the movement and the support of organizations
like AMERINDA, Native artists still often must fight for authentic Native
American representation in the arts. When she first began booking acting jobs,
including two on Broadway [The Price,
1992; Inherit the Wind, 1996],
Jamieson was cast according to her Caucasian appearance. But after she listed
Native American on her résumé, she received very few non-Native parts.
“I’ve
been asked to get a tan, wear a wig, and ‘sound Indian,’ and these suggestions
often come from well-meaning people who are looking to promote Native work,”
Jamieson marveled. “Until it’s generally accepted that Native people vary in
appearance and voice, the situation won’t change.”
Fraher
has seen the slow progress made in the battle for representation, first for
Native actors to be able to play Native roles and now for Native playwrights to
be able to tell their stories. “Perhaps the next big thing we want to conquer
is developing leadership—we need to develop Native directors in theatre,” she
said.
These
advancements are especially important in dispelling the notion that Native
American culture exists only as a part of history.
“We’re
a living culture—we’re not just figures of the past, so our stories are not
just about our historical past,” says Fraher, “It’s really important for people
to recognize us as a living culture that’s a part of the whole in order for us
to take our place in the American theatre and the canon of American theatre.”
And
take their part in the story of one of 21st-century America’s defining traumas.
[Christie Honoré is a writer, editor, and theatermaker
with experience in dramaturgy and teaching.
She’s a recent graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.]
* * * *
A TROUPE THAT TURNS TROPES INTO TAKEOFFS
by Anne Hamilton
[Until now, most of the AT series on native theater has been serious
business—most of the plays are dramas (Randy Reinholz’s Off the Rails, a
Native American adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, is one
exception) and the issues have all been profound and addressed with
solemnity. Well, the guys of the sketch
troupe the 1491s take a different tack.
The subjects may still be significant to Native Americans and
non-natives as well, but the approach is comedic . . . even silly at
times. And it’s apparently been working
since the four-man group, who came together by serendipity, have grown in
popularity and demand—and they still have a point to make. Anne Hamilton’s “A Troupe that Turns Tropes into
Takeoffs” is a brief profile of this out-of-the-ordinary comedy quartet.]
The
1491s have gone from YouTube videos to live sketch comedy to a major play
commission, and they’re laughing all the way.
The
travel route from Minneapolis to Tulsa runs right down the center of the
country. If
the Midwest is the heart of the country, this route looks like a jagged scar
from open heart surgery.
This is
the path that members of the nearly decade-old sketch comedy troupe the
1491s travel to meet up with each other and work on their shows and
sketches. And if they have their way, their comedy will help to heal an ancient
divide as sharp and deep as a scar.
Their
work has had national play: In Al Jazeera’s 2012 piece “A dynamic year of
indigenous communication,” reporter Manuela Picq led with a nod to the
1491s’ video “Geronimo E-KIA,” which riffed tellingly on the
controversial use of the Apache warrior’s name for the Osama bin Laden raid.
And members of the group of five appeared in 2014 on Jon Stewart’s “The
Daily Show” in a segment called “The Redskins’ Name – Catching
Racism” about the controversial name of Washington, D.C.’s football team.
I
recently interviewed three of [the] troupe’s five members, then followed up
with a more in-depth talk with Bobby Wilson, a Sisseton-Wahpeton
Dakota artist and educator. I also spoke with Migizi
Pensoneau, an Ojibwe and Ponca writer and producer, and Ryan RedCorn, a[n
Osage] portrait photographer and graphic designer from Oklahoma. The group
is rounded out by Dallas Goldtooth, a Dakota and Navajo comedian and
environmental organizer, and Sterlin Harjo, a Creek and Seminole filmmaker from
Oklahoma.
Goldtooth
and Pensoneau are stepbrothers who grew up together in northern Minnesota.
Deadpanned Pensoneau: “My name is Migizi—it’s spelled like it sounds, only the
e is silent.”
I’ll
admit the discussion was slightly disconcerting; I felt a bit like I was
interviewing frat brothers the day before Spring Break. Topics were introduced
rapid-fire and ideas batted around with good humor. Laughter was abundant.
I
learned that all their work is co-created. “We aren’t reinventing any
wheels—it’s sketch comedy, but we are a different voice,” says Pensoneau. “We
like to make what we like to make. We have our own guidelines. Five of us work
as a collective. We are a unified voice.”
Wilson
agrees: “There’s so much expectation put on indigenous people in the arts,
especially in the media. It comes from a longstanding tradition of non-Native
people, most often white men, writing stories for Hollywood and the stage.
We’re fighting those tropes. If they show up in our work, it’s just to lampoon
them.”
The
five members met for the first time in 2009 at a festival called the Santa
Fe Indian Market, which has been a national gathering place for almost 100
years. “It’s just where all the top Native artists and artisans go to sell
their wares and party it up,” says Wilson. “Okies tend to travel in packs. We
didn’t have a place to stay, so Ryan RedCorn invited us to stay in a hotel
room.” They told stories and laughed for hours, and the group was born.
They took their name in oblique reference to Charles C. Mann’s book 1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a touchstone of Native
Americans’ culturally rich and advanced civilizations.
Since
then the group has made and posted 150 videos to YouTube on topics from film
depictions of Native Americans to sovereignty, from cultural appropriation to
Halloween to Columbus Day. Their work traffics in silliness as much as satire,
breaking up stereotypes and turning tropes around.
They
say [they] made their initial video just for fun: To satirize the depiction of
the werewolf pack in the Twilight films, they shot “New
Moon Wolf Pack Auditions!!!!”, presided over by Harjo, they borrowed a camera
for the day. The video took off and won them many fans who asked for more,
leading in turn to requests for live performances.
“The
videos were a blast,” says Wilson. Then, he said, they got queries from tribes
who “asked us if we had ever done live comedy shows. They would ask us to come.
They were pretty small venues. The demand for it became so frequent that we do
three or four shows a month. As far as we know, we’re the only indigenous
sketch comedy troupe in the U.S. If there is even one Native kid in a school
district, they often ask for us.”
November
has them touring most of the month, as it’s Native American history month.
“It’s the only time you’re allowed to be Indian in public,” Wilson quips.
It was
while the 1491s were performing at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa that they got
a big break of sorts: The Twin Cities’ New Native Theatre took note
and brought them to the attention of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Alison Carey, director of OSF’s American Revolutions program, offered them
a commission. The troupe has finished their play’s second draft, about which
they say there have been no restrictions.
Wilson
explains their approach to playwriting: “We asked ourselves, what does a
comedy look like in this space? We played around with the idea of doing a
musical until we realized that none of us are musical, but there are some
components that will end up in this production. We thought, let’s insert music
for the comedic timing, and the sake of the storyline.”
As a subject
they settled on pivotal moments in American history connected to the Wounded
Knee Massacre. The action starts with the American Indian
Movement’s occupation of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the 1970s,
and flashes back to events at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South
Dakota in 1890. The title: Between Two Knees. [No date had been announced for a
production of the 1491s’ play. ~Rick]
While
the consensus is that they want to act in the play’s first production, they
hope it has a life of its own. “Our dream is that it will go out and there
will be people producing it, and it will have a life outside of us,”
says Pensoneau.“I would be thrilled if some tribal high school out in the
middle of nowhere would put it on.”
There
may be an even broader appetite for their work. The troupe recently gave a very
well-received show at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. ([Friday, 2 March,] during
a nor’easter, no less). “It’s super inspiring to know that Native jokes are
landing with a non-Native crowd that is younger,” Wilson said. “A lot of the
stuff that we do is regional, but being at Vassar, we were way far away from
where we were raised. It gives me a lot of hope that there is definitely a
shift and a change.”
By
sharing humor with Native and non-Native audiences, the 1491s may just patch
together a new American consciousness.
[Anne Hamilton is a New York City-based
freelance dramaturg who’s worked with Andrei Serban, Michael Mayer, Lynn
Nottage, Niegel Smith, and Classic Stage Company, among others. Her specialties include new-play development,
production dramaturgy, new musicals, career advising, advocacy, and oral
histories. She has an MFA from the Columbia University School of the Arts and was a
Bogliasco Foundation Fellow.
[When I got the April issue of American Theatre in the mail—it came
last month—and I started leafing through it, I found the series of
articles on theater by indigenous Americans. American Indian
theater, from what little I knew of its history and development, is a
fascinating phenomenon. (I knew nothing of native Hawaiian and native Alaskan
theater efforts, which are covered in the AT series.)
It’s
a little like Inuit art (on which I’ve blogged a few times), except that was
originated and subsidized by the Canadian government and Indian theater is
organic. Since Indians didn’t have a
theater tradition, they took European theater but turned it to
telling their native stories and incorporated their various storytelling
techniques and styles. It took time for that marriage to work integrally—and
also for mainstream theater people (producers, agents, literary managers, non-native
directors/artistic directors, and others) to accept it as a mature, stageable
American theater art. According to the articles in AT,
that’s been happening slowly, still mostly out west, but it sounds like it’s
at a tipping point.
[I read the articles as I got them ready to
post, and they proved to be really interesting. I believe they’re perfect
for ROT! I hope ROTters have read them all; I’m sure you’ll learn things about our
theater, as I have. They’re absolutely engrossing. (That promised list of native theater
resources is below.)]
* * * *
A LIST OF NATIVE THEATRES AND THEATREMAKERS
by
American Theatre Editors
Resources,
institutions, and more than 100 artists spanning North America.
This list of Native American theatres and
theatremakers was compiled in part by Madeline Sayet, with suggestions from
Randy Reinholz and with help by Jerald Raymond Pierce.
Native-run theatre companies:
Amerinda
(American Indian Artists) Inc. (NYC)
Dark
Winter Productions (Alaska)
The
Eagle Project (NYC)
Native
Voices at the Autry (L.A.)
New
Native Theatre (Twin Cities)
Oklahoma
City Theatre Company’s Native American New Play Festival
Raving
Native Productions (Twin Cities)
Red
Eagle Soaring (Seattle)
Safe
Harbors Indigenous Collective (NYC)
Spiderwoman
Theater (NYC)
Thunderbird
Theatre (Kansas)
Turtle
Theatre Collective (Twin Cities)
Two
Worlds Theatre (New Mexico)
Other producing organization and university
resources:
Institute
of American Indian Arts (IAIA)
Project
HOOP at UCLA (dir. Hanay Geiogamah)
Yale
Indigenous Performing Arts Program (dir. Mary Kathryn Nagle & Reed Adair
Bobroff)
Writers/theatremakers:
Ishmael
Angaluuk Hope (Iñupiaq/Tlingit)
Alani
Apio (Native Hawaiian)
Jules
Arita Koostachin (Attawapiskat, Cree)
Annette
Arkeketa (Otoe-Missouria)
Jaisey
Bates (Longhouse Huron, Algonquin)
Nick
Bear (Penobscot)
C.W.
Bearshield (Sicangu Lakota)
Diane
Benson (Tlingit)
Columpa
Bobb (Tsleil Waututh/Nlaka’pamux)
Reed
Adair Bobroff (Navajo)
Murielle
Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock)
Ed
Bourgeois (Mohawk)
Joseph
Bruchac (Abenaki)
Margaret
Bruchac (Abenaki)
Candice
Byrd (Cherokee/Quapaw/Osage)
Julie
Cajune (Salish)
Marisa
Carr (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe)
Lee
Cataluna (Native Hawaiian)
Monica
Charles (Klallam)
Vic
Charlo (Salish)
Dillon
Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw/Laguna/Isleta Pueblo)
Marie
Clements (Métis)
Montana
Cypress (Miccosukee)
Maulian
Dana (Penobscot)
Joseph
Dandurand (Kwantlen)
Nora
Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit)
Daystar,
a.k.a. Rosalie Jones (Pembina Chippewa)
Ty
Defoe (Oneida/Ojibwe)
Darrell
Dennis (Secwepemc)
Carolyn
Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee)
Ed Edmo
(Shoshone-Bannock-Nez Perce)
Steve
Elm (Oneida)
Larissa
FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota)
Lori
Favela (Yankton Sioux)
Stephanie
Fielding (Mohegan)
Charli
Fool Bear (Yanktonai Dakota)
Eric
Gansworth (Onondaga)
Hanay
Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware)
Diane
Glancy (Cherokee)
Kim
Delfina Gleason (Navajo)
Terry
Gomez (Comanche)
Moses
Goods (Native Hawaiian)
Jason
Grasl (Blackfeet)
Tammy
Haili`opua Baker (Native Hawaiian)
Joy
Harjo (Muskogee Creek)
Suzan
Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee)
Drew
Hayden Taylor (Ojibway)
Lance
Henson (Cheyenne)
Tomson
Highway (Cree)
Linda
Hogan (Chickasaw)
Philip
Hooser (Choctaw)
LeAnne
Howe (Choctaw)
Claude
Jackson Jr. (Pima/Hopi)
Dawn
Jamieson (Cayuga/Iroquois)
Terry
Jones (Seneca)
Frank
Henry Kaash Katasse (Tlingit)
Aassanaaq
Kairaiuak (Yup’ik)
Margo
Kane (Cree-Saulteaux)
Ajuawak
Kapashesit (Ojibwe/Cree)
Bruce
King (Oneida)
Martha
Kreipe de Montaño (Prairie Band Potawatomi)
Donna
Loring (Penobscot)
Nancy
McDoniel (Chickasaw)
Gloria
Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)
Muriel
Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)
Duane
Minard (Yurok, Piaute)
Kohl
Miner (Ho-Chunk)
Sam
Mitchell (Yaqui)
Monique
Mojica (Kuna/Rappahannock)
N.
Scott Momaday (Kiowa)
Vicki
Lynn Mooney (Cherokee)
Tara
Moses (Seminole)
Jay B.
Muskett (Navajo)
Mary
Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee)
Victoria
Nalani Kneubuhl (Native Hawaiian-Samoan)
Michael
Nephew (Cherokee)
Judy
Lee Oliva (Chickasaw)
Robert
Owens-Greygrass (Lakota)
Richard
Perry (Yup’ik)
PJ
Prudat (Métis/Cree/Saulteaux)
Kalani
Queypo (Blackfeet)
Vickie
Ramirez (Tuscarora)
Randy
Reinholz (Choctaw)
Marcie
Rendon (White Earth Anishinabe)
Mark
Anthony Rolo (Chippewa)
Lucas
Rowley (Inupiaq)
Madeline
Sayet (Mohegan)
Laura
Annawyn Shamas (Chickasaw)
Kim
Snyder (Oglala Lakota)
Vera
Starbard (Tlingit/Dena’ina Athabascan)
Arigon
Starr (Kickapoo)
DeLanna
Studi (Cherokee)
Cathy
Tagnak Rexford (Inupiaq)
Xemiyulu
Manibusan Tapepechul (Salvadoran Nawat)
Maya
Torralba (Kiowa)
Joseph
Valdez (Navajo)
David
Velarde Jr. (Jicarilla Apache)
Rhiana
Yazzie (Navajo)
Dianne
Yeahquo Reyner (Kiowa)
William
S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine
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