Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

In this paper I engage with theories drawn from feminist geographies, recent media and travelogues of Arctic explorers to
examine the extent to which orientalising agendas are at play in the reification of the Inuit and their endangered way of life as
performed in Chouinard’s Les trous du ciel. As part of my “Choreographing the North” project this research asks what it means
to identify with “northern” themes; how “northernness” relates to identity and the performance of place; and whether
connections exist between physical and metaphysical colonization at the northern-most edge of the world.
“Mounds, Earthworks, Side Show Freaks, and Circus Injuns.” Ric Knowles (University of
Guleph)
I am involved as dramaturge and scholar in a major research/creation project, “Indignous Knowledge, Contemporary
Performance”—funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSRHC)—which involves
the development of new Indigenous performances based on traditional Indigenous cultural texts. As part this project, Monique
Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock) and LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) are creating a new work, Side Show Freaks and Circus
Injuns, which employs the deep structure of earthworks, funeral, and effigy mounds of the Indigenous peoples of eastern
Turtle Island. These mounds that with varying degrees of density, visibility or invisibility, and having suffered varying degrees
of desecration or “preservation” since, cluster around the Mississippi River and its tributaries, but range from Louisiana in the
Southern US north into Canada. At their peak, as many as 200,000 mounds dotted eastern Turtle Island between 600 and
1300 CE.
Native American scholar Chadwick Allen has argued that these mounds constitute the expressive “literature” of the
Indigenous peoples who created them. The mounds are characterized by a scientific, geometrical, and astronomical
sophistication that is astonishing, and this sophistication directly linked the ecosphere with the heavens. To construct a
dramaturgy that is grounded in the architecture of these mounds is to reconnect with an Indigenous cosmology that remains
unbroken by colonization and models indigenous ways of knowing and being with and in the world. Side Show Freaks and
Circus Injuns, addressing in its content a history (based on the family backgrounds of Mojica and Howe) of the exploitation and
display of Indigenous peoples, at once invisible and hyper visible, is employing the environmental and astronomical optics of
these architectures to construct a new Indigenous dramaturgy that reassesses the people’s relationship to the universe.
“(Re)presentations of Colonial Violence in Monique Mojica’s Birdwoman and the Suffragettes
and Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots.” Sarah MacKenzie (University of Ottawa)
Colonial cultural production has too often portrayed Indigenous women as hyper-sexual, irresponsible and impulsive. The
propagation of these images reinforces discourses that inferiorize Indigenous cultures generally, and Indigenous women
particularly, obscuring colonial injustices and diminishing the potential for syncretic postcolonial harmonization. Despite
colonial efforts to silence the voices of Indigenous women, today we are telling their own stories through literature and drama,
reimagining and (re)presenting histories of colonization and, in doing so, subverting the representational and, laterally,
manifest violence to which we have been subject in both historic and contemporary times.
Closely analyzing Kuna/Rappahannock actor and dramatist Monique Mojica’s Birdwoman and the Suffragettes (1991) and
Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991), this paper assesses the extent to which Mojica’s works present gendered,
racialized violence as a technology of colonization, which works, together with misrepresentations of Indigenous women, and
with the erasure of cultural memory, as a mechanism of cultural genocide. Ultimately, I contend that, through a resistant
process of reverse interpellation, Mojica reconfigures colonial legacies of violence, particularly sexual violence, by presenting
revisionist histories and subversive self-representations that oppose denigrating colonial depictions. Birdwoman and the
Suffragettes reconfigures the colonialist story of Sacajawea, the Lemhi Shoshone guide and translator to the American Lewis
and Clarke expedition, while Princess Pocahontas encourages Indigenous women to become “word warriors” and “fashion
[their] own gods out of [their] entrails” (168).
Though the postcolonial climate of contemporary North America creates a fraught representational context for Indigenous
dramatic production, Mojica’s works demonstrate that Indigenous women playwrights can re-appropriate stereotypes and
disparaging literary tropes and reimagine histories of violence, rendering apparent the colonial assumptions underlying these
depictions. In an instrumental resistance of misrepresentations, Indigenous women dramatists destabilize the representations
accorded authenticity by the colonizing power and thereby reconfigure historic power relations.
c) Where Art Meets Science: Theatre Devising at the Edge McIntyre
Praxis Workshop Organizer: Nelson Gray (University of Victoria)
For several centuries, a bifurcation of art and science has left artists and scientists working in isolation from one another. Yet
despite their different methodologies, artists and scientists often share similar concerns and are motivated by common
purposes. This is particularly so in the present era, when human-induced ecological change has wiped out countless species
and brought us to the edge of the planet’s capacity to sustain our own. This 90-minute workshop is designed to reveal and
explore the creative and community-building impact of arts/science collaborations in performance.
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