[In March and April
of last year, I posted a series of eight articles from American Theatre magazine called “Staging
Our Native Nation.” The series (24, 27,
and 30 March 2018, and 2, 5, and 7 April 2018) was about the theater being created
and performed by American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Inuit theater companies
all over the United States. On 2 January 2019, I was interested to read in the “Arts” section of the New
York Times an article about a conference,
First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking, that’s taking place in various
locations in Manhattan; First Nations Dialogues, which also includes work being created by native Canadians and Australia’s
Aborigines, started on 5 January bugt will continue through12 January. (The New York Times article is also
available on line as “‘The People Making It Are Indigenous, but Indigenous Is
Not a Genre,'" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/arts/dance/02firstnations.html.)]
The weeklong First Nations Dialogues directly challenge the concept of ‘diversity.’
For the Brooklyn-born
playwright Muriel Miguel, a founder of the Native American feminist collective
Spiderwoman Theater, the word diversity raises suspicions.
“Diversity means if you
check the box, well, you did diversity,” she said in a recent telephone
interview. “I’m always a little leery about how do you get diversity? It seems
to me that it needs to be more than just checking the box.”
Known as a grandmother of
the Indigenous theater movement in the United States and Canada, Ms. Miguel is
among the 30 or so artists participating in this year’s First Nations Dialogues
New York/Lenapehoking. (Lenapehoking is the homeland of the Lenape, the
original inhabitants of the area encompassing New York City.) Taking place at
multiple downtown theaters, the Dialogues bring together Indigenous performing
artists from Australia, Canada and the United States for a week of
performances, discussions and other gatherings, beginning Jan. 5.
After a low-profile first
edition last year, the series is returning in an expanded, more public form.
Coinciding with the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts
Professionals — which draws thousands of visitors from around the world — it is
presented in partnership with 13 festivals and organizations, including
American Realness, the Lenape Center, the American Indian Community House and
Performance Space New York. Deliberately, it will be hard to miss.
“I hope that it’s
immersive,” said Merindah Donnelly, an organizer of the series and the
executive producer of BlakDance in Australia, speaking by Skype from Brisbane.
“I hope that people can’t avoid having encounters with the First Nations
Dialogues, though” — she added with a smile — “I’m not sure that we’re quite
that big yet.”
In drawing attention to
the breadth of contemporary Indigenous performance — with works spanning dance,
theater, performance art and genres in between — the Dialogues are something
rare for New York, if not unprecedented. Describing what to expect is not easy
and not intended to be. In deciding what to program, the chief organizers — Ms.
Donnelly, the choreographer Emily Johnson, and Vallejo Gantner, the former
director of Performance Space — set out to challenge a notion they often come
across, that Indigenous performance fits any single description.
“It’s contemporary art,
it’s live, it’s experimental, it’s multidisciplinary, it’s cabaret, it’s queer,
it’s drag, it’s theater,” Ms. Donnelly said. “The people making it are
Indigenous, but Indigenous is not a genre.”
As Mr. Gantner put it:
“You can’t say, ‘This is what Indigenous work looks like.’ That’s like saying,
‘What does European work look like?’ ”
A centerpiece of the week
will be KIN, a subseries programmed by Ms. Johnson at Performance Space, in the
East Village. [KIN is described in its publicity as “a series of Indigenous led
presentations that explore kinship, care and the transmutation of grief through
ceremonial language.”] The offerings here — many of which deal with themes of
trauma, grief and healing — include Ms. Miguel’s Pulling Threads Fabric
Workshop, in which storytelling and quilting serve as tools for mending old
wounds; and SJ Norman’s “Cicatrix 1 (that which is taken/that which remains),”
a meditation on the deaths of incarcerated First Nations people in Australia.
While the tone may be
somber at times, there is also much to celebrate. SJ Norman, an Australian
artist of Wiradjuri and Wonnaruah heritage, said in an email that the
opportunity to gather in New York “feels like an honoring of the continued
existence of our peoples in the big city, as well as the dynamism and globalism
of our peoples, which is absolutely vast.”
Far from merely checking
boxes, the Dialogues grew out of a wariness similar to Ms. Miguel’s about
diversity, or a related hope: to build lasting institutional support for
Indigenous performing arts worldwide. “This is about a deep cultural shift,
deep cultural change,” Ms. Johnson said. “We are very adamant that this is not
about just putting your name on something, not about doing the least amount of
work.”
A Native Alaskan artist
of Yupik ancestry, Ms. Johnson has been working tirelessly to counter what she
calls “the perceived invisibility” of Indigenous performing artists,
particularly in the United States. Funding for Indigenous performance is more
robust in Australia and Canada, and said Ms. Johnson said that in her home
country she has often found herself wondering: “Where are the Indigenous works?
How do we bring this work forward?”
Mr. Gantner, who grew up
in Melbourne, Australia, and lives in New York, has observed similar
disparities. “Here it’s kind of stuck into a corner of folk or community
practice, or traditional or ritualistic,” he said. “In Australia and elsewhere
in the world, it’s not; it’s understood as a dynamic contemporary expression of
a culture.”
One approach to bringing
the United States up to speed is an ambitious pilot program, the Global First
Nations Performance Network, which will be in development during this year’s
Dialogues. (Planning sessions are closed to the public.) The envisioned network
will include 15 institutions from Canada, Australia and the United States —
with the potential to expand to other countries — all dedicated to
commissioning and presenting works by Indigenous artists.
The network also
requires, of each presenter, a commitment to undergoing what Mr. Gantner calls
“a kind of decolonization process.” This could involve steps like hiring Indigenous
board and staff members, building relationships with local Indigenous
communities and implementing land acknowledgment, the practice of honoring the
native inhabitants of a place.
Ms. Johnson sees this
year’s Dialogues as a microcosm of what the network may eventually accomplish,
including opening up international exchange. For the Australian choreographer
Mariaa Randall, whose “Footwork/Technique,” part of KIN, explores the footwork
of Aboriginal dances, a highlight of the Dialogues is the chance to simply talk
and listen with peers from around the world.
“In our countries we can
become kind of siloed,” she said. “I want to be able to sit with and see and
hear from other First Nations females: what their struggles are, their
achievements, and how they continue to keep their culture and their practice
together, to keep moving forward, because sometimes it is really hard.”
Ms. Miguel, who founded
Spiderwoman Theater with her sisters in 1976, noted that, historically,
gatherings of Indigenous people have often been banned or met with state
violence. “I think we’ve been separated for a very long time,” she said.
Ms. Johnson is the first
to point out that while the First Nations Dialogues may be new, the work that
she and her colleagues are doing is not. They see themselves as building upon a
foundation laid by Ms. Miguel and her contemporaries over the course of many
decades, right up to today. Ms. Johnson recalled a moment at last year’s
Dialogues when the conversation turned from hypothesizing to taking action.
“Auntie Muriel was like,
‘I’ve been talking about this for 80 years. I want change!’ ” she said with an
appreciative laugh. “So, we felt that push.”
[After a brief
meeting 50 years ago in Harlem between a small group of Native American performing
artists, the first First Nations
Dialogues convened in January 2018. As
Siobhan Burke stated above, it was a “low-profile” affair. It Made possible, however, this month’s
larger, more inclusive gathering.
[Burke is a
dance critic for the New York Times and a contributing
writer for Dance Magazine, where she
was an editor from 2008 to 2013. She has
written for Open Space, Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, the Performance Club, Hyperallergic, Art in America, Pointe magazine, the Village
Voice, and other publications.]
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