Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers: Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island 3030823741, 9783030823740

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Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island

Liza-Mare Syron

Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers

Liza-Mare Syron

Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island

Liza-Mare Syron Arts and Media University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-82374-0    ISBN 978-3-030-82375-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82375-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The gift of the weave

When Indigenous people actively practice, participate, and perpetuate their cultures, this is the most basic form of gratitude to those ancestors who made the effort to carry the culture into the future, into our present. —Heather Ahtone, “Reading beneath the surface: Joe Feddersen’s parking lot,” Wicazo Sa Review. 2012, 73–84, 82

Abstract

This book is a radical departure from the study of Indigenous theatre practices, which in recent times has been dominated by perspectives and paradigms that privilege the non-Indigenous voice and where indigeneity is mediated through a non-Indigenous lens. This study highlights different ways of seeing, knowing, and doing to that which currently circulates within the academy. It considers what new knowledge can be understood about a practice by employing an Indigenous standpoint, specifically an Indigenous woman’s standpoint (Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Towards an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint: A methodological tool.” Australian Feminist Studies (Taylor Francis Online) 28 (78) (2013): 331–347). This three-year transnational and transcultural study investigates the every-day practices of Maori, First Nations, and Aboriginal Australian contemporary theatre makers from inside the rehearsal room with a focus on the role of women playwrights acting as a territorial agent constantly shifting, expanding, and contracting a sense of indigeneity within these rehearsal contexts by guiding and influencing that process through culturally informed ways of making theatre. Keywords   Indigenous ● Rehearsal practices ● Indigenous women playwrights ● Indigenous theatre and performance. (The first note is to outline my approach to using various terms in respect to the First Peoples of colonised countries. I use the term Indigenous with a capital I throughout the document as a sign of respect for Indigenous

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peoples across the globe and employ the use of the term when discussing First Nations Peoples broadly. Where possible I have identified research collaborators by their clan or tribe affiliations, and used local language or preferred language for localities and countries involved. I also often shift between using the Christian or surname of research collaborators with the intention of demonstrating a familiarity with or relational distance from particular collaborators)

Acknowledgements

This study was undertaken as part of a Post-Doctoral research project at Macquarie University Sydney Australia in 2013–2016. The manuscript was completed with the assistance of the University of New South Wales in 2021. I wish to acknowledge the following people: All of the research collaborators without whom this study would never had happened including: Hone Kouka and Miria George from Tawata Productions Wellington New Zealand; the cast and crew of Sunset Road 2014; Yvette Nolan and Ryan Cunningham from Native Earth Performing Arts Toronto Canada; Nina Lee Aquino and Clare Preuss from The Factory Theatre Toronto Canada; The cast and crew of The Unplugging 2015; The creative team of The Fox and the Freedom Fighters Sydney Australia 2014. I would also like to thank Lily Shearer, Dr. Anne Marshall, and Kate Rossmanith for their wisdom and guidance. Editors—Justine Shih Pearson and Jacqueline Mills. Also, Robert and Louise Sparre-Hargraves for allowing me the space to pen this book.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 From Here to There 27 3 Sharing Stories 57 4 Embodied Knowledge 85 5 The Way We Make Theatre107 Bibliography123

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Mittoo Boorilook I was a little star-struck when I first met her that first day of rehearsals. We rarely spoke however as she was always intensely focused on the day-to-day happenings of the rehearsal process. One day, out of the blue, she came over to where I was sitting in the corner of the room to tell me that she had been thinking about a name for me in her language, like an Anishinaabe phrase for “a fly on the wall” she said. I asked if I could have a name more like a gecko on the wall. She said smiling, “We don’t have geckos here.” The title of this introduction chapter, Mittoo Boorilook means ‘little fly’ in the language of my father’s people, the Biripi people of the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales in Australia.1 The story above reveals why I use this phrase here. I had spent four weeks in the rehearsal room documenting the day to day activities of the key creatives for the 2015 remount of Anishinaabe playwright and director Yvette Nolan’s play, The Unplugging. One day she was thinking about a name to give me in her native tongue.2 Although I never did get that phrase in Anishinaabe, I decided to claim the intention of Nolan’s gesture and search for the phrase in the language of my father’s people. The use of this phrase in language is to indicate that like the ‘fly on the wall’ the research approach is immersive being both inside yet outside of an experience, and that the study is framed by an Indigenous perspective.3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L.-M. Syron, Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82375-7_1

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The contents of this manuscript are derived from a three-year trans-­ national and trans-cultural research project. The goal of this study was to observe and document the rehearsal practices of Maori, First Nations, and Aboriginal Australian theatre makers in the rehearsal room with the aim of highlighting their particular theatre making practices in order to understand more about ways of making theatre that are culturally informed. To my knowledge, this is the first trans-national research project of its kind investigating the every-day practices of contemporary Indigenous theatre makers from inside the rehearsal room. The information presented in this book reflects a radical departure from the study of Indigenous theatre, which in recent times has been dominated by perspectives and paradigms that privilege the non-Indigenous voice and where indigeneity is mediated through a non-Indigenous lens. This study is a refocus from the objectification of a people and their practice to one that fully enters into the worlds of theatre makers making theatre making. In embracing Indigenous research principles and perspectives this investigation asks the question, what new knowledge can be understood about Indigenous theatre practice by employing Indigenous standpoint theory, specifically an Indigenous woman’s standpoint.4 As an Indigenous scholar and theatre maker it has always been, for me, a fraught enterprise to investigate and critically engage with Indigenous theatre making practices and processes. This is because I was trained by the academy firstly as a professional theatre maker, and later as an academic/researcher.5 I have been exposed to a diversity of performance practices and various theoretical positions and frameworks that are, for the most part, defined and influenced by Western and European ways of thinking, doing, and seeing. I have always felt situated outside of dominant knowledge constructs that privilege whiteness (race) and men (gender) as the knowing subject position. So, in coming to this book, I realised that the subjective situated knowledges of Indigenous researchers and theatre -makers is not a problematic to be considered but instead, that thanks to scholars like Moreton-Robinson, this book takes a new view, a celebratory one, in advancing Indigenous voices and their stories, specifically those of women playwrights and recognises Indigenous women as knowing subjects.6 It is important to acknowledge that for many Indigenous researchers, what we know and how we approach research is often defined by our relationality. We belong to a community or communities where we have roles, status, and positions, which come with responsibilities and

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obligations to those communities. This is not always the experience of non-Indigenous researchers researching Indigenous peoples and communities. We are in the process of double research agendas, between the academy and the community.7 Many Indigenous researchers move across boundaries of Indigenous and metropolitan, institutional and community, politics and scholarship. The challenge is to understand where these boundaries begin and end. An Indigenous standpoint emphasises the position of the Indigenous scholar as an insider-outsider to any study that encompasses Indigenous people, communities, practices, and or concepts. This positioning can be seen as problematic as it is often required that a researcher maintain a certain separation from the people or places being researched, either spatially, physically, temporally or culturally. This form of detachment is designed to maintain an objective distance between the researcher and the subject of inquiry. Indigenous cultures and societies previously studied within the domain of the Imperial gaze were effectively marginalised by this approach situated as subjects and outside of the academy. As a Performance Studies scholar, Indigenous research methodologies are new to me. So I have nonetheless also utilised other discipline approaches to gather data such as those employed in Performance Studies to assist with the transition and evolution of thought from a way of doing to a way of knowing. I value Indigenous research methodologies to validate and organise my thoughts on the materials and data gathered, and to present this information from an Indigenous perspective. To begin, this introduction briefly debates what is Indigenous theatre before introducing and contextualising the three case studies. I then return to a discussion on Indigenous Standpoint Theory as a research framework and its application in Performance Studies. I also provide a brief summary of available literature on Indigenous theatre written by scholars and theatre makers from the three countries, and a chapter overview as I lead into the study findings.

What Is Indigenous Theatre? I am always surprised when people from within the performing arts sector, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as some academics often ask, ‘What is Indigenous theatre’? I have always thought that this was the wrong question to be asking. However, in consideration of this question I begin by deferring to a keynote address made by Aboriginal theatre maker and Artistic Director of Ilbijerri Theatre, Rachelle Maza-Long.8 Who at

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the 2015 Australian National Theatre Forum. During her address Maza-­ Long rhetorically asked, “What is Indigenous theatre?”9 On that day Maza-Long did not provide a definitive answer. Instead, her response centred on ‘what makes a work Indigenous’, and to that inquiry her answer was ‘ownership’. Having ownership of our stories and the right to tell those stories in any way possible is, for Maza-Long, a key feature of what makes a work Indigenous. Although the collective ‘our’ in her argument was not established, I strongly believe that she alludes to a broader context of community ownership as well as the singular authority of an Indigenous theatre maker. However, many Indigenous theatre makers choose to produce their works through collaborative production models. This means that the ownership, or authorship, of Indigenous stories for the stage needs to be strongly established. Whilst many agree with the argument of authorship, Australian scholar Helen Gilbert in her article, Reconciliation? Aboriginality and Australian Theatre in the 1990s suggests that the authorship argument is problematic when discussing collaboratively written works. Gilbert argues that there is a need to consider the inherent hierarchy at work in these collaborations because making Indigenous theatre is an exchange between Indigenous and Western theatre practices.10 This is true. The nature of theatre is that it is a collaborative activity and there are always multiplicities of artistic and cultural relationships in play no matter what the story or form of production. Various sector and industry peers will often have input into the development of new play texts whether they are Indigenous or not, and it is not uncommon for non-­ Indigenous dramaturges to work with Indigenous playwrights on developing scripts for the stage. As Gilbert argues, this is because the theatrical framework in which these stories are told is mostly determined by Western and European understandings of theatre making practices such as narrative structures, plot, characters, and stage elements. In complimenting Maza-Long’s argument, I too believe that what makes a play Indigenous is where Indigenous theatre makers maintain stewardship of their stories, have a legitimate say in the process of bringing those stories to the stage, and have creative leadership in collaborative developments or presentations. This study therefore investigates the role of the Indigenous author/ playwright and how creative leadership is experienced by way of three case studies. The three rehearsal case studies chosen for this study were all collaborative projects in one way or another. What each has in common was that the playwright was present in the rehearsal room guiding the creatives towards

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an understanding of their story, characters, and play worlds. All of the research collaborators involved in this study are highly regarded in, and distinct to their local contexts. The three case studies are of rehearsals that took place over the three year project time line from 2013–2016. While having occurred some time ago, the rehearsal activities highlighted still form part of an ongoing practice that builds on historical and contemporary cultural forms. Although the case studies represent a small sample, they do highlight the multiplicity of conditions under which Indigenous work is collaboratively developed and made. Projects  he Fox and the Freedom Fighters (Australia) T The Fox and the Freedom Fighters is a new Aboriginal play co-written and performed by two independent Aboriginal theatre makers, a mother and daughter. The work was rehearsed and performed at Carriageworks in Redfern, Sydney Australia in late 2014. The story is based on the life of the late Aboriginal activist Charles “Chicka” Dixon. Chicka is the mother’s father and the daughter’s Grandfather. The Fox and the Freedom Fighters is very much about the story of growing up under the shadow of his very public life. This play marked the first major production for Aunty and her daughter and was produced by an independent non-Indigenous producer and developed with the assistance of a non-Indigenous playwright and dramaturge. For this production, I was engaged as the rehearsal director and the only other Indigenous person on the creative team. Although engaged to direct the show the theatre makers mostly regarded me as an outsider and with apprehension. It had taken the mother and daughter many years to bring the story to production and they were very cautious about sharing their story with someone who was not part of that journey. Although employed on the creative team, I was very clear about the research project, and I had spent some time discussing the aims of the project with both theatre makers. Despite my best efforts to convince them that the research was not about the work itself but about the process of bringing the story to the stage the theatre makers finally consented to me documenting the rehearsal process but only by writings on the process of making the show in my personal journal, which included some observations of rehearsals. In this way I was also able to document discussions that took place between the theatre makers, and

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other happenings. Documenting this project was difficult as it required drawing from memories of what took place each day during the rehearsals, but it was none-the-­less highly productive. The theatre makers are not named in this study as they did not give permission to be identified, which is why I refer to them as Aunty and daughter. I talk more about this somewhat untenable situation in the following chapter.  unset Road (Aotearoa) S In Aotearoa New Zealand I observed rehearsals for a 2014 remount of a Maori/Cook Island story Sunset Road written by Maori/Cook Island playwright Miria George and produced by Tawata Productions in Wellington.11 Miria is co-founder and co-producer of Tawata Productions with Co-producer Hone Kouka. She is an award-winning playwright and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters.12 For the 2014 production of Sunset Road, Miria as playwright also directed the show. Sunset Road is a coming of age story set against the post-war economic boom of the 1950s and 60s when many Pacific Islanders from Tonga, Samoa, Cook Islands, and Fiji migrated to New Zealand on temporary visas under cheap labour schemes. The majority of these itinerant workers and their families settled predominately on the North Island, and in particular in the city of Auckland, which quickly became the largest diasporic Polynesian city in the world. For this production, the majority of the cast and crew involved in the remount were of both Maori and Cook Island heritage. The Sunset Road case study could be viewed as the “ideal” context for making Indigenous works for the stage. To produce an Indigenous story by Indigenous people for Indigenous people, or in this case a Maori/ Cook Island story produced by a Maori/Cook company with mostly an all Maori/Cook Island cast and creative team, is an aspirational model for many Indigenous theatre makers around the world. It is a paradigm that provides Indigenous creative control and cultural authority over how a work is developed and made. Sadly, this approach to making theatre is not always possible for many Indigenous companies due to the availability of trained and experienced theatre makers, inadequate funding, and lack of resources. Due to this situation many Indigenous companies co-produce with non-Indigenous companies, as was the case for The Fox and The Freedom Fighters, and for the following First Nations story, The Unplugging.

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 he Unplugging (Turtle Island) T The Unplugging is an award-winning play written by Algonquin First Nations playwright Yvette Nolan.13 The play is based on Velma Wallis’s book entitled Two Old Women, an Athabascan legend passed down from mothers to daughters for many generations.14 The play is an account of two old women abandoned by their community somewhere in the north of Canada during a particularly brutal winter. For the 2015 remount of her play Nolan chose to work with Native Earth Performing Arts and co-­ produce with a non-first nations company The Factory Theatre in Toronto. The director, the actors, and production crew all came from culturally diverse backgrounds including Filipino, Swiss, Chinese, and Korean Canadian heritage. For the 2015 production Nolan also chose to cast non-­ First Nations actors, which was in my view a brave and revolutionary act. During her time as Artistic Director of Native Performing Arts Nolan wrote about what she calls, “others” in collaboration when making and producing First Nations work. In Native Earth’s 25-year anniversary publication Nolan is quoted as stating, “We always hire other ‘other’ in the work. Native people, people of colour, queer people and women, those with conflicted relationships to the dominant”.15 Unfortunately, her local First Nations theatre community did not support her artistic vision for the 2015 production and made very public protestations challenging her right to decide how her work could be told. Although somewhat distressing for Nolan, and for the cast and crew, Nolan stood by her decision, but at a cost both personally and to her reputation. Disapproval from local community groups, family, and within Indigenous theatre sectors is a common experience for many Indigenous theatre makers. Aunty and her daughter were also subject to similar challenges in writing their story for the stage. In their case however it was mostly personal with threats coming from within their own family. These experiences are due to the challenges of individual ownership and community responsibilities. In her book, Talkin’ Up To The White Woman, Moreton-Robinson explains the notion of Indigenous relationality. She states, “In Indigenous cultural domains relationality means that one experiences the self as part of others and that others are part of the self; this is learnt through reciprocity, obligation, shared experiences, coexistence, cooperation and social memory.”16 Moreton-Robinson also tells us that the life writings of Indigenous women are often “part of, inseparable, to an embodied sense of one’s community”.17 When an Indigenous

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playwright decides to tell their story in a theatrical context however, it is not always in a way that community perceive as historically known or culturally acceptable. There were two of the women playwrights in this study that at some point had to overcome the challenges of collective ownership in telling their stories. How each playwright dealt with these issues I discuss in more detail throughout the following chapters. Both The Unplugging and The Fox and the Freedom Fighters are in essence Indigenous stories. As mentioned, Nolan’s play is based on an Athabascan First Nations story passed down from generation to generation. Nolan’s own life experiences also permeate throughout the play, something she pointed out at various stages throughout the rehearsal process. The 2015 remount was articulated in the media as co-production between a First Nations company Native Earth Performing Arts and a non-First Nations company The Factory Theatre. For the 2015 remount Nolan and the play Director, Nina Aquino chose non-First Nations production crew, creatives, and cast. However, as mentioned, most were from non-Anglo heritage. Besides Nolan, no other First Nations creatives were involved in the rehearsal process or in production. The Unplugging is an Indigenous play. However, it was not an Indigenous production. Similarly, The Fox and the Freedom Fighters is based on the early life experiences of Aunty and her daughter. Their story was translated into a written theatrical format by a non-Indigenous playwright. This decision does not, in my mind, make their play any less Indigenous. Like Nolan, Aunty and her daughter engaged a non-Indigenous company to produce their 2014 show and the ultimate power and decision making on how the story would be presented on stage largely sat with the non-Indigenous producers. Both plays are Indigenous stories or based on Indigenous stories. They are also in part both based on the lived experiences of the playwrights. The productions were collaborations between the Indigenous playwrights and the producing companies. Luckily, I am not interested in the final production of any of these works. Instead my purpose is to highlight the role of the Indigenous woman playwright, and their creative licence in the rehearsal process. In now focus on outlining an Indigenous research framework for examining this practice beginning with an overview of Moreton-Robertson’s Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory.

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Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory Indigenous methodologies are a vigorous and active field of knowledge production involving Indigenous peoples from around the world, including Australia, applying their own lenses, and understanding.18

The above quote is from Moreton-Robertson and Maggie Walter co-­ authored book chapter, Indigenous Methodologies in Social Research (2009), which outlines key components of Indigenous research.19 In that article the authors note that “notwithstanding differences [across different cultural contexts] Indigenous methodologies all have a common philosophical base” which can be defined as; reflecting Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing), axiologies (ways of doing), and ontologies (ways of being).20 They define Indigenous epistemologies as being informed by our relationality, our shared memories and experiences, as well as our individual concrete experiences.21 That our ontologies are informed by our relations to country and ancestral beings, and our axiologies as shaped by “our ontology and epistemology.”22 What we know, how we are, and what we do as Indigenous people is informed by our knowledge and understanding of the world as culturally known. An Indigenous standpoint requires that an Indigenous researcher highlight these beliefs whilst also acknowledging that one’s own subjectivity, and research, is informed by these principles. To understand Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory, it is important to begin by acknowledging the development and thinking around Indigenous research, methodologies, and principles and how they may apply to the study of Indigenous theatre. Indigenous scholar Martin Nakata describes an Indigenous standpoint as, “…the point of entry for investigation of the cultural interface where western knowledge systems and Indigenous experiences are dialectically engaged”.23 The point of entry for this study is the rehearsal room, and it is important to recognise that rehearsal rooms are not a neutral interface. Like theatres, rehearsal spaces hold a legacy of theatre making practices and processes that are historically influenced by Western and European understandings of theatre making. In examining the cultural bias inherent in theatre making spaces, Australian scholars Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo ask, “Whose ground are we on? How are power relations inscribed in the architectural aspects of a theatre space? How can theatre provide a space for negotiating or subverting the relationships its spatial configurations foster?”.24 In his book, The Haunted Stage,

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performance scholar Marvin Carlson similarly examines the historical associations of theatres as archival sites recognising that “the relationship between theatre and cultural memory is deep and complex”.25 Like theatres, rehearsal rooms can also reflect particular historical and cultural contexts and in post-colonial contexts on land that is historically contested, which can affect the theatre makers process of making theatre in those spaces. It is the case that the majority of contemporary Indigenous theatre makers do not make theatre on their own lands. Instead, like cultural nomads they exist between spaces. They are also often trained in Western and European theatre traditions whilst also being deeply informed by their own specific cultural performance practices. To counter the social, cultural and artistic traces of Western and European influences held within a rehearsal context many of the Indigenous theatre makers that I observed employed specific ways of marking that territory for the duration of the rehearsal process. When present in the rehearsal room the Indigenous woman playwright would often play a significant role in this activity through an articulation of her position as an Indigenous woman, sharing her knowledge of cultural practice, and acting as a territorial agent constantly shifting, expanding and contracting a sense of indigeneity within and upon that territory. Nakata also suggests that an Indigenous Standpoint is a discursive mode of enquiry and that the lived experience is an entry point for investigation.26 In a similar way First Nations scholar Margaret Elizabeth Kovach argues that cultural specificity can be articulated through story and personal narratives, which can have profound implications for the interpretation of story within research.27 Kovach suggests that historically oral traditions and stories were born of connections within the world, and that they are often recounted relationally. Further, that narrative is a primary means for passing on knowledge,28 that there is an “inseparable relationship between narrative and knowing.29 Kovach explains that within Indigenous epistemologies there are two general forms of stories, stories that spiritual elements such as creation stories, and stories that are all about knowledge production.30 As mentioned, the goal of an Indigenous researcher is to find a way to honour these practices, and in doing this I embrace story sharing as an Indigenous methodological framework to unpack the research data and to describe the process of undertaking participant observations from across three different countries. I dedicate the following chapters to privileging the voices of Indigenous women

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playwrights as their stories situate and contextualise their lives and plays in the vast and intricate landscapes of their local cultures, histories, and epistemologies.31 Applying an Indigenous Women’s Standpoint theory provides the grown for recognising that for Indigenous women, their way of knowing, being, and doing is often informed by their relationality to community, country, and ancestors. That as a research methodology, an Indigenous Women’s Standpoint is an approach that embraces a shared experience, acknowledges story sharing as knowledge production, and privileges Indigenous woman’s voices. It is an approach that challenges the knowledge position of Indigenous women within the academy, as researchers and knowledge holders, whilst also recognising the added responsibilities of undertaking research in communities and conducting research in an ethical and considered way. For the Indigenous researcher, it is important that we define our position acknowledging our interconnectedness with the research collaborators. So, in acknowledging my position as an Aboriginal person, theatre maker, teacher, and scholar working in Australia for over 25 years I want to briefly present my standpoint. I am a founding member and Co-Artistic Director of Moogahlin Performing Arts an Aboriginal theatre company in Sydney that develops and presents new Aboriginal work. For ten years I worked as Head of Theatre at an Aboriginal college, the Eora College and Aboriginal Centre for Visual and Performing Arts in Redfern Sydney. My early scholarly writing focused on the training of Indigenous actors in Australia. I make theatre that is culturally informed by particular processes and practices that have everything to do with a philosophical set of values and ethics of being as do my Indigenous theatre peers and associates locally, nationally and internationally. My role as a theatre maker, teacher and academic is inextricably informed by my embodied sense of being an Aboriginal woman and grounded in knowledge’s that are different to the realities of other non-­ Indigenous theatre makers. As an Aboriginal woman it is considered culturally ethical and appropriate to conduct research with Indigenous women playwrights and to listen to their stories. My approach to research is informed by a cultural practice of Ngara, or deep listening. Ngara is a custom of observance that Indigenous people of South Eastern Australia have known for thousands of years.32 Similarly many clans of southern Queensland know this tradition as Dadirri. Aboriginal writer Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann describes Dadirr in the following way:

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Dadirri is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn—not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting.33

In coming to a methodology for gathering data (stories) I looked for a scholarly approach that was similar and compatible with the practice of Ngara—to observe and record the day to day happenings inside the rehearsal rooms. I considered the works of Australian Performance Studies scholars such as Gay McAuley (1998, 2006, 2012), Kate Rossmanith (2008), Laura Ginters (2013) and to some extent Rachael Swain (2006). All of the aforementioned academics have applied an approach to the study of theatre and performance known as Rehearsal Studies. Rehearsal Studies draws from the ground breaking work of Anthropologist Victor Turner (1992) as well as the more recent writings of Richard Schechner (2010) to consider the everyday social and cultural activities and interactions that take place between the people (theatre makers) who inhabit a space (the rehearsal room) to know more about how people make sense of what they are doing (theatre making). The field of rehearsal studies also draws on the work of a number of ethnographers such as Dwight Conquergood (2006) who writes about ways of observing the human condition, Clifford Geertz (1973) for detailing the body in space through a practice of what he describes as “thick description”, and James Clifford (1986) who describes the process of participant observation, and of writing up observations from insider/outsider accounts. For this study I drew on the practice of participant observation, and applied the data collection techniques of Rehearsal Studies scholars to compile a record of the day to day activities of Indigenous theatre makers making theatre making.

Recording and Writing Data In her article Towards an Ethnography of Rehearsal (1998) McAuley outlines some of the practices employed by Performance Studies researchers for documenting rehearsal activities suggesting a number of approaches, each depending on the type of rehearsal context, and these include; written documentation, journal musings, video recording, and or interviews.34 As standard theatre rehearsals often occur daily and cab range in time from

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a two to four week period, the sheer bulk of material collected can be problematic. In her article McAuley provides little relief on how to extrapolate information from this volume of data except to suggest that video footage can assist the researcher and the researched as an archive for both.35 For the researcher these recordings offer a return to the field, a record of an earlier visit.36 But what if you cannot record or document the rehearsal activities, as was the condition with two of the case studies. Each case study had its own unique challenges in gaining permissions to access and record rehearsals that were determined by local theatre policies or by the theatre makers themselves. As mentioned earlier, the research collaborators in Australia did not give permission to video record or document the rehearsals. They did however give consent for the use of a personal journal to reflect on my experience of the rehearsal process. When negotiating the Turtle Island/Canada field trip I was informed by the then Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Tara Beagan, that I needed to consider Clauses 47 and 57 of the Canadian Actor’s Equity Association Canadian Independent Theatre Agreement. In that agreement Clause 47 allows for the recording of rehearsals for non-commercial purposes such as at an artist request or for archival purposes., but not for research purposes.37 Clause 57 strictly restricts the video recording of workshops or rehearsals, even for educational purposes. In Aotearoa, there were no restrictions imposed, but that is not to say that were no challenges in gaining access to the Sunset Road rehearsal. In the following chapter I discuss in more detail the intricacies of these endeavours. In documenting the other two rehearsals I sat at the back of the rehearsal room everyday diligently documenting in a notebook details of the goings on of the theatre makers. To formalise this process each page was divided into three columns. One for the time, one for who speaks and to whom, plus one to add detailed descriptions of bodies in space, theatre maker’s actions and sometimes personal musings. Some page corners would often be marked by doodles that helped focus my mind and keep me present throughout the rehearsal period. In Aotearoa I employed a local research assistant to video record.38 For this process I noted a time code for when the recording started and ended (see Fig. 1.1). The document above shows the date and time of the rehearsal, what conversation took place and where, who spoke and to whom, plus a time code for when the camera was turned on in the rehearsal room for later reference.

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Fig. 1.1  Rehearsal Documentation notebook

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Alongside the formal documentation I often made notes in a personal journal detailing experiences and conversations that took place either accidently or purposefully in each context. Such experiences included arriving early to rehearsals so as to catch the theatre makers as they entered the space. Most days I would have lunch with the cast. I joined then during breaks outside in the snow, or in the rain. There rehearsal issues would be discussed between cast members. After rehearsals I would also go for a drink at the local bar with some of the cast and crew. During these meetings the theatre makers would often discuss many of their concerns regarding the rehearsal issues and processes. Several theatre makers were very happy to talk with me. Perhaps as a complete stranger I was seen as unthreatening. A type of neutral sounding board. At the end of the day I would reflect on and note in my journal many of these discussions. Over the three-year research period I had clocked over 420 hours of rehearsal observations and accumulated four hundred pages of written rehearsal documentation, 140  hours of video footage, and a number of personal journals. The following section outlines my approach to dealing with the enormity and range of data.

Writing Up In writing up the research findings I firstly draw on the work of Glaser and Strauss and Grounded Theory (1967) to form an appreciation of a practice as open-ended, unstable and situated rather than fixed and universal. In trawling through the data collected I tease out themes and moments that seemed relevant to the research objects such as when the theatre makers were conveying their understanding of performance making, whilst the playwrights were deeply involved in articulating their epistemological and or ontological views on that practice, as they shared their real life experiences, and in explaining the fictional worlds and characters of their plays. I build stories around these moments in a type of ethnographic narrative, which constructs narratives around particular understandings of life and practice from an Indigenous point of view. In employ a writing style of autoethnography. I use a mode of critical writing well suited to an accidental “anthropologist”, who like me are “natives” or insiders of the cultures we study. In writing autoethnographic text I describe various experiences from both inside and outside of a practice and culture. The results of this type of writing is referred to by ethnographer Norman Denzin as ‘messy text’, a collection of experiences that are incomplete, self-reflexive, and

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resistant to totalizing theories, but which are also grounded in epiphanies that occur in the field or in everyday life.39 I do not attempt to capture the totality of a group’s way of life or in this context, to categories a set of practices. Instead, I offer interpreted slices and glimpses of interactions, a snap shot of Indigenous theatre practitioners in rehearsal across three different cultural contexts within a three-year time frame.

Writing About Indigenous Performance As stated, this study offers a new viewpoint of a practice. In claiming this position, what follows is a broad summary of current writings about Indigenous theatre. I include in this list writings by Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous scholars from Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island, and published works by local theatre makers. The list also does not include writings on Native American theatre or from Native American scholars or practitioners. This omission is deliberate due to the parameters of the research project. I acknowledge the boundaries that separate First Nations and Native American peoples and cultures are defined by colonial frontiers and I recognise that not all Indigenous people of North America recognise these boundaries. However, my study is bound in many ways by the continuing colonial influence on these sites that may still have cultural affiliations within commonwealth boundaries. Critical writings on Indigenous theatre in the academy are mostly framed by postcolonial perspectives, historical accounts, reception theory, and transcultural analysis. Much of this writing generally focuses on the public presentation or production of Indigenous works and from outsider accounts. A critical work written from an Indigenous perspective, standpoint, or that incorporates Indigenous epistemologies is rare. Such accounts are primarily written by Indigenous theatre practitioners or co-­ written with non-Indigenous academics. The authors and publications noted in this review are of those that have contributed to current knowledge on Indigenous theatre and by no means account for the substantial amount of published works on Indigenous performing arts practice locally and globally as that is beyond the focus and scope of this study. Australia To date there are very few Indigenous scholars writing about Indigenous performance in Australia. Anne Marshall is one of the rare Aboriginal

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voices. Her article, Casting about for the scent: Researching Aboriginal Performance, investigates Indigenous performance as an ecology in process, one always in flux and constructed from Indigenous ontologies (Marshall and Beattie 2000, 9). Now retired and living happily on a property in southern NSW, Marshall has been a great mentor in guiding my academic writing and research practice. As the leading Indigenous scholar in Australia my contributions to the field include co-authored journals such as The Challenges of Benevolence: the role of the Indigenous Actor (2005) with Maryrose Casey,40 and Protocols of Engagement: ‘Community Cultural Development’ Encounters an Urban Aboriginal Experience’ with Paul Dwyer (2009).41 My solo articles include, Transnational connections: First nations conversations through making performance (2018b),42 Addressing a Great Silence (2015),43 and a book chapter, Afterword: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre and Performance Practice in Australia (2011).44 When it comes listing Non-Indigenous scholars in Australia writing about Indigenous theatre I begin with the latest publication Performing Indigenous Identities On The Contemporary Australian Stage (2020) by Susanne Julia Thurow. This research considers identity representation in cross-cultural works for the stage. For any years Maryrose Casey has been the leading scholar in Australia having published numerous books and articles providing in-depth historical narratives, inquiries, and critical examinations of Indigenous performance. Her books include Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967–1990 (2004), and Telling Stories, Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Performance (2012). Her numerous articles include the following key publications, Indigenous Australian Drama: Decolonising Australian Stage’s (2009), Ngapartji Ngapartji: Telling Aboriginal Australian Stories (2009), and Nindethana and the National Black Theatre: interrogating the mythology of the New Wave (2000). Another significant Australian scholar is Helen Gilbert who writes from within the field of postcolonial studies examining Indigenous theatre as intercultural practice highlighting contested positions and discourses within and about that practice. Her most influential critical works include the books Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in contemporary Australian Theatre (1998b), Postcolonial plays: an anthology (2013), and articles, Reconciliation? Aboriginality and Australian theatre in the 1990s (1998a), and Black and white and Re(a)d all over again: Indigenous minstrelsy in contemporary Canadian and Australian theatre (2003). Joanna Tompkins

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is another key Australian scholar who’s book Unsettling space: contestations in contemporary Australian theatre (2006) examines the Australian stage as an unstable place where historically, Indigenous narratives, culture, and performance practices were systematically contested, erased, or replaced by foreign (colonial) narratives and perspectives of Australian culture and society. In her book Post-colonial drama: theory, practice, politics (Tompkins and Gilbert 1996) Tompkins explores Indigenous performance as a challenging and destabilising force on Australian stages that counter and disrupt dominant settler narratives of a homogenised history and culture. Other Australian scholars who influenced critical thinking around Indigenous performance in Australia include, Geoffrey Milne (2000), and Stephen Muecke (1992). Worth noting is that over the past twenty years it has been women scholars in Australia who have primarily published the most critically engaging articles and books on Indigenous theatre practice. This is not the case in Aotearoa. Aotearoa Much like in Australia, there are few Māori voices on Māori theatre within the academy. One fresh voice is Nicola Hyland, who offers incisive and illuminating scholarly critiques on Māori performance practices and the portrayal of Maori life and culture on New Zealand stages. In her article, Beyoncé’s Response (eh?): Feeling the Ihi of Spontaneous Haka Performance in Aotearoa/New Zealand’ (2015a) Hyland critiques a backstage performance of a Haka for a famous international performer (Beyonce). In her article Hyland clarifies the values and purposes of a Haka in different cultural contexts arguing that the practice is not only a cultural form, the Haka is a lived practice. Hyland states, “Yet, by viewing haka as an evolved and evolving cross-disciplinary form, there is an acknowledgement of the form’s relevance as a living practice”.45 In her article, Unsettling Blanket Man: The ‘Ecological Māori’ as a Pākeha Play-Thing (2015b) Hyland critically examines a recent award winning theatre production presented by a Pakeha (non-Maori) company about a dead local homeless Maori man. Hyland suggests that the portrayal of Maori lives on the stage is often constructed through the colonial lens and argues that in these contexts a Maori voice is not present even when seemingly there. Of the Maori theatre practitioners who have published works about their practice Hone Kouka is the most prolific. In his book Our Own Voice (1999), Kouka interrogates key assumptions and tropes about Maori

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theatre practice and argues for a self-determined Maori theatre in Aotearoa. In his book chapter Re-colonising the natives: The state of contemporary Maori theatre (2007) Kouka describes the realisation of his company Tawata Productions as one based on and informed by the collective vision, aspiration and purpose of Maori Kaupapa (ways of being).46 He also appears in interviews in many Pakeha publications such as in William Peterson’s Maori Theatre on its Own Ground: Moving Past the Post Postcolonialism (2006, 126–142). A key publication by Pakeha scholars on Māori and Pacifika theatre is Performing Aotearoa (2007). Co-edited by David O’Donnell and Marc Maufort Performing Aotearoa is a comprehensive anthology of Māori and Pacifika theatre productions from across the north and south islands of Aotearoa/NZ. O’Donnell is the leading Pakeha scholar on Maori and Pacifica theatre having published articles such as Politics of Place and Extended Family (2009), Taki Rua Productions’ 25th Year: ‘Strange Resting Places’ and ‘Te Karakia’ (2009), and ‘Naked Samoans: Pacific Island Voices in the Theatre of Aotearoa/New Zealand’ (2003). Maufort has contributed to international collective dialogues about First Nations theatre practice more broadly in articles such as, Captured Images: Performing the First Nations ‘Other’ Codifying the National Self (2006). Other key Pakeha literature includes, Hilary Halba in Let me feel the magic: Hilary Halba interviews Rangimoana Taylor (2007), and Creating Images and Telling Stories: Decolonising Performing Arts and Image-­ based Research in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2009), Christopher Balme’s article New Maori Theatre in New Zealand (1989) and Astrid Carstenen’s article, Home Fires: Creating a Pacifica Theatre in the Diaspora (2001). Turtle Island In Turtle Island, there are a few First Nations scholars writing about Indigenous theatre making practices. Toronto based Anishinaabe theatre practitioner Jill Carter’s article Chocolate Woman visions an organic dramaturgy (2008) is based on rehearsal observations of the two week creative development of the First Nations work Chocolate Woman Dreams.47 Monique Mojica, a Kuna and Rappahannock theatre maker and performer in Chocolate Woman Dreams also published an article based on her involvement in the realisation of the show in Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way (2008). Mojica has written widely on her approaches to making performance work such as in, Stories from the Bod: Blood Memory

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and Organic Texts (2006) and in co-authored publications with non-First nations academics such as Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English (2003). Another key author is Yvette Nolan (The Unplugging), who has just finished her book, Medicine Shows: Indigenous performance culture (2020), on First Nations theatre practice in Canada. This book expands on her previously published article, Aboriginal Theatre in Canada: An Overview on the history of First Nations Theatre in Canada (2008). To the field of literature by non-First Nations scholars on First Nations performance, Canadian academic Ric Knowles has contributed the most substantial number of scholarly articles based on his in-depth engagement with First Nations playwrights and performance makers. His publications include co-authored articles with Mojica such as Staging Coyote’s Dream mentioned above, and Translators, traitors, mistresses, and whores: Mojica and the mothers of the Metis nation (2005). Along with Mojica, Knowles has also co-published works from his close association with playwright Nolan Native Earth: National, Transnational and Local (2007). He has also written extensively on intercultural practice such as his article ‘Performing Intercultural Memory in the Diasporic Present: The Case of Toronto (2009). Other key Canadian scholars include Helen Peters (1993), and Rob Appleford (2005). In Aboriginal Drama and Theatre: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English Appleford presents an edited collection of literature by non-First Nations theatre academics and First Nations theatre practitioners. An Indigenous Voice As mentioned, the list above by no means covers the innumerable publications about Indigenous theatre and performance practice locally or globally. For the most part the Indigenous scholars and theatre makers who do contribute to the academic discourse about Indigenous performance do so from an Indigenous perspective, knowledge system, and worldview. What we write is often informed by our lived experiences, values, and histories, which are often informed by similar or shared experiences of the people we write about. We have a responsibility to adhere to local protocols when approaching or negotiating collaborations and relationships with other Indigenous scholars, theatre makers, and peoples. It would be wrong to presume that this process should or would be unproblematic for an Indigenous researcher. Each collaboration has its complications. For

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this research, as mentioned, the encounters were sometimes determined by local theatrical agreements, but mostly they were defined by the nuanced cultural etiquette of the local communities and theatre makers involved in the study. The following chapter entitled, “From Here to There” therefore provides a personal account of these experiences highlighting the key responsibilities of an Indigenous researcher when approaching research collaborators. In writing these accounts in the style of ethnographic memoir I attempt to bring an intimate understanding of the lived experience of undertaking Indigenous research from an Indigenous perspective. I describe the visceral experiences of travelling to foreign sites, both at home and away, narrating through the gritty day-to-­ day details of accessing these worlds. I unravel the necessary challenges specific to each cultural context and the specific cultural processes involved in gaining permission to access, observe, and write about Indigenous rehearsal practices. The chapters that follow this chapter delve deeply into the day to day activities of the theatre makers themselves. In the third chapter, Sharing Stories, I examine the role and application of personal stories and cultural narratives that were shared in rehearsal by the Indigenous women playwrights to gain an understanding of their understanding of the world and their practice, and how they realise their play characters as representing a modern Indigenous woman’s experience of the world. I apply story as a methodology to also uncover some of the common, interconnecting, and relational concerns articulated by the women playwrights across all three plays and in each rehearsal context. In chapter four entitled, Embodied Knowledge, I investigate the way theatre makers convey an embodied sense and understanding of identity, and of the world as culturally known. In closing, the final chapter, The Way We Make Theatre, briefly outlines some of the key findings of the case studies. I then draw attention to the little discussed practice of inscribing native languages in play texts. Lastly, I conclude by presenting some the impacts that this study has had on my professional practice as an Indigenous theatre maker and researcher, and for the research collaborators involved.

Notes 1. My father’s family are from the Biripi clan nation, whose ancestral lands are on the Mid North Coast of NSW from Taree to Barrington Tops. 2. The Anishinaabe are a group of culturally-related Indigenous peoples from what is now known as Canadian Territories and into the United States.

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They include the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe (including Mississaugas), Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, and Algonquin peoples. The terms Anishinaabe and Ojibwe are often interchangeable, yet they have different meanings. Anishinaabe can describe various Indigenous peoples in North America. It can also mean the language group shared by the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. Ojibwe, on the other hand, refers to a specific Anishinaabe nation. 3. I use the term Indigenous throughout this manuscript to denote a group of peoples with no specificity other than being Indigenous to their countries. Where possible I use proper nouns to identify specific cultures such as Aboriginal, Maori, and First Nations. In the same way I also name individual clan nations that collaborators identify with. I also use the first names of research collaborators to ensure their participation is viewed as collaborators and keeping with a ficto-narrative style of this book. 4. Indigenous women’s standpoint theory is an approach to research first coined by Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her article, ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint: A methodological tool’ Australian Feminist Studies (Taylor Francis Online) 28 (78) (2013): 331–347. 5. I studied dramatic arts at the Victorian College of Arts, a conservatory model of actor training. I have a Master of Adult Education from the University of Technology Sydney, a Master of Creative Arts Research from Wollongong University, and a Doctoral degree in Arts from University of Sydney. 6. Moreton-Robertson, Towards and Indigenous Woman’s Standpoin, 333. 7. Nakata, M. (2002). Indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. IFLA journal, 28(5–6), 281–291. p. 284. 8. Rachael Maza is the current Artistic Director of Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Cooperative, which was formed in 1990 by a group of Melbourne-based Indigenous artists and community members. Ilbijerri (pronounced il-bidg-er-ree) is a Woiwurrung word meaning “coming together for ceremony.” Woiwurrung people belong to the Kulin Nation of the Melbourne area in Victoria. 9. Rachael Maza-Long’s speech can be found at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zNPLfrSjQXQ. 10. Helen Gilbert, “Reconciliation? Aboriginality and Australian theatre in the 1990s.” Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s, Edit. Veronica Kelly (Amsterdam: Rudopi, 1998), 75. 11. When first introducing research collaborators I do so by formally using their full name and later refer to them informally by using their first names

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as a means of acknowledging a more personal approach to research collaboration. 12. Her first play Oho Ake won the 2004 Chapman Tripp Theatre Award. Her play, And What Remains (2007) marked Miria’s international debut as a playwright. Her other plays include, The Awakening (2004), He Reo Aroha (2010) and Sunset Road (2012). 13. Nolan is a playwright, director, dramaturge and educator, born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to an Algonquin mother and an Irish immigrant father. She was the first ever Writer-in-Residence at Brandon University in 1996. From 2003–2011, she served as the Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. The first production of The Unplugging, directed by Yvette, won the 2013 Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for Outstanding Original Script. 14. Velma Wallis, Two Old Women (Seattle: Epicentre Press, 1993). 15. Ric Knowles. “Yvette Nolan’s Native Earth: National, Transnational and Local.” Native life, Native Theatre, Native Earth (Native Earth Performing Arts, 2007), 5. 16. Aileen Moreton Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal women and Feminism (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2000), 15. 17. Ibid., 16. 18. Moreton-Robinson and Walter, “Indigenous Methodologies in Social Research.” In Social Research Methods, Edit. M. Walter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 95–109. 96. 19. Moreton-Robinson, “Indigenous Methodologies in Social Research,” 95–109. 20. Ibid., 96. 21. Ibid., 342. 22. Ibid., 340. 23. Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), quoted in Moreton-Robinson. “Towards an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint,” 38. 24. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo. “Toward a Topography of Cross-­ Cultural Theatre Praxis” The Drama Review (Melbourne, Victoria: The MIT Press, 2002), 46 (3): 31–53, 47. 25. Marvin Carlson, The haunted Stage: the theatre as a memory machine (Michigan: University of Michigan). 26. Martin, Nakata, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 213. 27. Margaret Elizabeth Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 94–108, 97.

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28. Ibid., 94. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 95. 31. Maryrose Casey, Telling Stories: Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Performance (Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012). 119. 32. Ngara—is a term used across many NSW clan languages. 33. Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann, “Dadirri—A Reflction” (Emmaus Productions, 2002). http://www.dadirri.org.au/wp-­content/ uploads/2015/03/Dadirri-­I nner-­D eep-­L istening-­M -­R -­U ngunmerr-­ Bauman-­Refl1.pdf. 34. McAuley, “Towards an Ethnography of Rehearsal,” 75. 35. Ibid., 82. 36. Ibid., 78. 37. Clause 47 covers the non-commercial capture and distribution of recordings of a production, including aspects of the development, rehearsal, and preparation of a production in which Artists may be featured. Recording refers to the capture of material including moving or still images, video and audio recordings by any available means. The current Agreement that I referred to was released on 31 December 2014 and valid to 28 June 2015, and is available from the website http://www.caea.com/Equityweb/ EquityLibrary/Agreements/Theatre/CTA/2012-­2015CTA.pdf. 38. The research assistant for Sunset Road, Sarita Keo Kossamak, was employed on the advice of the theatre makers. 39. Norman K.  Denzin, Interpreting Ethnography: Ethnographic Practice for the 21st Century (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 246. 40. This article is a discussion on how Indigenous actors navigate the complexities of artistic practice and the social and cultural obligations of making work. 41. This paper examines a Community Cultural Development project in my local community. 42. This article investigates a transcultural model of exchange between Aboriginal Australia and First Nations from Turtle Island/Canada. 43. This article critiques two Indigenous art and performance works that respond to Indigenous involvement in world conflicts. 44. This article investigates the everyday social and cultural implications for Indigenous actors. 45. Nicola Hyland, “Unsettling Blanket Man: The Ecological Maori as a Pakeha Play Thing” (Theatre Research International 2015), 40.01:4–18.80. 46. Kaupapa includes Tino Rangatiratanga the principle of self-­determination and Māori control over their own culture, aspirations and destiny. Taonga Tuku Iho the principle of cultural aspiration asserting the centrality and

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legitimacy of Māori ways of knowing, doing and understanding the world and acknowledging their validity and relevance. Kia piki ake i nga ̄ raruraru o te kainga—the alleviation of negative pressures and disadvantages experienced by Māori communities. Wha ̄nau or extended family structure. The principle of Whānau sits at the core of Kaupapa Māori. It acknowledges the relationships that Māori have to one another and to the world around them. Whānau, and the process of whakawhanaungatanga are key elements of Māori society and culture. This principle acknowledges the responsibility and obligations of the company to nurture and care for these relationships. Ata is the principle of growing respectful relationships, negotiating boundaries, working to create and hold safe space with corresponding behaviours. Ata gently reminds people of how to behave when engaging in relationships with people, kaupapa and environments. Kaupapa accords quality space of time (wā) and place (wāhi). It demands effort and energy of participants. It conveys the notion of respectfulness. It conveys the notion of reciprocity. It conveys the requirement of reflection, the prerequisite to critical analysis. It conveys the requirement of discipline. It ensures that the transformation process is an integral part of relationships. 47. Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way was directed by Floyd Favel and performed by Mojica Monique at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre University of Guelph 21 November 2007.

CHAPTER 2

From Here to There

Ethnographic encounters of landscape and environment in the field whether at home or away, are central to the significance of place, and of the people who reside there. —Kirsten Hastrup. ‘Emotional Topographies: The Sense of Place in the Far North’ in Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, edit. James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer (California: Stanford University Press, 2010), 191–211. 191

Home and the Field To distinguish a separation from what could be perceived as the familiar, such as undertaking research in one’s own cultural and professional contexts, it is important that the boundaries between known and unknown be clearly defined. One way of doing this is to distinguish between what is home and what is the field. Home can be described as being constructed by the everyday, by familiar surroundings and relationships, and by the daily routines of the people who live there.1 Even though some places will necessarily feel more like home than others, for a researcher the field is mostly a place that is not home. Home and the field can be also defined as a process of movement from one place to another, specifically from what is familiar to the strange. The ethnographic convention of a travel narrative is often employed to highlight a distance between home and the field, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L.-M. Syron, Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82375-7_2

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familiar and strange.2 This chapter therefore concerns itself with this type of travel account providing details of the numerous processes involved in securing permissions to travel to sites, the often uncomfortable yet exhilarating experiences of being a stranger, the unfamiliar landscapes and climates, and the people I met along the way. These travel field notes are based on my immediate visceral reflections and are also constructed from memory. These recollections and initial perceptions set the stage for establishing each field context.

Getting There Undertaking research with Indigenous peoples is a complex business. There are many reasons why this is the case. One of the main difficulties is that many Indigenous people and communities are generally suspicious of researchers. In her article ‘Ways of Knowing, Ways of Being and Ways of Doing’ Indigenous Australian scholar Karen Martin states that “…the extent of research conducted in Aboriginal lands and on Aboriginal people since British invasion in the late 1770s, is so immense it makes us one of the most researched groups of people on earth”.3 Martin also adds that “…until recent times, research conducted in Aboriginal lands was done so without permission, consultation, or involvement of Aboriginal people.”4 In the past Indigenous peoples were present only as ‘objects of curiosity’ and subjects of research. To be seen, but not asked, heard, nor respected”.5 It is this over surveillance and perceived lack of respect for their culture, society, and way of life that has generated some animosity from many Indigenous peoples towards researchers, and research more broadly.6 Undertaking Indigenous research requires that a researcher build of a generosity of trust with research collaborators. This process can take weeks, months, and in some cases years. Often the time required is indefinable, which can be problematic given the limitations often associated with funded research projects. Such was this case for this study. I had three years to complete the case studies. The first step of any qualitative research project often necessitates an initial contact, either by phone or email. I call this process the ‘cold bite’. This phrase is sometimes used colloquially to describe the act of asking a stranger for something, as in ‘to bite someone for money’, or to use a more familiar phrase a ‘cold call’. I felt genuinely nervous in taking this first step. There was a creeping sense of shame in having to ask people to take a leap of faith in me as a researcher and the research project. I kept

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asking myself, under what conditions would it be ok to sit in a rehearsal room every day recording the activities of the theatre makers? Was I asking too much? I was about to find out. The first case study was to be for the 2013 remount of Tawata’s Sunset Road in Wellington Aotearoa. It took many months for the right conditions to begin the research conversation with the collaborators. It also took several trips to Wellington to build the trust required before the theatre makers felt comfortable with the research aims and outcomes. Whanganui a Tara I had never been to Aotearoa. Nor did I know much about Māori theatre before starting this research project in 2013. I had spent the last ten years examining my own practice and those of my Aboriginal theatre making peers, devoting much of that time to the topic of training Indigenous actors in Australia. I had no reference point from which to start a conversation with Māori theatre makers. In searching the internet for Māori theatre a number of names were highlighted including Rangimoana Taylor, Nancy Brunning, Briar Grace-Smith, Rawiri Paratene, Jim Moriarty, Roma Potiki, Riwia Brown, and Hone Kouka. The only Māori companies at the time with a web presence of producing theatre were Taki Rua and Tawata Productions. Miria George and Hone Kouka are the Co-producers of Tawata. As Hone was linked to both Taki Rua and Tawata he seemed the best choice to follow up. To be sure about the right contact, I decided to meet with a colleague of mine in Sydney who was once a theatre producer in New Zealand.7 She informed me that Hone was “like an Elder in an Australian Indigenous sense.” She thought for a minute then clarified, “though not an Elder, but a senior practitioner due to his age and the length of time he has been practicing theatre in New Zealand. Hone founded Taki Rua, the National Māori Theatre Company in New Zealand and she had produced many of his first plays. I decided that Hone was the perfect place to start. The world wide web doesn’t always provide unlimited access to people and places. The Tawata company home page was informative about the work of the company but only listed a generic info email address. The site didn’t offer a contact number. In August 2013 I wrote to Hone via the info@tawata email introducing myself, my cultural background, and some context on the theatre work I do in Australia. I also provided information about common contacts we shared including the peer mentioned above,

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plus Indigenous theatre associates like Rachael Maza from Ilbijerri Theatre in Melbourne, and Kyle Morrison then Artistic Director of Yirra Yaakin in Perth. I also provided information on the research project, and that I was interested in meeting him. I didn’t go into much detail, as this was just an introduction email. It was Miria who replied some days later. Tena koe Liza-Mare, Nga mihi mahana ki a koe! Many thanks for your email. We are fortunate to have good friendships with both Rachael and [associate]. Tawata’s was very lucky to have Rachael join us for a week during our international Indigenous playwrights development festival here in June. Our Māori theatre community learnt much from Rachael and as the current context for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island theatre in Australia. This is a relationship we are hoping to grow—so that our peoples can share and learn from one another. Hone and I are very happy to speak with you and to give you as much of an insight into our way of working as could be useful to you. (August 2014)

This was a promising start. The next step was to secure a travel date and rehearsal project to research. In a reply email I spoke about the research process and the aim of being inside the room during the entire rehearsal. I didn’t hear back from Miria for quite some time after that. Perhaps it was the distance between us geographically. Maybe it was that they were incredibly busy. Was I missing something, a step, a process, or an appropriate way to approach a request to visit? Did they need time to find out more about me? Was it asking too much? Although Mira had said that they were interested in providing insights, I don’t think that she expected me to ask to spend an extended period of time with them. In the months of silence that followed, these doubts haunted me. I began to reflect on my own understanding of specific cultural processes and practices that I associate with my own Indigenous context and the historical requirements of requesting permission to enter another’s country. The Sacred Ochre Site explains this process in the following way: Travelling across the land involves cultural obligations and respect for the traditional boundaries of neighbouring clan groups. Custom requires visitors to obtain permission to cross the lands of different nations.8

Historically, Indigenous Australians customs dictated that when traveling to another’s country your intention should be communicated by sending a message ahead to the appropriate people, family, or custodians of

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those sites. A visitor would then be required to wait at the border of the host country for an extended period of time until permission arrived to enter. There were always provisions provided for this waiting period such as hunting or fishing tools. I had signalled ahead to Hone and Miria that I wanted to travel to Wellington, to meet and spend an extended period of time with them observing rehearsals for one of their upcoming shows. I now waited for their consent to visit. Kia tupato (be cautious).9 I was resolute. I would wait respectfully for permission to travel to Wellington. Whilst waiting, I spent time researching more about Maori research. In the article ‘An exploration of kaupapa Maori research, its principles, processes and applications’ Co-authors Shane Walker, Anaru Eketone, and Anita Gibbs provide key principles for undertaking Maori research.10 Firstly, and most importantly, a researcher must know about tikanga (Maori culture and customs) before a meeting. Next, is kanohi ki te kanohi, (to meet face-to-face), this is required in establishing an authentic relationship. The involvement of a kaumatua (Elder) is also central to this process. A kaumatua provides guidance and protection. Maori culture and protocols are also underpinned by the concept of whanau. Whanau refers to family, which includes the idea of extended family. The principle of Te reo Maori (language) provides a way to access the histories, values, and beliefs of Maori people. Although this is not always possible for many non-Maori researchers, a mix of English and Maori is acceptable. From this reading it was clear that I needed to understand these principles before starting a conversation. I had introduced myself via email drawing on common cultural and professional experiences as an Indigenous theatre maker and researcher. Work relationships. It was important that I try to meet Hone and Miria face-to face to build a sense of trust and connectedness. Although I didn’t know a Maori Elder, maybe I would meet one whilst there, and learn some Maori language from Hone and Miria. These principles were very helpful as I waited to hear back from Hone or Miria. Although desperate, I was cautious and didn’t want to push my agenda for fear of seeming overbearing. It was now January 2014 and I had run into an impasse. I decided to find an opportunity to meet with Hone and Miria in Wellington. Returning to the Tawata web site I noticed their upcoming 2014 artistic program. Two opportunities were available, The Putahi Festival, which was to take place in February 2014, and Sunset Road, a play scheduled for production in late July that year. I emailed Miria again suggesting that I attend the Putahi Festival and start a conversation with her about observing rehearsals for her play Sunset Road. She

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wrote straight back with a positive response. I then began preparations for what I call a reconnaissance field trip. The next month I was on a three-­ hour flight across the Tasman Sea from Sydney to the southwestern tip of the North Island, to Wellington to attend the Putahi Festival. Putahi Festival I arrived in Wellington in February 2014. My first impressions of Wellington, its history, people, the climate, the politics, and civic architecture are noted in the following way. When searching for information about Wellington, the Zealand Tourist Information site tells tourists that to Maori people Wellington is known as Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui or ‘the head of Maui’s fish.’11 In Māori legend, Maui was a Polynesian navigator who hooked a giant fish. When pulled to the surface the fish transformed into landform. Over the next thousand years different iwi (tribes) settled in the area including Ngai Tara, who named the harbour area, Te Whanganui a Tara, which means “great harbour of Tara.” When European settlers arrived in the early 1840s they renamed the area after the English Lord, Arthur Wellesley the first Duke of Wellington. In 1865 Wellington became the capital of New Zealand. Walking across Wellington the first natural site you notice is its magnificent harbor, which is cradled by a line of blue-hazed mountains. A concrete boardwalk tracks along the foreshore where continual gatherings of activities occur daily. Joggers, walkers, tourists trawling local restaurants, and pop up weekend markets. Fifteen “text block” stone sculptures bank the walls of the walkway etched in the adoration of Wellington by local poets. One of these odes is affectionately cautious. I love this city, the hills, the harbour the wind that blasts through it. I love the life and pulse and activity, and the warm decrepitude there’s always an edge here that one must walk which is sharp and precarious, requiring vigilance.12

To the west of the boardwalk is the Te Papa Museum and Circa Theatre, one of the city’s main stage theatre companies. Ferries and sailboats share the harbour alongside Dragon boat training. Large black stingrays glide like birds below along the shallow marine floor. I arrived in Wellington as the Putahi Festival rehearsals were underway. Putahi or Te Putahi means “to support.” Te Putahitanga A Te Rehia is a

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theatre alliance, and The Putahi Festival is an outcome of this association,. The festival brings together some of Wellington’s most celebrated Māori theatre companies, actors, writers, and artists for a week of Māori theatre. The Festival is a celebration of the diversity of Te Ao Māori (the Māori world). The 2014 season featured Hone Kouke’s The Beautiful Ones, Helen Pearse-Otene’s The Battalion, and Jamie McCaskill’s Not in Our Neighbourhood. Victoria University hosted the artists in the performance studies department in Kelburn at Studio 77, which is a large rectangular barn style space with a big garage door at one end. It was probably once a barn, but now it is a converted performance space with a foyer area, a studio, upstairs workshop spaces, and academic offices. On a map, everything in Wellington looks flat. The University campus looked close to where I was staying in the centre of town, and I thought is was a close walk. Kelburn was in fact atop Cook Mountain. I had to take the Wellington Cable Car up through a flashing technicoloured neon tunnel to the Mountain cliff top. There the sound of cicadas and bees buzzed in the warm February air. I followed the road as it wound itself along the mountain towards the studio where I met up with the then emerging Māori scholar Nicola Hyland. I had corresponded with Nicola before leaving Sydney as she was helping organise the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies ADSA conference to take place at the University in June later that year. It was Nicola who introduced me to Miria. When I met Miria she was in a studio workshop room talking to the festival production manager. I was taken by how young she seemed for someone so accomplished. Miria holds a Masters’ degree in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and is an award-winning playwright. Her first play Oho Ake won the 2004 Chapman Tripp Theatre Award.13 Her play, And What Remains (2007) marked Miria’s international debut as a playwright, and her other plays include, He Reo Aroha, Urban Hymns, and Sunset Road. Miria was wearing a large stripped t-shirt and a pair of blue dungarees rolled up to reveal a pair of white high-top sandshoes. She seemed a little stressed and busy but took the time to welcome me with a kiss and a hug. “You made it over,” she said with a warm and disarming smile as she excused herself to run downstairs—but not before asking if I was coming to the Festival. I sat a little while with Nicola in her discussing her role at Victoria University. Then Miria returned and we all sat around and chatted briefly about where I was staying and how long I would be there. I informed Miria that I had booked

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tickets to two Putahi shows and would be attending The Battalion and The Beautiful Ones. She seemed pleased. I asked if she needed any help with opening night. She smiled and said that they were fine and that I should relax and see more of Wellington before the show. As I was unfamiliar with my new surroundings, but I decided to stay on the Mountain for the day. After Miria left I went downstairs and snuck into the rehearsal studio where Hone was rehearsing The Beautiful Ones. As I naughtily entered the space I looked over to Hone, who I recognised from his photo on the website, and sort permission to enter. I am not sure he knew who I was, but he was most congenial. I just need to explain, before moving on, that sneaking into theatres is something I used to do regularly as an undergraduate actor. I gathered backstage and dressing room experiences like others might collect coins or stamps. So, finding my way into rehearsal was a type of thrill and I was happy to turn around and leave if Hone wanted. First impressions, Hone is a little older than Miria. On that day he was wearing a bold red hoody and matching red cap. I noted Hone showed a calm mannerism, a confidence that radiated from his occasional smile and relaxed approach to directing. In the Studio room were actors Manuel Solomon, Moana Ete, Kali Kopae, Scotty Cotter, Skyla Love, Ngakopa Volkerling, Tanamahuta and Nathan Gray, plus guest singers. His play, The Beautiful Ones, and set in a nightclub, is a devised work about young love. Hone had developed the work as part of the Putahi Festival. I sat a while watching Hone in rehearsal that day, but came back the following evening to watch the opening of the show. The next day was overcast and I was surprised at how quickly the Wellington temperature can drop without the sun. I headed up the Mountain early. As I got closer to the studio I could hear sounds of clapping and yelling echoing through the trees. The cast of The Beautiful Ones were warming up with a game of cricket. I then remembered how sports-­ mad many New Zealanders are, and the code rivalries with Australia in cricket, rugby, and netball. The stakes seemed high. It was close to the final innings. Hone was at bat and chasing the highest score. Everyone looked toward him, crouching, ready to be the one to take him down. The ball bowled, Hone misses, the makeshift stumps are knocked over. Everyone yells, arms raised in celebration. That was game over. The cast quickly moved back inside Studio 77 to begin preparing for rehearsals. Before he left the courtyard Hone came over to ask me about my day. I told him that things were going well and that I was looking forward to the show later that night. I asked him how the rehearsals were going to which

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he replied, “I like to work loosely. The actors and performers will make their own show of it tonight.” These were wise words from an experienced theatre maker. There comes a time in any rehearsal process when the director needs to stand back, stop giving instructions, trust in the process, and allow the cast to do their job. That moment needs to be recognised. I made my way to the foyer where young Maori performers were rehearsing a dance to be performed at the opening. Throughout the day people came and went. Later that afternoon I watched the performance of the The Beautiful Ones. After, I was invited out for a drink with Hone and Miria, and the cast. I only stayed for one drink. This was a reconnaissance trip after all, and I thought there would be more time to socialise when I returned. During the Putahi Festival, Hone and Miria had made me feel incredibly welcomed. I was hugged and kissed when introduced to the actors. I wanted to run away with these amazing theatre makers and learn as much as I could about their history, their culture, and their practice. Instead I was there trying to negotiate a research project. That irrational sense of shame rose again. A feeling that would not be easily resolved because I still had not secured the rehearsal observations. I did not press my agenda. I had met Hone and Miria face to face and I felt slightly buoyed by this experience. I was excited about the next step and for securing the rehearsal observations of Sunset Road. I packed my bags and caught the morning flight home. Matariki Festival In mid-June that year I was on my way back to Wellington to present a paper at the Australasian Drama Studies Association ADSA conference hosted by Victoria University.14 Although I was at a conference, I also saw the trip as an opportunity to catch up with Miria and Hone again. I had informed them that I would be there, but no official plans had been arranged to meet. The Matarika Festival was in full swing when I arrived. Matariki is a cluster of stars that appear in the dawn sky above Aotearoa/ New Zealand in late May or early June.15 Matariki signals the Māori New Year. It is customary at this time to remember the deceased of the past year and to plan ahead for the year to come. As a festival Matariki is a celebration of people, culture, language, and spirituality. It is a time for whānau (family and friends). At that time Hone and Miria were producing the first Tawata Matariki Development Festival and Hone was directing and presenting a new play, 2080, by local Maori emerging playwright and actor

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Aroha White. Miria was also performing the female lead in Hikoi at the Circa Theatre, a new play written and directed by Nancy Brunning and co-written with Tanea Heke. I was looking forward to seeing Miria performing on stage. On my arrival in Wellington I headed straight for Circa Theatre to see if I could get tickets to the two shows. Hone was there, sitting in the foyer at a table on his computer. I went to the counter to see if there were any tickets for either of the two shows. I purchased one for the opening of 2080, and I was put on a waiting list for Hikoi as it had sold out. I slowly made my way over to where Hone was working and said “Hi.” He immediately jumped up and gave me a big hug. I told him I had just bought tickets to 2080 and that I was looking forward to seeing the show. I then reminded him about coming over later in July to sit in on rehearsals for Sunset Road. He asked if Miria had sent through a rehearsal schedule. I said that I hadn’t received anything yet. He assured me that he would speak to Miria about this. I asked if she was available to talk to, and he said that she was heavily into the last week of rehearsal for Hikoi. I left it at that. On the first day of the ADSA conference as delegates we were introduced to renowned Māori actor Rangimoana Taylor. I found Rangimoana incredibly charming, with a thick grey mane and glistening white teeth that seemed to reach out to you when he smiled, one could not help but smile back. He lit up the room. He has the gift. When he spoke, he held the entire audience seemingly and effortlessly in the palm of his hand. Rangimoana is a kaumatua, a respected Elder of the Wellington theatre scene and a founding member of Theatre Marae.16 His role at the conference was to guide the delegates through the protocols of being welcomed at the local marae (meeting ground). Later that night I went to see 2080 at the downstairs theatre at Circa. I had arrived quite early as I was hoping to eat before the show, which started around seven that evening. The place was teaming with mostly young Islander and/or Māori patrons. In the crowd I saw Rangimoana. I smiled and waved at him and then made my way to where he was standing to thank him for taking us through the po ̄whiri (welcoming ceremony) that afternoon. He was incredibly friendly and he asked me if I was coming to see the show that night. I said that I had a ticket and he seemed impressed. He could see I had come alone and when it came time for the show to start he asked if I wanted to sit with him. As we entered the theatre together, Hone who was sitting at the back of the theatre saw me

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enter with Rangimoana. After the show, Rangimoana politely introduced me to Hone. There it was. A set of coincidences interwoven towards the moment of being formally introduced to Hone by a kaumatua Māori theatre Elder. It was the result I had hoped for after months of emailing, waiting for responses, building opportunities, and taking a leap of faith. I stood at the mat and waited. After entering the performance space with Rangimoana, I felt that the windows and doors slowly opened, and I felt a rising sense of completeness about the time taken to build a bridge between our two countries, cultures, and practice. A week later I received a rehearsal schedule from Miria and I began organizing my travel arrangements to return to Wellington in late July 2014 to observe the rehearsals for Sunset Road. Back in Wellington and this time to a country in political overdrive. It was the lead up to the 2014 New Zealand election. The nightly television was awash with political debates and scandals. The former National Party president had hacked into Labour politicians’ email accounts in search of evidence of corrupt and immoral conduct. A tell-all book was about to be released, Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager. Election commentary speculated on the information contained in Hager’s yet-to-be-released book. But the main social/economic issue dominating daily political debate was the ‘migrant agenda’ and the ‘foreign ownership’ of land in the northern parts of the country. Some media commentators like John Broddock and Tom Peters viewed the current political circus as masking a more urgent social crisis in New Zealand, the growing social divide between New Zealand’s financial elite and the poor.17 There were predictions of economic hardship to come in New Zealand with expected budget cuts to services and then there was rising unemployment. Meanwhile a group of Maori theatre makers were about to begin rehearsals for a local story set in the 1970’s during a time of real political struggle in New Zealand. S unset Road Rehearsals It was a cold and windy day on the first day of Sunset Road rehearsals. I arrived early to the 22 Web Street studio at the top of Cuba Street. Up a set of stairs, I entered a rectangular room laid with wooden floors. One side of the room was lined with mirrors, while the other had windows that filtered natural light into the room. Two small heaters sat at opposite ends of the room. It was a dance studio. There was a kitchen at the front entrance where a kettle boiled. As I entered Hone appeared offering coffee. There were biscuits and cakes baked by Miria. As one by one the cast

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arrived, each was welcomed with kisses and hugs from Hone and Miria as well as the other cast members. When introduced to each by Hone I was also received in this warm manner. I recognised some of the cast from the Matariki Festival shows,18 the romantic lead from The Beautiful Ones, and an actor who was in Hikoi alongside Miria. After coffee and once inside the rehearsal space I noticed that Miria and the cast each unloaded their backpacks in various corners of the room. Miria took a few interesting items out of her bag; a couple of history books on the Cook Islands, a cloth that she placed on an old piano at the back of the room, and a small wooden statue that she gently set down on the cloth. Although the statue stood only about 25  cm high it was the manner in which Miria placed the idol on the carefully laid out cloth that indicated to me that this object was important. I later found out that the statue was of Tangaroa the creator god of the Pacific Island peoples, the god of the seas and fertility. Considering the place of water in Island cultures this was indeed an eminent God. I noted its presence at the back of the room on the first day of rehearsals. Later that first week Tangaroa was given a more prominent position on top of a filing cabinet at the far corner of the rehearsal space. Each night Miria would carefully wrap him up in cloth and placed him in a set of draws. In the morning she would take him out and stand him up on the cabinet facing the rehearsal room action. There he stood, silent for the entire rehearsals. He was not a prop. Instead the statue stood as the material form of Tangaroa igniting a particular cultural presence. He brought a temporal sense of the Cook Island culture, history, and life into the rehearsal room. For Miria, Tangaroa represented and contained the voices of her ancestors, her family, and her ancestral home Island of Aitu in the Cook Islands. The idol seemed to ground the playwright/director in a familiar social and cultural space. Tangaroa served this function for the duration of the Sunset Road rehearsals. At ten o’clock Hone called everyone into the studio. He began the morning with a welcome in Māori, “Kia ora koutou.” He then handed the morning debrief over to Miria who was to direct rehearsals for the production. Miria began by telling everyone how excited she was to be there as it had been a long time since the first production of the play in 2012. Miria stated that she would be making some edits to the play during the rehearsal. “As a writer,” she explained, “the work is so much better when you get inside it on the floor.” She went on to say, “The key is that this is a New

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Zealand/Cook Island story.” Standing in address to the cast and crew Miria spoke about her motivation for writing the play: I wanted to talk to my little sisters’ generation to step up and take responsibility and acknowledge what the older generation did for us. Sunset Road is about responsibility. We are never just putting on a show. We are taking responsibility as artists to push the boundaries, to get into battle together. This is not just a practice, but a way of life.19

These were powerful and moving words. In her opening address to the cast and crew Miria acknowledged her place in a cultural lineage of Maori practitioners. She reminded the cast that her theatre making practice was one that existed beyond a rehearsal room, towards life itself. These statements reflect an Indigenous ontology as constituted through relationality, connecting one’s self and practice by descent, country, place, and shared experiences. Miria’s way of knowing and doing was based on the understanding of creator spirits such as Tangaroa. Her directorial style was also about creating an expansive space where Maori and Cook Island cultures, and relative beliefs about the nature of the world would be discussed and shared. Her introduction was a call to arms in preparation for the weeks of creative and cultural activity that was to come. For the rest of the first day I sat at the back of the rehearsal room documenting the day’s activities.

Reflection On reflection of the circumstances that led to me sitting in a rehearsal room with Maori theatre makers, they seemed synchronistic. My approach was always informed by a consideration of Indigenous values, principles, and local customs to bridge unfamiliar cultural contexts. I was very aware, however, that what worked in one context would not be duplicated in another. That the local values and principles of one cultural context would not be the same as another. The experience in Aotearoa were however to directly influence my approach in negotiations with theatre makers from across the geographical expanse of the Pacific Ocean on Turtle Island. The next step for this study was to negotiate rehearsal observations with First Nations theatre makers, and this seemed terrifying, only because of time restraints, distance, and my lack of knowledge of First Nations theatre practice or cultural protocols.

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Turtle Island As I had never travelled to Turtle Island/ before, finding a way into the country’s First Nations culture and arts sector seemed as daunting as my initial Aotearoa experience. This time there was no room to make multiple trips or to introduce myself and discuss the study face to face. Instead an electronic platform had to suffice. In searching for a Canadian case study from the comfort of my university office in Sydney there were two First Nations theatre companies that initially took my interest, Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA) in Toronto and Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company in Saskatoon.20 I first wrote to the then Artistic Director of NEPA, Tara Beagan, in September 2013 to introduce myself and discuss the research project. In that email I flagged that the research would entail observing and documenting the rehearsal process, and that I was interested in an upcoming show called Quinchella, which was to happen during January 2014. Beagan had created and written the play and she would also direct the show.21 At the time, Beagan was away directing another show and it was the Acting Artistic Director Falen Johnson who responded. Falen was also at the time the coordinator for the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance (IPAA), an online group that I promptly joined.22 With one finger now on the First Nations performing arts pulse I waited for other opportunities that may arise, as negotiations with NEPA were moving slowly. The Canadian Panel on Research Ethics (PRE) outline three core principles for undertaking research with Aboriginal people and these included; respect for persons (consent), concern for welfare (provide information about the research) and Justice (the obligation to treat people fairly and equitably).23 Most of the information in circulation about working with First Nations peoples mostly related to ways of working in reservation communities or with traditional knowledge holders and Elders. There were no specific arts or performance related documents like we had in Australia.24 There were, however, a common set of principles outlined in most of the material available on First Nations protocols and these were set out to ensure First Nations ownership, control, access, and possession of data (OCAP). Like Indigenous Australian and Maori protocols, these four principles exist to guide researchers in building respectful relationships with First Nations collaborators. Also, as with the Australia Council for the Arts Indigenous protocols, the four First Nations principles are firmly rooted in local epistemologies and understandings of the world. It

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is important to acknowledge however that Indigenous, Maori, and First Nations protocols are not static but are an organic process always in a constant state of change. Modifying and adjusting the research outcomes and parameters was an everyday reality when negotiating research projects with local artists in faraway lands. One should always keep options open. Changes to company structures, schedules, and programming frequently occur throwing months and sometimes years of negotiations into disarray. Like the New Zealand project, organising the Canada field trip required an adaptable yet steady pace. The initial conversations with NEPA took place over the 2013 Christmas period, in-between Christmas drinks, time off from university, and catching up with family and friends NEPA underwent a leadership change and most of the contacts I made, like Tara Beagan and Falen Johnson, had moved on. By January 2014 I had found out through the IPA network that Tara had taken up a directing role at the then named Saskatoon Native Theatre in Regina in the mid-north of the country.25 Starting over again was debilitating and slow. By early February 2014 Tara was scheduled to direct another of her plays Dreary and Izzy in Saskatoon. I was seriously considering negotiating with Tara to document the rehearsal for that show, but that year an extreme weather event was unfolding across the north of America and Canada. During the Sydney summer of 2014, the news reports ran regular and disturbing updates (in spectacular graphics) describing the environmental effects of what had become known as a ‘polar vortex’, that had swarmed into New York, and much of Canada’s south eastern coast. Travelling to a small city like Saskatoon in the middle of the northern flats of Canada at that time would have been absolute madness. Was I being too dramatic? Having no experience of this type of weather event, and without a current driver’s license, I would have been at the mercy of the elements. I didn’t know at the time that they drive on the opposite side of the road to Australia. No, this would not do. However, I still had to confirm a Canadian fieldtrip. At the beginning of 2014 I had also considered rehearsals in Saskatoon for the play Salt Baby to be directed by Yvette Nolan. Luckily one of Yvette’s plays, The Unplugging, was to be produced in February–March 2015  in Toronto. That sounded better. By March 2014 I began exploring the possibility of observing rehearsals for The Unplugging and I reached out to the show’s director Nina Lee Aquino. A few weeks later I received the following email.

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Dear Liza-Mare I think your proposal sounds great and I’d love to hear more about it. Shall we set up a phone meeting just to connect in person? And just for your information, The Unplugging will not be strictly an Aboriginal production. I, for example, am not an Aboriginal director, and most of my creative team are also not Aboriginal (all of us however are coming from culturally diverse communities—both in ethnicity and sexuality). I don’t know if this info makes a difference to your research and study but I thought it was important to let you know. (Nina Lee Nina, April 2014)

This information was unexpected. I had assumed that the co-­production between NEPA and The Factory would have First Nations theatre makers involved in key positions, at least as part of the cast. Yvette as playwright would be present in the rehearsal room and that appealed to the objectives of the study. The conditions of producing a First Nations play with a non-­ First Nations director and cast was a highly unusual creative choice by the playwright, and one I believed would highlight more critically the role of the First Nations playwright in the rehearsal process. After exchanging more emails throughout the year, by December 2014 Nina I had a Skype meeting. Rehearsals would begin in February 2015. I needed to know, “Is it cold in Toronto?” Nina’s response was that that I should get myself a long, warm jacket. That was good advice! On the morning I was to leave home for Toronto it was a sparkly blue day in Sydney with temperatures in the mid-thirties (Celsius) and I went swimming at Clovelly baths. It was February 14th, St Valentine’s Day, and I was about to travel sixteen hours to Toronto flying Air Canada. When I finally landed on the tarmac it was covered in a fine layer snow. The change in climate was sudden and decisive. Passenger jackets appeared from carry­on bags like rabbits from a magician’s top hat in preparation for the cold. I followed the locals past the luggage check, shuffling through the airport to the outside where for first time in my life I felt a double-digit minus temperature in my lungs. I think I went into climate shock. I awoke the next day to the coldest day in Toronto for the year. The weatherman on the nightly news assured viewers that although temperatures were expected to rise somewhat overnight, an extreme weather warning had been put in place. At the bottom of the telecast a stream of digitised information read, “People outdoors should exercise extreme caution in this hazardous situation. Frostbite on exposed skin may occur in just a few minutes.” What the! Bitterly cold arctic air from the north that

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morning would contribute to conditions of minus twenty-five degrees Celsius. Crikey, that is cold! ‘Wind-chill values’ was an unfamiliar weather terminology. Even more horrifying was the little squirrel in the tree sitting metres from my AirBnB window. He was frozen, his diminutive face petrified by the glaze of a cold death. I was prepared for the cold. I had thermals and jackets purchased in Wellington. It was cold there too, although a different kind of cold. During the Sunset Road rehearsals, the outside temperature was often in the low twenties (Celsius), and it rained a lot. In Toronto everyone walks very fast. Much quicker than a languid Australian stroll during the rising humidity of a hot summer day. Toronto locals go about their business promptly. Heads lowered in full fluffy coat hoods, scarves wound tightly around the mouth to keep tepid air flowing back into the lungs to avoid hypothermia. Thankfully, rehearsals were only a short walk from my apartment. The Factory Theatre was on Bathurst Street in downtown Toronto. Up early and dressed for the day. Thermals, a polar tech jumper, beanie, scarf, snow boots, and a long warm grey padded hooded jacket. Rehearsals began at 9:30 am.

The Unplugging Rehearsals The Factory Theatre is an old converted community hall that now functions as a theatre with two performance spaces. Up three flights of wooden stairs, past the theatre and administration offices and around from a top floor “front of house” foyer, was the rehearsal studio. Wooden floorboards marked with blue lines of tape, white walls lightly interrupted by rows of tall ecclesiastical windows, and bar heaters under every window. The rehearsal room overlooked a large Church and bell tower, which tolled hourly. Outside the theatre was a courtyard covered in fourteen inches of snow. I noticed it had a sheltered makeshift smoking area. I do not know if it was the anticipation of the beginning of rehearsals or the warmth of Toronto’s Factory Theatre rehearsal room that made me a bit giddy, but I was nervous. There were two large tables in the centre of the room and a number of chairs set around them. Positioned adjacent to the walls were more chairs and on these sat a number of people who were not the cast or crew. Ryan Cunningham, the new artistic director of NEPA was one of them. He had brought along a guest, a tall longhaired fellow in a white cowboy hat and faded jeans. Perhaps it was the rhinestone bracelet that gave him away, was he First Nations? There was another man too, Nigel Shawn Williams, a Jamaican-born Canadian. He was the

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co-­artistic director of The Factory Theatre. Nina was at the opposite end of the room talking to Yvette. They were speaking very softly to each other, intimate, trusting. My first impressions of Nina was that she seemed quite young for an artistic director of a main stage theatre company. She wore a long padded coat and leather boots that came up to her knees. Her long black hair rested down her back as she looked about through a pair of black glasses. Nina is related to the late Benigno Aquino, the former Philippine Senator who was assassinated in 1983, and to Maria Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the eleventh Prime Minister of the Philippines. Nina and her family immigrated to Canada during the Marcos regime.26 Diminutive but with a commanding presence, Nina once worked at NEPA when Yvette was the Artistic Director. Nina was now to produce and direct Yvette’s award-­ winning play The Unplugging at The Factory Theatre.27 Nina seemed very interested that I would be documenting the rehearsals. She was, after all, a student of Canadian academic Ric Knowles, who was also going to be working on the project as a dramaturge. Yvette stood intensely as people arrived. She wore a long black t-shirt with large yellow writing that read, “In solidarity of our sisters.” These words were also echoed on the front-page feature of the newspaper I picked up on arrival at Toronto airport. I was drawn to the number of photos of First Nations girls on the cover. The headline read, “SILENT NO MORE.”28 There was a national crisis. Four Indigenous women were missing. The article asked if these women were casualties of the social divide growing across the country. According to the article, they had all shared the same heart-wrenching backgrounds that included child sex abuse, early drug addiction, violent boyfriends, and early pregnancies followed by teenage flight from their communities to urban predatory landscapes. They were portrayed as vulnerable souls with little or no local support networks. All of these young women were victims of one murderer, a man called Robert Pickton. First Nations communities were under scrutiny. Pickton was portrayed as an opportunist. The missing young girls were positioned as a social problem, and Yvette seemed to be wearing her t-shirt in defence of their humanity. That morning the sun filtered through the rehearsal room. Everyone took their seats. It was Nina who spoke first: “hello,” she said with a Canadian accent that elongated the last vowel. A broad smile appeared across her face just like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland. She was about to undertake a non-Indigenous production of The Unplugging,

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a first for her company and a first co-production with NEPA. Ryan stood up next to welcome everyone, “Anii, Boozhoo, miigwech gayegin” (hello and welcome). He followed this welcome with an acknowledgement to the traditional custodians of the land, the Ojibwas and the Algonquin peoples of the Anishinaabe nation. Ryan’s welcome was familiar. Not dissimilar to the first day of rehearsals for an Indigenous play in Australia. Australian Indigenous theatre makers also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which they meet before rehearsals begin. After the welcome Yvette performed a ceremony in preparation for the work that was to be undertaken. Yvette moved her chair away from the table and took a small woven bag from her lap. In the pouch was an oyster shell, dried sage, and some matches, which she placed on the table. She placed the sage in the cup of the shell. As he lit the sage it’s smoke rose gently, weaving its way upward as it bellowed from the shell base. Yvette explained to all in the room that the smudging clarifies and clears the space. It is a ceremony performed for Indigenous people and their ancestors and for the people who come after. Yvette then cupped the shell and invited people to partake in the ritual. She announced that all jewellery must be removed as you present yourself to the spirits, and that, “you must come to the smoke as you once came into the world.” Yvette then instructed everyone to wash their head and heart with the smoke as this was to aid in clarity of thinking and feeling. She then instructed everyone to cleanse their eyes to see clearly, the ears to hear clearly, and the mouth to speak clearly. Everyone participated and no one spoke until the end of the smudging. I felt cleansed and welcomed. The need for the smudging was evident. This was to be a non-First Nations production. The cast was non-First Nations, as were the production crew and the director.29 The only First Nations people in the room that day were Yvette, Ryan, and his friend. For the duration of rehearsals, it would be the playwright, Yvette who would alone represent the First Nations voice in the room. In many ways the process of gaining access to the rehearsals was not ideal because I had not entered into an agreement with Yvette, and because of this I felt somewhat tolerated by Yvette throughout the rehearsal period. I also did not meet with Ryan until after the rehearsals had begun. It could be argued that my research agreement was with Nina and the Factory Theatre and not with Yvette and NEPA. I did present consent forms and information sheets on the research to them both, but only after I was inside the rehearsal room. Both signed the forms. Later during the rehearsals I met with Ryan for coffee and we

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discussed the possibility of forming a relationship beyond the current project. Ryan was attracted to ways that Moogahlin Performing Arts and NEPA might start a mutually beneficial relationship. This was pleasing. After that meeting I only saw him one more time before leaving Toronto and that was at the opening night of the show.

Reflection Traveling many kilometres over vast oceans to another’s country, moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar was essential to undertaking this study, which allowed for the inclusion of narratives about shifting between places creating a sense of ‘here and there’. When considering undertaking research locally in Australia and on a familiar land, of observing a local practice with one’s own people, this required a more sophisticated way of describing and understanding what was ‘home’ and what is the ‘field’. A key point of conducting research close to home is in the opportunities that arise for discovering the boundaries that exist within closely defined communities, practices, and lives. For the Australian project I would observe two Aboriginal women theatre makers whom I knew. Added to this complexity was that the two women wanted me to direct their show, which was the only way I was going to be let inside the rehearsal room. I knew them both from my days working as Head of theatre and performance at the Eora College of Aboriginal Studies, Centre for Visual and Performing Arts in Redfern Sydney. I also worked with them both on a community cultural development project called Gathering Ground 2010.30 Moogahlin Performing Arts produced the third instalment of this project, and my role at the time was as project researcher recording the rehearsal workshop process.31 I later co-wrote and published an article about Gathering Ground with a focus on protocols for community cultural exchange.32 An interview with Aunty forms part of that article. It was because of these connections that I was asked to direct their play The Fox and the Freedom Fighters.33 The offer came at a critical stage in the research, as time was running out to secure a local rehearsal. The opportunity to work on The Fox and the Freedom Fighters provided the break I needed and allowed for a consideration of what it would be like to document the experience of a rehearsal process from both inside and outside the process. Although we all live and work in close proximity to one another the collaborators were from different language groups to my own. Both Aunty

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and her daughter are Dharug and Yuin women.34 I am Birripi. Understanding of the diversity of clan groups that exist across Australia is an important part of knowing the multiplicity of cultural identities that are situated within a cultural context like Australia. Australia is home to over five hundred different Indigenous language groups. Also, home for me is Redfern in the outer eastern suburbs of Sydney. I have lived and worked in the area for over twenty years. Redfern is known as a meeting place for Indigenous people from all over the country. Situated on Gadigal land, the traditional custodians of the area, Redfern has a long and vibrant history of conflict, activism, arts, celebration, and culture. Rehearsals for the Fox and The Freedom Fighters would take place at Carriageworks, which is walking distance from Redfern. Carriageworks is not ‘home’. A rehearsal room is also not home, but constitutes a world accessible to the few theatre makers who work in that place for a finite period of time. According to Performance Studies scholars, rehearsal rooms are the “hidden world” of theatre making, a realm usually veiled to observers.35 They are also a “carefully guarded and protected place of work”,36 and traditionally “private”,37 a time when artists work intensively together. Although my home and the rehearsal room are located in adjacent suburbs, they are essentially very different areas of habitation that delimit the separation between my life, research, and work. However, this separation was not enough to distance me from my role and position within the broader Aboriginal context at home. I was inextricably connected to the theatre makers in more ways that I knew and gaining permissions to document rehearsals proved to be much more complicated and challenging than undertaking research in Aotearoa and Turtle Island.

Gadigal Searching for an Australian Indigenous case study between 2013–2015 was difficult. Established companies such as Ilbijerri in Melbourne and Yirra Yaakin in Perth were potential research opportunities. However, Ilbijerri was on an international tour with their new show Jack Charles Versus the Crown and most of the company’s resources and time were devoted to this task. I had also written numerous times to the Artistic Director of Yirra Yaakin about documenting a remount of The Cake Man late in 2013, but disappointingly I never received a reply. Indigenous works produced outside of these two companies during that time were few and far between, and of the independent opportunities that were available

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the theatre makers involved were very wary of discussing rehearsal observations. I was getting desperate. Then in December 2014 I received a phone call from an independent producer inviting me to come and chat about a new Aboriginal work, The Fox and the Freedom Fighters, co-written written by a mother and daughter team with a non-Indigenous playwright. The show was to be produced by the independent producer and be shown as part of Performance Space’s scheduled program of works in November 2014 under the banner of Buruwan (island), a season of new Australian works.38 Rehearsals would take place in Redfern Sydney at Carriagworks on Gadigal land. The invitation was promising. In March 2014 I attended an initial meeting at the home of the producer in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Having invested in the show’s early development in 2013, Performance Space was interested to see if it was production-ready. A two-week script development workshop was scheduled to take place in July 2014 culminating in a staged reading of the play. At the March meeting the producer laid out a very nice spread of cakes, biscuits, and tea for all. The collaborators sat around a long wooden table. Aunty and her daughter were present. There was a film documentary team, the co-writer, the stage manager, sound and lighting designers, and the producer. All of the designers and production team were non-­ Indigenous. It was the producer who did most of the talking at the meeting, about the aims, and the development, rehearsal and presentation dates. It was all very businesslike until Aunty and her daughter began talking about their need to have some control over the rehearsal process. It was Aunty who stated to the group that she wanted to investigate a cultural process of working. One, she said, “that women might participate in when making or telling stories.” The room fell silent. In that moment I could sense that no one really understood what Aunty was articulating. Neither did I.  I decided to organise a more private meeting with them both to clarify what Aunty meant by a cultural process of working. I also wanted to talk with them both about recording the rehearsals for the purposes of this research project. The following week I met both Aunty and her daughter at a café near the Discovery Museum in the Rocks precinct at Circular Quay. I chose this location because at the time the daughter was undertaking an artist’s residency at the Museum working on and demonstrating her weaving practice. We all sat down together as I ordered coffees and buns. Aunty, is a small yet commanding woman in her late fifties. She had worked in the

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education sector for most of her adult life as a professional performer and Cultural Arts Educator. She had also worked for cultural festivals as a cultural advisor, and for other organisations such as the Correctional Services (in jails). When Aunty was seventeen, she sang alongside legends of the Aboriginal music sector in Australia, such as with Jimmy Little, Youthu Yindi, Kev Carmody, Archie Roach, Black Fire, and Tiddas. In the early 1970s, Aunty trained in theatre and acting with my uncle Brian Syron. More recently she had performed in various theatre productions such as Posts in the Paddock a co-production between theatre company My Darling Patricia and Moogahlin Performing Arts.39 Her father is the late Aboriginal Activist Chicka Dixon, about whom the play is based on.40 She has two children, a daughter and a son. She also has a number of grandchildren, and a number of siblings and cousins who she includes as her extended family. The Fox and The Freedom Fighters is Aunty’s opus magnum, her life’s project. Aunty’s daughter is also a powerful and politicised black woman. For most of her life daughter had worked as a professional musician. On that day she looked a rock star with her liberated mass of reddish curly hair, tight leather and animal print apparel, and ankle-length elevated black boots. This style was in stark contrast to her mother who wore layered loose clothing, an assortment of printed scarves, and comfortable shoes. Aunty looked much like the archetypal “mother”. That morning over coffee we all discussed our expectations, our fears, and a vision for the show. Mother and her daughter talked about how important the show was for them. This was their story of the important men in lives and growing up under their influence. They were well aware that the story also belonged to a lot of other people in the family and to their wider communities. Honouring this story came with many expectations, of themselves, from the community, and from their family. Aunty was worried that her family might not be that understanding about them telling this story publicly. “There may be trouble from the family,” she said. I thought to myself, it wouldn’t be an Aboriginal play if there weren’t some trouble from the community.41 After much soul searching however, Aunty had decided that this project was one that she would do without the consent of her family. This stance was about taking ownership of their part of that story. Writing the play seemed to be a way of sharing the stories that they had carried for a very long time. It came as little surprise then, that when I raised the proposition of video recording the rehearsals Aunty didn’t give me an answer right away.

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When it came to discussing ‘a cultural way of rehearsing’ Aunty and her daughter spoke at length about incorporating elements of dance, song, and weaving into the rehearsal process and the production. As mentioned, the daughter was a weaver and she spoke about wanting to incorporate her weaving into the design of the production. These were all great offers and I would assist the pair in bringing these elements to the rehearsal process. In the following chapters this process will be discussed in more detail. I had spoken to them both at length at that meeting about the process of rehearsal observation, documentation, and what it would entail. As I was directing I asked if I could video record the rehearsal process to have the opportunity to watch what took place. It was just before we were to begin rehearsals that Aunty informed me that documenting the process would not be possible. This was a major setback. I had to respect Aunty and her daughter’s decision. They had both spent many years writing this play and then sourcing the right people to assist them in mounting a main stage production. They both held this story tightly in their hearts like it meant the world to them. I decided to renegotiate the terms of the research and spoke to Aunty and her daughter again about how I might still document aspects of rehearsal through the devise of a personal memoir. I also informed them that I would not identify them by name in this book, as they did not give consent for me to do so. Also, that I would only discuss moments that occurred during the closed rehearsal if it somehow related to my own life or process as the director of the show. Aunty and her daughter agreed to these terms. Although this approach was challenging, I needed to honour their decision whilst also acknowledging my own authority and agency in the process as an Indigenous theatre maker. Just as Aunty and her daughter felt an obligation and responsibility to tell their story so that other generations would come to know more about the very personal side of her father’s public story, I also recognise my responsibility in acknowledging that my life is inextricably intertwined with their story through my own family legacy. Entering the rehearsal room in November 2014, I had no idea how I was going to document my experience of the rehearsal process, it was to be a challenge, though it was not an impossible proposition. Daily reflections in a personal journal did limite the focus of key events in the day-to-­ day goings on that took place between myself and the theatre makers. Although I did not have the luxury of recording experiences to reflect on at a later, I was able to mark moments where the theatre makers and I were

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involved in sharing experiences of the process. Luckily, the observations undertaken in Aotearoa and Turtle Island were not so difficult to negotiate. Although each did have their own unique challenges.

Reflection Undertaking an international study with Indigenous theatre makers across three different continents was a mammoth undertaking. As mentioned, to my knowledge, no one has yet to attempt this. I was on my own navigating the various cultural landscapes and obstacles associated with such an enterprise. I did have an academic sponsor who at times I spoke with at length about my frustrations, but these conversations primarily focused on settling anxieties during the long waiting periods between negotiating with potential collaborators and securing case studies.42 I studied and followed local protocols in each location in preparation for an opportunity, while respecting and acknowledging that the collaborators would have the final say on how the research would be undertaken. There would be no coercion. I consider myself fortunate in gaining permission to access to these very private worlds and I appreciate the space that was created for me to be there. In traveling to foreign sites I was taken aback by the rare beauty of each new frontier, of foreign lands, new people, and new places. Once inside the rehearsal room I witnessed how the Indigenous women playwrights in each rehearsal room went about owning that space by enacting and demonstrating very specific cultural ways of opening and preparing rehearsals that were unique to each location. In Toronto Yvette used sage to smoke and cleanse the cast, crew, and all the visitors who were in the room that day in preparation for rehearsal. Yvette ‘s actions were about marking the territory, bringing into the rehearsal room an Indigenous perspective on the importance of making stories, that this practice required a process of cleansing. Yvette was also demonstrating her cultural authority and validating ownership of the Indigenous story about to be told. The objects used by Yvette were not ceremonial objects. The sage packaged in a clear sealed plastic bag you might find at any alternative lifestyle outlet. Similarly, the shell used was not unusual in any way. These everyday items were however activated through the performance of ceremony. In drawing on her depth of knowledge of First Nations practices Yvette’s belief in the power of things, skilfully transformed the objects into ceremonial matter. In his article Critical Inquiry A Sense of Things (2003), Bill Brown argues that objects become “amorphous perceived as a

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metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become totems, idols, or ceremonial”.43 This process was not unlike how an actor might activate a prop in rehearsal, which is sometimes done through technical routine. Yet, unlike ceremonial objects props can be removed without taking away the meaning of a moment. The ritual performed by Yvette could not be performed without these objects, and through the act of transforming them something greater was indicated. Yvette described her process as ‘bringing in the ancestors’. Though not invocative, the process instead implied a belief in and openness to these worlds. This can also be said of Miria who through the presence of the Tangaroa idol inside the rehearsal room a sacred connection was created to worlds outside of the rehearsal space. The statue stood as the material form of the spirit of Tangaroa. He brought a temporal sense of the Cook Island culture, history, and life into the rehearsal room. Tangaroa facilitated the idea that cultural memory can be transmitted across temporal and geospatial territories intersecting time, place, and space. Because, for Miria, Tangaroa represented and contained the voices of her ancestors, her family, and her ancestral home Island of Aitu in the Cook Islands. The idol grounded the playwright/director in a familiar social and cultural space. Tangaroa served this function for the duration of the Sunset Road rehearsals. During rehearsals for The Fox and The Freedom Fighters the daughter used weaving materials to produce a sense of belonging to a collective dimension, which for her had cultural significance and meaning. The daughter wove every day. From the first day of rehearsals right through to the production, and each night during the performance, the daughter wove These weaves were made from a variety of natural fibres such as grass that was grown at a relative’s property in Canberra and picked up by the production team and brought into the rehearsal room where they were placed in a bucket of water and soaked over the first week of rehearsals. The daughter also used non-natural materials such as multi coloured plastic twine brought from a local craft shop. The plastic fibre and natural materials were woven together to form a mix of contemporary and traditional twine. In many ways this practice signified much about the interconnectedness of the past and present, as well as the contemporary practice of rehearsal with traditional processes of story-­ telling. The end result of her weaving project were three magnificent objects that became central to the overall design of the production. In making these cultural objects the theatre maker spoke to their significance.

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It is the beginning of life. The first stitches bind the base, it is like birth. As you weave you interweave your stories, your thoughts, your hopes and your dreams. The gift of a weave is a gift of yourself. Weaving represents the interwovenness of all of our lives. You can’t really pull one thread out without all the others being inter-connected. (Daughter)

All of the practices discussed in this reflection were deeply connected to the specific locations of the theatre makers. In the chapter that follows I discuss other significant cultural practices employed by the theatre makers in rehearsal to highlight local viewpoints and understandings of the worlds in which each of the theatre makers live, work and tell their stories.

Notes 1. Virginia Caputo. “At ‘Home’ and ‘Away’.” In Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, edit. Vered Amit (London; New York: Routledge). 22. 2. Ibid. 3. Karen Martin. “Ways of Knowing, Ways of Being and Ways of Doing: a theoretical framework and methods for Indigenous re-search and Indigenist research,” in Voicing Dissent, New Talents 21C: Next Generation Journal of Australian Studies 76. 203–214. 203. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. This colleague identifies as pa ̄kehā, a non-Māori person. In Australia we have similar words for non-Aboriginal people, like gubba, and wadjula, but these are terms only used by Aboriginal people and they mostly refer specifically to white people. 8. The Australian Interactive Ochre Site https://nationalvetcontent.edu.au/ alfresco/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/608432de-­278f-­40ae-­89e5-­8f2 bc01bd4cb/907/swf/index.htm. 9. Smith. Decolonising Methodologies, 124. 10. Shane Walker, Anaru Eketone and Anita Gibbs. “An exploration of Kaupapa Maori research, its principles, processes and applications.” Int. J. Social Research Methodology (2006). 9 (4) 331–344. 11. New Zealand Tourist Information. http://www.newzealand.com/travel/ en/media/topic-­index/nz-­regions/wellington.cfm. 12. Patricia Grace Cousins. https://www.newzealand.com/au/feature/ wellington-­writers-­walk/.

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13. The Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards honour Wellington’s best on- and off-stage talent, their contribution to the arts and the community. Established in 1992 and sponsored by law firm Chapman Tripp, the prestigious awards are the main highlight of Wellington’s art and social calendar. The winners are selected by a panel of Wellington’s theatre critics (http://www.chapmantripptheatreawards.org.nz/). 14. The Australasian Drama and Performance Studies Association ADSA 2014 conference theme, Restoring Balance. I presented a paper entitled, Unsettling Black Diggers, which was later published as, Liza-Mare Syron. 2015. “Addressing a Great Silence Black Diggers and the Aboriginal Experience of War”. New Theatre Quarterly. 223–231. 15. Europeans may know the star cluster as Pleiades. In Australia, many Indigenous communities know this constellation as the ‘Seven Sisters Dreaming.’ 16. Theatre Marae challenges popular assumptions and values of conventional New Zealand theatre, and works to demystify Western theatre forms as a valid tool for Māori artistic, social, and political expression (http://terakau.org/theatre-­marae/—http://terakau.org/theatre-­marae/). 17. John Braddock and Tom Peters. Media Turns Against New Zealand Government ahead of election. World Socialist Website August 2014. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/23/dirt-­a23.html. 18. Sunset Road cast and crew include, Taungaroa Emile (Rarotonga / Ngati kahungunu), Nathan Mudge (Rarotonga), Aroha White (Nga Puhi). The creative team include, writer/director—Miria Miria (Aitu/Rarotonga / Te arawa), choreographer- Te Hau Winitana (Aitu / te atiawa / Ngati Ruapani), translator- Tupu Araiti: (Aitu / Rarotonga) set design—Jaimee Warda & Wai Mihinui, light design—Ulli Le Fort, sound design -Karnan Saba, costume design—Cara Louise Waretini Kana and set builder—Gavin Underhill. 19. Noted in rehearsal documentation, Monday July 28, 2014 at 10:15 am. 20. Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company is now known as Gordon Tootoosis ‘Nı ̄kānı ̄win’ Theatre. Nı ̄kānı ̄win (pronounced knee-gone-knee-­win) is a Plains Cree expression for ‘leadership’. 21. Quilchena was later named In Spirit and presented at NEPA in 2014. https://www.nativeearth.ca/1314season/inspirit/. 22. The Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance is an online arts service organisation for First Nations Theatre makers. More information available at http://ipaa.ca. 23. Draft 2nd Edition of the TCPS (December 2008) Chapter 9. RESEARCH INVOLVING ABORIGINAL PEOPLES http://www.pre.ethics.gc.ca. 24. The Australia Council for the Arts working with Indigenous Australian artists, Indigenous Cultural protocol guides published by the Council as a

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condition funding. https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about/ protocols-­for-­working-­with-­Indigenous-­artists/. 25. Now known as the Gordon Tootsis Nakniwin Theatre after one of the theatre’s founders. 26. Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, Sr. was President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He ruled under martial law from 1972 until 1981 and his regime as dictator was known for corruption, extravagance, and brutality. 27. The first production of The Unplugging, directed by Yvette, won the 2013 Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for Outstanding Original Script. 28. Sarah Boesveld. National Post. Canada, February 17th 2015. nationalpost. com/news/canada/silent-­n o-­m ore-­w hat-­c anadas-­m ayors-­h ave-­t o­say-­about-­violence-­against-­aboriginal-­women. 29. Directed by Nina Lee Nina, Sound Design by Romeo Candido, Lighting Design by Michelle Ramsay, Set Design by Camellia Koo, Costume Design by Joanna Yu, Stage Manager AJ Laflamme. He cast include, Umed Amin, Diana Belshaw and Allegra Fulton. 30. Gathering Ground 2010 was a multi art community cultural development project in Redfern Sydney. It was the third installation of a three stage project initiated by PACT theatre for young people. 31. Moogahlin Performing Arts is an Aboriginal theatre company founded in 2007 by Sydney Aboriginal theatre makers Lily Shearer, Frederick Copperwaite, and Liza-Mare Syron. Mooghalin develops and presents new Aboriginal work. 32. Paul Dwyer and Liza-Mare Syron. “Protocols of Engagement: ‘Community Cultural Development’ Encounters and Urban Aboriginal Experience.’” About Performance, Playing Politics: Performance, Community and Social Change (University of Sydney, 2009) 9: 169–191. 33. The Fox and the Freedom Fighters was performed at Carriageworks, Sydney in November 2014. 34. As previously mentioned my family heritage is Biripi from the Mid North Coast of NSW. Dharug lands form part of Greater Sydney and the Blue Mountains to the west. Historically, Dharug people occupied 1800 square kilometres of land extending along the east coast of NSW from the Hawkesbury River in the north and then inland to the present towns of Campbelltown and Camden. Yuin country covers the south-east corner of NSW, flowing from the Shoalhaven river in the north, through to Nowra in the south and along the eastern coastline into lake of Mallacoota on the Victorian border. 35. Susan Letzler Cole. Directors in Rehearsal: a hidden world (New York: Routledge, 1992). 2.

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36. Kate Rossmanith. “Making theatre-Making: Fieldwork, rehearsal and performance preparation,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (University of Portsmouth United Kingdom 2009), 1. 14. 37. Gay McAuley. Not Magic but Work (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 4. 38. Performance Space is a non-profit company that develops and presents new works by innovative artists and is currently a resident company at Carriageworks in Sydney. The company is historically important in relation to contemporary performance in Australia and has a history of developing new Aboriginal work working closely with Aboriginal artists and the local Redfern Aboriginal community in Redfern. 39. Posts in the Paddock was produced by Performance Space in November 2011 at Carriageworks Redfern. 40. As the play had a public performance at the end of the rehearsal period it is public knowledge that the play was based on Chicken Dixon’s life. 41. In Aboriginal culture and society in Australia telling stories that include those of one’s family or community in a dramatic work is an issue of authority. Part of the process of developing such works requires that consent be given by one’s community or family especially when there is an economic benefit. This is often worked through by employing a process of consultation over many months, and sometimes years, before a project reaches the development stage. 42. My academic sponsor was Dr Kate Rossmanith Senior lecturer at the Department of Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies Macquarie University Sydney Australia. 43. Bill Brown. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 28.1: 1–22. 5.

CHAPTER 3

Sharing Stories

Oral stories are born of connections within the world and are thus recounted relationally. They tie us to our past and provide a basis for continuity with future generations. —Kovach. Indigenous Methodologies, 94

The above quote by First Nations Cree academic Margaret Kovach suggests that for First Nations peoples, story is a method of knowledge production and connection. That the relationship between story, belonging, and knowing is inseparable, and that stories inextricably unite us relationally to our world.1 For Indigenous Australians, our ontologies and epistemologies, derived from our relationality to country, were historically formulated by way of oral narratives and traditionally through interrelated modes of storytelling such as dance and art.2 For Maori, every story contains whakapapa (genealogy) that is a beginning or a place from which stories derive or descend from. Maori genealogy begins with two ancestral beings. As Maori scholar Brigitte Te Awe Awe-Bevan explains “…all things descend from Papatuanuku (the earth mother), and Ranginui (the Sky Father)”.3 For Maori, stories are tāonga (precious), as are their traditions, practices and spirituality. Te Awe Awe-Bevan states: A fire is lit, burning a desire and passion to hear and learn more of ancestral stories and ways of doing and being. These are passed on as legacies, through © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L.-M. Syron, Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82375-7_3

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kōrero whakapapa (stories from our ancestors) with each generation providing its own way of transmitting knowledge, linking the old with the new in an everchanging world.4

In watching and listening to the Indigenous women playwrights I came to understand very early on, and continuing throughout the rehearsal process, that storytelling was very much central to their practice of theatre making. That the playwrights’ practice was to weave real life stories with the imagined in ways that situated their play narratives in the intricate landscapes of their own lives, cultures, and histories, and epistemologies.5 That for the playwrights, their plays were not necessarily about educating a broader non-Indigenous audience on the Indigenous experience. They were concerned with a reconfiguring of knowledge production. A way of passing down knowledge from generation to generation. For example, in addressing the cast on the first day of Sunset Road rehearsals the playwright and director Miria George announced to the cast, “I wanted to talk to my little sisters generation, to step up and take responsibility.”6 Similarly, one day in rehearsal for The Unplugging Nolan had informed the cast that the play was about ‘Eldering up’ and ‘taking responsibility’.7 For Nolan, her play held a message that was for the coming generations to understand. In the same way Aunty and her daughter often spoke in rehearsal about their play being a legacy piece for their children, and that it was their responsibility to speak to their family history, or at least articulate their part in that story. Each playwright saw their role as recording their life experiences, albeit in a fictional way, as an endowment for the next generation, and as a way to contribute these stories to the collective memory of Indigenous lives. In many ways the three plays in this study represent a twenty-first century refection on the Indigenous experience from different cultural contexts, and as such the stories held within these plays reveal much about the modern Indigenous woman’s experience of the world. There were three common interconnecting and relational story themes that emerged across all three plays, and that were also shared by the women playwrights in rehearsal. The three main story topics were; family and community, loss and survival, and land and place. These themes may be a universal experience for many people, but for many Indigenous peoples in colonial territories these experiences are often compounded by historical factors such as the loss of culture, language, homes, land, and family. This historical legacy can make the sharing of these stories a very emotionally charged experience.

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In discussing the three emergent themes, I examine the interconnections between each play plot and the real stories that were shared by the playwrights in the rehearsal process to show how the plays are a reflection on the way that the playwrights perceives their worlds as Indigenous women. In understanding this interconnectedness it becomes clear that the Indigenous plays in this study are, in many ways, a contemplation on the historical, cultural, and social experiences of Indigenous women more broadly. In re-narrating these accounts, I acknowledge that I am also involved in the process of co-constructing these knowledges of the world from an Indigenous perspective. That my life experiences as an Indigenous woman, theatre maker, and researcher, has various personal or professional similarities and connections to those of the women playwrights in this study. Many of the stories disclosed in rehearsal felt familiar, yet they were not familiar, because each was grounded in  local epistemologies and ontologies that were different from my own.

Family and Community/Loss and Survival Aunty and her Daughter’s Story The Fox and the Freedom Fighters is based on the life of the late Aboriginal activist Chicka Dixon, also known as The Fox. The play explores the consequences of his politically charged life on his family, and a testament to the strength and resilience of one Aboriginal family in the face of overwhelming social and political odds. Chicka was born in a time in Australia’s history when Aboriginal people were managed under the Aborigines Protection Act 1909.8 The following quote is taken from archival footage of Chicka giving the 2005 Jumbunna lecture at the University of Technology Sydney. I grew up on a little mission called Wallaga Lake on the South Coast of New South Wales. These were the days when blacks couldn’t go to white schools. I’m talking thirties and forties. The manager’s wife was automatically the schoolteacher. He was a shit carter from Bega. She took on the role and she was illiterate herself. No matter how old you were you were in third class. You could be eighteen and still in third class. Took me many years to realise what they were doin’. They purposely kept us illiterate. They did that ­purposely because they had a cheap pool of labour in the pea paddocks and bean paddocks.9

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Chicka was well into his seventies at the time of this recording, and at that stage of his life he had an inestimable presence that only those who have risen above adversity could ever accomplish. Wearing a plain off-­ white shirt, and sporting a full mass of wavy grey hair, with his glasses sitting low on his nose. In delivering the lecture he often drew deep and hard for every breath. He reached for each important statement, comment, and remark that he needed to say. Chicka understood the power of public speaking. The play was built from archival materials, conversations, and monologues written by Aunty and her daughter. Throughout rehearsals we watched Chicka’s speeches, news footage of his travels abroad as a Union delegate, and we studied the many photographs brought in from Aunty and her daughter’s collection. In telling Chicka’s story, the theatre makers were actively situating themselves in relation to his life and his work. Chicka’s story is significant to the everyday experiences of the two women playwrights and I now briefly tell his story to reveal more about these two women. As a young man Chicka had moved away from the realities of mission life at Wallaga Lake and travelled to the big city to find work on Sydney’s harbour front wharves and it was there that he was exposed to Waterside Workers Union, which he later joined. Joining the union was a decision that would have an important influence on his burgeoning political career. In later life Chicka would become a cultural leader during a time in Aboriginal politics that preceded the 1967 referendum on citizenship rights for Aboriginal people. He was a key member of the tent embassy in Canberra in 1972 and was instrumental in establishing an independent Aboriginal Arts board at the Australia Council for the Arts. The demands of Chicka’s public life and the effects on those closest to him make up much of the play as Aunty and her daughter recall intimate and honest tales of family life during these times. Stories of the travelling family caravan that followed him to significant political activities and protests both at home and abroad, of having to move from town to town due to his work commitments, and of spending various points in their lives back on their ancestral lands on Yuin country. But Chicka also carried a deep family tragedy that for most of his life he struggled to overcome. There was one key event at the heart of this family story, the tragic loss of Chicka’s only son. To tell this story a pre-recorded video monologue was projected onto a large white screen.

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To narrate each significant family event the playwrights worked with the film makers on pre-recorded video monologues that were to be projected onto a large white screen on stage. During one rehearsal, as Auntie’s face loomed large on stage, the sound of water dripping ominously in the background. Then the voice of Mario Lanza can be heard singing Niun me tema (death of Otello). Aunty begins a story, of the day when her grandfather was minding her brother. Chicka’s first-born and only son. The grandfather was only gone for a minute. The boy was fatally scalded in the family bathtub. It was an accident. A tragic misfortune that happened before Aunty was born. No one ever spoke about it. Yet, the effects were deeply and profoundly felt by the family for generations. The loss of his only son is speculated to be the cause of Chicka’s early struggle with alcohol. The cast and crew watched the first play back of Auntie’s monologue. After, there was a silence that hovered over the room. It was a solemn moment. Everyone present was affected by this story of loss, especially Aunty who wept openly. Her father’s absence was something that she felt deeply. Aunty rarely had contact with her father during her early adult years as during this time Chicka was away on his many political campaigns. In one scene towards the end of the play Aunty realises that her father had loved her very much. To one side of the set was a lounge room made from two chairs and a coffee table where Aunty and her daughter would sometimes sit in the show and talk casually about their lives. They were about to rehearse a scene about a particularly challenging time in their lives. It was a time when Aunty was away overseas studying, and her daughter was pregnant with her first child. Aunty and her daughter sat together on stage in silence for some time before reading the scene. Auntie’s head hung low fidgeting and rubbing her hands together. Reading from their scripts, Aunty looked up at her daughter and said, “I am sorry”. The daughter seemed agitated. She drew a large loud breath in and out before responding by asking, “Is that what you wanted, an apology from your own father?” Aunty was slow to reply, “Well he did say that in the end. He said it was the only thing he ever regretted, not spending time with the family.” Aunty then tells her daughter that after he had passed away she was cleaning out his things, when she had found a small box. Inside that box was his wallet, and inside the wallet was a photograph of a young woman wearing a flower in her hair. She didn’t recognise the woman at first but later realised that it was a picture of her. He had carried her photo with him his entire life, yet he never showed how he felt due to the trauma of losing his first born son.

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After the first reading of this scene, Aunty cried inconsolably. Everyone in the room sat silent allowing her grief to be present. For Aunty and her daughter, sharing these very personal stories was profoundly moving. Although they both had lived very rich and full lives, with families of their own, and both being accomplished musicians, there was always this shadow that followed them, a generational grief that had haunted them for most of their lives. The experience of writing and performing their story provided them with the space to face their grief, and to redress some of the effects of that burden on their own relationship. Throughout the rehearsal process Aunty, her daughter, and I also often spoke about the interconnectedness of family and community. Like Chicka, my Uncle Brian Syron was also involved in local Aboriginal politics and he mixed in the same circles as Chicka. In fact they knew each other very well. One day during rehearsals, the film archive researchers had bought in a photo from a newspaper clipping depicting the inaugural Australia Council Aboriginal Advisory Board that was established in1983. Chicka had been appointed as the Board Chair. The picture was to be used in the production and accompanied by a voiceover of Chicka recalling the events that led to the establishment of the Board.10 As I looked at the photo more closely, I noticed in the back row standing was Brian. He had been engaged as the Honorary Theatre Consultant to the Board. “There’s Brian,” I pointed out to Aunty and her daughter. He was smiling. He wore a pair of pale-coloured flared slacks and a matching soft denim jacket. As I looked down at his shoes and I could see that his right foot was turned in like some shy schoolboy on class-photo day. He seemed truly humbled by the occasion. It must have been an incredibly moving day for all concerned. In speaking about our connections, Aunty, her daughter and I all shared an association through an event that occurred over thirty years ago. For a brief moment we sat in a sense of extended time that reached back through the people that we loved. This play was their story. What I didn’t expect in the play were the memories and presence of my own family. In the telling of their family history a hidden part of my own family story had been uncovered. The monument provided a brief sense of union with the playwrights, one that was not determined by my role as director, or my interest in researching the rehearsals, but through my family ties. I too was moved by this history. Brian had played a very important role in my life after my father had passed away. Like Aunty, I was also a young woman at when Brian himself passed

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on. He was only in his early sixties. I wondered if they were both watching us making this work together. In unearthing family and community memories through the device of storytelling the theatre makers as authors of their own stories understood the power of performance as a tool for healing, and as a means to re-­ narrate possible and more positive futures. Although loss and survival were at the core of their story there were also celebrated moments of hope, redemption, and recovery. Like Aunty and her daughter, Yvette Nolan also examined individual and community grief and its legacy in her play The Unplugging. Similarly, Nolan also situated a reconnection to family and culture as a pathway to recovery. Yvette’s Story We have to remember that they are suffering. Yes, they were too quick to condemn us, but now we have proven them wrong.11

The above quote is taken from Velma Wallis’s book, Two Old Women (1993), a short story based on a legend passed down for many generations from mothers to daughters. It is the story of two elderly First Nations Athabaskan women abandoned by their community during a particularly brutal winter in Alaska, north of Canada.12 The characters in Wallis’ book are in their seventies and eighties and had lived for some time being cared for by their tribe. They complain a lot, about their condition, and about other people in their community. One particularly bitter winter there is a famine. There is not enough game or food available for the tribe, and a decision is made to move the community on in search of food. Because of their condition the Chief regrettably decides to leave the two old women behind. They are abandoned by their families and by their community. Though devastated, together, each day they drag their painful and aged bodies out into the cold in search of food, and each day they begin to reclaim their will to survive. They soon also decide to move on from where they were left, knowing that their community may never find them if they do. They set out towards north, to a place they remembered from their childhood. The journey is cold and hard but along the way they continue to remember their survival skills. They come to realise that they had given up caring for themselves because other people had looked after them. Now, they had to fight to live again. They survive the winter, and in the spring begin to prepare for their future in earnest. They trap muskrats,

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beavers, and rabbits. They catch great quantities of fish and smoke them along with rabbit meat to preserve,. They mend and make new clothing and hats out of the skins. They gather firewood and stack it all around their camp for the next winter. Then one spring day their community finds them. At first the women are fearful of their own family. They are scared that what food stores they built would be taken from them. Although still hurt for being left behind, they decide to share their food, and are gradually reunited with their families. They live several more years as happy old women. For Nolan, the story of the Two Old Women was not dissimilar to her own real-life family history. During the first week of rehearsals Nolan often spoke about her grandmother who was also abandoned by her family and left alone in old age to fend for herself. On the first day of rehearsal the mostly non-First Nations cast and crew were discussing at length some of the play’s themes, such as issues of aging, death, and survival. The youngest member of the cast was trying to understand why a community would abandon the aged to die in hard times. Yvette replied, “That’s what we do to old people.”13 Her reply seemed dismissive, but I sensed there was something else that Nolan was contemplating and wanting to say about aging. She herself had become critically aware of her own aging process and how society responded to women aging more broadly. Another issue Nolan chose to talk about in rehearsal that day was her growing awareness of becoming invisible. An experience that she felt around the age of forty-­ five.14 For Nolan, social invisibility contributes, in time, to a wanning of one’s life. The story of the Two Old Women the experience of aging is told through a first nations perspective where issues of survival are located in the wilds of Northern Turtle Island. Their story is about never giving up, and that that although society may try to push you aside, or position you as week, there is always the possibility of return. In Nolan’s The Unplugging, the women characters are not as old as those depicted in Wallis’s story. Elena is the eldest in in her sixties, and Bern is a little younger in her early fifties. Their story takes place in a dystopic future. It is a time of scarcity when community leaders must make hard decisions. Like the women in the Two Old Women, Elena and Bern are thrown out of their community into the wilderness to fend for themselves, their punishment for being “less productive’ members of their community. The first half of the play follows their struggle for survival during a very harsh winter. It is the youngest of the women, Bern, who leads them to safety guided by a memory of a group of cabins somewhere

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in the north forest, of a place where she used to spend time as a young woman. They eventually find the camp and settle in a cabin for the night. It is Elena who has survival skills. Elena remembers that as a child her mother would send her away to her father’s cabin up in the north country. Elena was often left alone to fend for herself as her father went in search for work. It was during these times that her grandmother would come to find her and take her hunting. She taught her how to make animal snares, hunt, and forage in the forest for medicinal plants. In Nolan’s play, it is the character of Elena who tells this story to her younger friend Bern. Elena recalls, “When she got really old, she was tiny, like a bird, they put her in a home, but she wouldn’t stay. She kept running away. Died in the bush. That’s what they did to us, Bern”.15 They both argue about the differences between how in the past women were left behind, and that now they are being pushed out by their community. Their circumstances may seem different to that of their grandmothers, but the feelings of abandonment are the same. The three intertwined stories in The Unplugging, which include, the Two Old Women, Nolan’s personal story, and that of the play characters are all accounts of similar experiences of the elderly told through the relationship of family and community. These accounts are firstly seen through the experiences of loss, but they later become stories about survival, the message is to ‘Elder up’ and take responsibility for one’s own life. Sometimes overcoming adversity is possible, but often, it depends on particular circumstances, and the willingness of an individual to accept their shortcomings, and consequences of their actions. In both The Fox and The Unplugging, the idea of personal redemption and recovery is seen as ultimately a family and community responsibility. You can’t have one without the other. In a similar way, the characters in Mira George’s play, Sunset Road, are deeply involved in recovery from a family disturbance but with the added pressures of great political and societal change as a backdrop. In Sunset Road themes of the family community, loss and survival are explored in a different way to that in the other two plays. Sunset Road, centres around a Cook Island family, and their experiences as migrant settlers during a time of political upheaval. Miria’s Story As mentioned, Sunset Road is based on real life experiences of the playwright. Set in Rotorua on the north Island of Aotearoa, where Miria grew

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up, the first half of the play occurs at a sawmill where the patriarchal head of a Cook Island family works. The sawmill in the play is based on the real life Waipa Mill in a small town called Taupo where Miria’s own family once lived and worked.16 The village is no longer there. Miria’s own paternal grandfather had worked at the sawmill as a Forman for fifty years. She believed that he was never properly paid for his experience or skills, but he was awarded a certificate from the Queen of England for his services. Her paternal grandmother, like many young Pacifica women in the 1930s, also migrated to Aotearo in search of work. “That was when my grandfather and grandmother met”, she explained.17 They married shortly after meeting and started a family, settling in Rotorua. This migration story is a common one for many Pacific Island families who now live throughout the North Island. In the 1960s when the New Zealand economy almost collapsed, the then government declared that all Island migrant workers must return to their homelands. This decision was devastating for many Pacifica families who had settled across the country. By the 1970s, the police had become involved hunting, catching, and deporting whole Pacifica families. These police activities were referred to as the “dawn raids”. This is the political backdrop of Sunset Road. The story of Sunset Road focuses on a family and their twin children, Luca and Lucia, played by Nathan Mudge and Aroha White. It is a three hander with Ina, their father as the other main character, played by Taungaroa Emile. On the Tuesday of the second week of rehearsals the cast and the director were rehearsing the first scene of the play. Miria is discussing her experience the town as “suffocating, boring, and nothing ever happened”.18 She then informed the cast that like the young characters in her play, her father was also a twin, but he was in fact a cousin. That her aunty was her grandfather’s sister’s grandchild. “There were always rumours” she said. “It was eventually confirmed through birth certificates”.19 In Sunset Road, Lucia finds out at the birthday party and she is not Ina’s chald but in fact Luca’s cousin. Ina had left his extended family in Atui to travel to Aotearoa in search of work and a new life. To understand what Ina’s actions meant in Cook Island terms, in the first week of rehearsals Miria gave a workshop on Cook Island culture, language, and family hierarchies.20 As the cast sat on the studio floor Miria drew a pie chart on a white board to show the Rorotonga family interconnections. Miria explained, “The head of the family caries the rangatira—the village title or chief, which is hotly

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contested. It [rangatira] may not always go to the eldest son of a family but may go to the eldest of another family”. In any case a title is hereditary and associated with particular plots of land. Miria continued, “You have to live in the village to retain a title.” In her play, it is Lucia’s father, Ina’s brother, who holds the family rangatira. Having a child out of wedlock would have caused family shame, which could have been grounds for his title to be contested. It is Ina’s individual sacrifice to leave his little island home of Atui to hide his brother’s shame and raises his illegitimate child Lucia, as his own. But this history finally catches up with Ina. When we first meet Ina at the beginning of Sunset Road, he has just had a serious accident at the Mill where his life was just one second away from ending. Ina is rocked by the incident and he is plunged into a deep spiritual crisis. Having spent over twenty years away from his homeland, his extended family, and his culture, Ina suddenly feels alone, lost, sad, and caught in a longing for place and unable to reconcile this sense of absence. In Sunset Road, The Fox and the Freedom Fighters, and The Unplugging it is the women who ultimately carry the responsibilities of their family and communities. It is women who deal with both their individual transgressions and those of their families or communities. In The Fox it is Aunty and her daughter who have lived and who now live with the intergenerational trauma of their father’s mission upbringing, his struggles with substance abuse, and his choice to follow a very public political career advocating for Indigenous rights in Australia. In The Unplugging it is Elena who must overcome her feelings of regret and revenge towards her community and transform her grief into love and acceptance. In Sunset Road it is Ina who carries the burden of his family shame by taking in his brother’s daughter, but by the end of the play it is Lucia who frees Ina and takes this burden on herself. The message from the playwrights about the role of women in Indigenous societies is that they often end up being the individual bearers of community and generational trauma. Each playwrights also created very specific locations to set their plays and these were often drawn from places known to the playwrights and situated within and from a specific cultural perspective of those places. Each play contained the playwright’s expressed viewpoint and understanding of place, These perspectives of place were conveyed by the playwrights throughout much of the rehearsal process and spoke to the reasonings for situating the Indigenous characters in specific locations, and to convey the playwrights own sense of those places as historically and culturally known.

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Land/Country/Place Indigenous women’s ontology is derived from our relationship to country.21

In coming to understand why the three playwrights based their plays in settings that were familiar and known to them, I firstly investigate how local scholars from each country convey an understanding of the meaning of land/country/place to Indigenous peoples more broadly. I do this with the aim of demonstrating how and why the three women playwrights engaged with ideas and concepts of place in their play texts and throughout the rehearsal process. In describing the relationship between Indigenous people and land/ country/place, in Australia Moreton-Robertson explains that this knowledge is intergenerational and “…passed down for thousands of years derived from origin time told in stories that relate to ancestral creator beings, a person’s family blood lines, and ‘tracks of country’”. She also adds that Aboriginal people in Australia derive their a sense of belonging to land/country/place through a connection to ancestral beings.22 Similarly, for Memmott and Long, a sense of place is “imbued with a rich cultural repertoire of symbolic and indexical elements derived from cosmologic and cosmogenic belief systems (invisible beings, entities and energies that live in place)”.23 Along with this perspective, it is my understanding that country is also viewed by many Indigenous Australian’s as a living being as well as an archive of their stories, families, identities, and spirit forms. Each clan has a responsibility as custodians of their country for the stories and animal totems that are held within specific sites of that country. This understanding informs our way of being in the world and our understanding of the natural world. Our animal totems connect us through time and place stretching back thousands of years to where our histories are held. For example, my Indigenous family are Biripi from the NSW mid-­ north coast. Biripi are known as saltwater people and our clan totem is the tiger shark. Understanding this knowledge provides me with a relationship to my history, my family, and country, which in this case is relational to a specific type of water. Inland people are often referred to as freshwater people and they carry specific knowledge held in and about rivers, lakes, and creeks. Similarly, in Aotearo Maori scholar, Brian Murton suggests that the idea of Maori is oriented and situated in place, and in conceptualising a phenomenological approach to place. He argues that for Maori, “body and landscape are complimentary. Each implies the other: both are

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represented in concrete forms”.24 For Murton, “The cartesian dichotomy between an observing thinking self and the outside world cannot exist”. Everything is connected and belonging to a primordial entity that today we call earth.25 In Turtle Island, Canadian academic Kathleen Wilson in describing an Obijway understanding of land explains that, “The land does not just represent a physical space but rather, represents the interconnected physical, symbolic, spiritual and social aspects of First Nations cultures”.26 Likewise, Canadian scholar Lesley Malloch argues that the Anishinaabe believe that, “all things on earth live and contain spirits. As such, land represents a site within which the Anishinaabe can relate to other animate beings in their everyday lives.”27 Many of the stories from different the original inhabitants of various countries, nations, clans, and tribes, all articulate a common understanding of self and community as being connected to specific sites and tracks of country and that this connection is beyond a physical understanding of the world. Moreton-Robertson, acknowledges however, that the epistemologies that flow from our ontologies will differ depending on our different experiences of colonisation.”28 It is a reality that the original inhabitants of colonised territories that their understanding of country exists in a continually contested reality pitted against the dominant narratives of conquered lands. The fundamental difference, and source of conflict between Indigenous peoples and the dominant Christian societies in countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand is in the divergent beliefs about the nature and origin of the world, and our relationship to those worlds. Most people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, believe that the world was shaped or created by ancestral or invisible beings. For example, Christians believe that a male God created the world in seven days. For Australia’s First Peoples, it is Biaime the creator or father sky that empowered great animal spirits such as the rainbow serpent to carve out natural landscapes on mother earth. In Maori cosmology land and sky are also equally gendered. Ranginui and Papatu ̄a ̄nuku are the primordial parents, the sky father and the earth mother. For Maori, and much of the Pacific nations there are strong anthropomorphic links between whanau (family) and land. Buried in the land are the Iwi or koiwi—bones of their ancestors tying people to communities and to place. In Turtle Island, found in Cree mythology (a tribal group that range from the east to the west of Turtle Island) is the story of a cultural hero who changed the chaotic myth-world into the ordered creation of today. This hero is the trickster wîsahkêcahk (Weesageechak). According to Ermine Willie,

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wîsahkêcahk named and organized everything that existed in the Cree life scape including the flora and fauna, earth, and the heavens in preparation for the arrival of the Cree people.29 Wîsahkêcahk is not gendered. However, as Kathleen Wilson suggests, “the Anishinaabe consider the land to be a female entity and a provider of all things necessary to sustain life and as such is referred to as Shkagamik-Kwe (Mother Earth).30 In describing these beliefs about the world in a performing-arts context I start by stating that all three case studies were undertaken in situ, and by that I mean on land that the Indigenous theatre makers have a long or deep connection to. Also, that a sense of land/country/place was something that the playwrights were invested in, articulating these connections in stories told throughout the rehearsal process and by re-counting in their plays origin narratives or creation stories related to the identity of their play characters. I begin this section on Land and Country with an analysis of The Fox and the Freedom Fighters where place was mostly portrayed as shifting landscape(s) featured theatrically in family photographs and paraded through various visual platforms on stage. Yet, Aunty and her daughter’s sense of place and identity was often expressed through stories connecting them to their historical and ancestral lands by way of the dreaming stories of the Yuin peoples. Yuin Country The 2014 production of The Fox and the Freedom Fighters was staged at Carriageworks, Sydney, on Gadigal land.31 The set design included Aunty’s fictional living room, set stage right and represented by two lounge chairs and a coffee table on a round orange rug. This setting was to signify a ‘yarning’ (talking) circle element to the show. Centre stage was a white scrim that hung from the lighting rig to the floor. The play text leaps across time and place signified through the projection of archival photographs and in memory told as. vignettes performed by Aunty or her daughter. Bookending the play are two dreaming/creation stories of the Yuin people from the south coast of NSW where Aunty and her daughter spent much of their time during their individual formative years. Dreaming stories relate an Aboriginal understanding of the world and of creation. For Indigenous Australians the dreaming is the beginning of knowledge from which came the laws of existence.32 Creation stories belong to and tell of the way a particular place was formed and of how the

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natural world came into being. These stories were passed down from generation to generation. However, many of these stories were interrupted due to colonisation and the systematic removal of Indigenous peoples from their native homelands. Today, this knowledge can be shared in the most unlikely and unexpected places, like in a rehearsal room. In Indigenous theatre makers often create known worlds, both real and imagined, to reflect their historical, social, and cultural milieu. During the Fox and the Freedom Fighters rehearsal process both Aunty and her daughter would encourage each other to tell these stories. In their play Aunty and her daughter employed the two Yuin stories as metaphors for their father’s spirit and the circumstances of his life. The first creation story told at the beginning of the play is of Bangu, the flying fox. I can’t tell you this story, as I don’t have permission to tell it the way it was told by Aunty and her daughter. The play is also not yet published and therefore cannot be reproduced in another document without their permissions. Even though the story was told on stage in front of a public audience, it wasn’t me who told the story in the first instance. This story belongs to the Yuin people and their descendants Aunty and her daughter, as Yuin women, have a family link to that country and to the story. There is however a publication of the tale in circulation.33 What I can tell you is that it is a morality tale about consequences, of not taking sides in a dispute, and of the isolation that can occur from not identifying with any one group. For Aunty and her daughter, the story of Bangu encapsulates much about Chicka’s life and his quest for equality. Of the sacrifice he had to make, and the line he walked between two worlds, and in his neutrality eventually leaving him separated from his family and community. The second Yuin story ends the play. It is the tale of a large wave that comes through the South Coast area every million or so years. It is the story of how the blue-tongue lizard got a blue tongue. It is a story of friendship, of a mutually positive affiliation between the natural world and beings that live there. It is a story about reciprocity, and how sometimes bad situations can have fulfilling and magical outcomes. For Aunty and her daughter, this was the positive future that they had wanted for Chicka’s life, and for their own lives too. Making connections to country through a range of storytelling practices (personal accounts, historical narratives, and creation stories) was something that all of the women theatre makers in this study were involved in. In creating the world of Sunset Road Miria often drew heavily from a closeness and access to her family history, specifically her paternal

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grandmother’s island home of Aitu in the Cook Islands. In this way Miria was invoking her genealogical connection to Aitu where the bones of her ancestors lie. In Sunset Road it is the origin story of Mariri Toa, the first man of Aitu that sits at the heart of the play. Aitu As mentioned, Sunset Road is set in Rotorua, the surrogate home to the play’s Cook Island family and where all of the play action takes place. Miria goes to some lengths throughout the play to describe this fictional world in a factual way. The town created from Miria’s own childhood memories. The set design is a sloping roof top, Luca and Lucia’s family home. It is here that we first meet the two young characters. They are talking about their futures as they look over their village. Lucia is feeling sentimental. Rotorua—a thermal wonderland—a volcanic plateau, where the streets still steamed with nga wha. Geysers. Mudpools. We would walk to town and pass nga wha [hot pool] that teased us—spitting mud and boiling water.34

In the following scene it is Lucia who again describes the town, but this time from the back of Luca’s triumph motorcycle. When we ride, the lights whip past us—the street lights, shop lights, lounge lights, garage lights and then nothing (BEAT) well … it’s not nothing … the paddocks, paddocks, dairy farm, paddocks, nga wha, nga wha, Whakarewarewa [Māori fortress of Te Puia]—the street lights return—the hotels, the motels, the casinos, the concerts, the penny divers, the meter maids.35 This is the world in which uca and Lucia have grown up in. It is the only world they know. Their family having moved to Rotorua from the Island of Aitu when they were both only infants. They have no real connection to the town. They know only the surface of the land, its physical elements and the built environment. On the other hand is Ina, the family patriarch who had bought them with him from his ancestral home. He has a strong connection to his birthplace, its stories, and its culture. He had been away a long time. The twins were about to celebrate their twenty first birthday. This was their coming of age. It is at this time that Ina has a near death experience. The giant bandsaw at the mill had broken and a

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fragment narrowly missed him by centimetres. He is suddenly unsettled. He sits alone at the mill, frightened, and muttering about his ancestral home. Te okioki mai nei te au manako anga. (It’s all coming back to me now.) Father, here is no Aitu, here is no island. I stand on the old land of the Arawa. The geysers cloud this land—like the fires in my island.36 Ina is far from home and cannot see his ancestors. Hearing of the incident Luka and Lucia run to his aid. When they arrive he is still in a state of shock. When he sees them he tells them the Aitu legend, of Mariri Toa, ‘the flying man’.37 I’ll show you Aitu one day. My island. My children—like Mariri Toa of Aitu—you’ll fly!38

The story of Mariri Toa is not fully told in the script, it is only referred to. This may be because amongst Pacific Islands peoples his story is a known one. To understand the cultural significance of that story to the imagined territories in the play text I include a summarised version below taken from Aitu Nu Marucrua, a collection of Cook Island Folklore.39 Known as the first man, Mariri Toa once lived in a place called ‘Avaiki’ during a time of scarcity. To save his people from starvation Mariri declared that he would travel the seas in search of a new home for his family. For his journey, the Aitu people made Mariri Toa, a canoe, which they named Te Kutikuti Rau Matangi (the Sharp Edged Leaf in the Wind). For many months Mariri Toa travelled across foreign seas until one morning at daybreak he finally sighted land. On landing he explored the new island in search of a suitable site for his family and community to live. He then searched for food and a good source of water. He found on this tiny island more than enough for his community to survive and flourish. He was satisfied that this new land would make a good place for his family to settle. Then, Mariri thought about his wife that he had left behind in Avaiki. He sat for several hours working out a way to bring them to the new land. He thought of a plan to fly to Avaiki. He made a frame using the branches of the tutu tree, and catching a number of birds he glued their feathers to the frame. He then set out to learn how to fly practicing for many days until he was fully confident in his ability. Mariri Toa then flew, soaring across the great Pacific Ocean returning to Avaiki and his family. Mariri Toa flew them all back with him to the island now known as Aitu.

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Like Mariri Toa, Ina travelled to the unknown for his children, for their future, toward what he believed would be a better life for them. Many Cook Islander people did this for their families in the late 1970s migrating to Aotearoa in search of work. Sadly for Ina, however, his sacrifices had become a burden. He had carried with him his family shame. After the mill accident he is suddenly overcome with the fear that he may never see his beloved island home again. He longs for the family he left behind. Sadly, he may never return. Ina has made the ultimate sacrifice for his family and the spiritual costs threaten to crush him. “For Maori, to know something is first of all to locate it in time and space through genealogy (whakapapa). To “know” one’s self is to know one’s genealogy. To “know” about a tree, a rock, the wind or the fishes in the sea, is to know their respective genealogies … everything-animate and inanimate-is connected within a single family tree.”40 For Ina and his family this connection was lost. In including origin narratives in their play texts both Aunty and her daughter, and Miria, were deeply invested in articulating and describing their epistemological and ontological understanding of the world, and that of their play worlds. Each of the playwrights had created these worlds on lands that were not historically their own. Aunty and her daughter in Gadigal lands, and Miria in Wellington. The reality is that many Indigenous theatre makers make theatre on dispossessed lands. Stories of place can provide a refuge from the realities of these Indigenous diasporas. In Nolan’s The Unplugging this theme of being a refuge in one’s own country permeates. In The Unplugging country is featured at first like as an unfamiliar and unforgiving landscape, but later as her characters refamiliarise themselves with their new environment, stories of place become a rich and generous sanctuary for them to transform. What sets The Unplugging apart from the other two plays is in the way the playwright also draws on her ancestral knowledge of celestial influences, such as in her understanding of the Anishinaabe moon cycles. The idea that humans and the natural world are interconnected and relational is a theme that runs through Nolan’s play. To this idea of land/place/country is an added belief in ‘sky stories’. For the Anishinaabe, knowledge of the stars forms part of this complex system of spiritual beliefs.41 Some spiritual leaders used this knowledge to help guide the day-to-day affairs of their communities. The Canadian Heritage Network describes this connection in the following way: The Anishinaabe have been given ways of communicating with the powerful heavenly forces. The oral teachings and stories which flow out of this com-

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munication between mortals and the spiritual world have been passed down from generation to generation since the beginning of time.42

The idea of ‘mutuality-in relation to the natural world’ was clearly exemplified by Nolan throughout her play through her knowledge of the 13 Grandmother Moon teachings of the Anishinaabe and Ojibwe moons.43 There are six moon cycles mentioned in the play that map out the succession of time and the spiritual effects of celestial forces on the natural world and on the peoples who inhabit that world, or in this case the characters in Nolan’s play. In this story, it is Elena who is open the transmorphic influences of the natural world. What follows is a brief description of the way Nolan weaves her sky stories with the play action and character journeys. The Far North The Unplugging begins with the two old women, Elena and Bern, carrying large packs on their backs walking in deep snow. They are both struggling to stay alive as the warm embrace of death circulates in their minds. They have travelled north in search of an old summer hunting camp that Bern remembers from her childhood. The north country of Turtle Island can be an unforgiving place during the winter months as temperatures can fall below forty degrees Celsius. The north according to Nolan is a world that only a few would know or even understand. “Only people who had skills would dare to go that far north”. This was the world in which Nolan places the two old women who must survive on knowledge handed down to them through generations for over thousands of years of that land/ place/country. However, the characters in Nolan’s play, had forgotten that knowledge, and they needed to quickly remember if they were to survive. In portraying this land/place/country, set designer Camellia Koo offered a draped white stage surrounded by falling translucent scrims. A raised white mound sat centre stage. The moon was projected onto the scrim traveling across the stage each night. The first scene of The Unplugging begins with the words, “Moon. Cold. Silver light. The sound of footsteps, the way it does when it is so cold.…”44 The two old women are traveling in the time of the Little Spirit Moon, which occurs in November–December. It is the darkest and coldest time of the year. In Ojibwe culture, Little Spirit Moon is described as a time to honour the silence, and to realise one’s place within all of the great

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mystery’s.45 It is in this time that the two women are walking deep in snow struggling with the elements, the cold, the wind, and a blizzard. Their bodies are failing. Elena has fallen. She doesn’t want to get up. It is the darkest moment in the play. They must choose to live, or die. Elena turns to Bern and says, “Bernadette, just leave me I don’t want to go on”46 But her companion Bern refuses to leave her. She cannot survive without her. Only through reminding Elena of her family, and her grandson, does Bern succeed in getting Elena to her feet. They move on. By scene three it is Spirit Moon, January. The text reads, “time passes, moving from Little Sprit Moon, December, to Spirit Moon, January”.47 The two women have found the old camp site and settled in one of the dilapidated cabins. The transition that Spirit Moon requires is from healing to being reborn. This process can take up to three months to complete. At the river camp Elena sets traps whilst Bern forages for food amongst the abandoned huts in the area. Together they relax into a comfortable life. At night, around a fire, they share stories of their youth, their families, the community, and they talk to each other about the women they are becoming. This is the first time that we hear them speak in language. It is Anishinaabe. It happens whilst Elena is cooking a rabbit stew. She calls it Pebeepebonbon. She doesn’t know why the stew is called that name. She just knows. Elena now knows many things that during the past months she slowly recalled. She gives thanks to the creator, for the meal, and to the waaboos (rabbit) for offering itself to be eaten. It is a time of gratitude. A time for acknowledging all life, and that we exist because of the sacrifice of others. By Scene five it is Mukwa Giizis (Bear Moon), February, a time for people to see beyond their day to day reality and to communicate through energy rather than sound. During this phase, Bern finds a young man wandering half-starved in the woods. She gives him food. She teaches him about the moon and its name. They become intimate, speaking to each other through their bodies. This affair Bern keeps to herself, a betrayal of sorts of her relationship with Elena. Scene eight is entitled Snow Crust Moon, also known as “Top of Snow Moon,” or opening the door and walking outside. This is the time when the snow is covered with a frozen ice coating. No snowshoes needed. In the play this scene is a transition scene without actors. The direction reads, “Time passes, moving from Bear Moon, February, to Snow Crust Moon, March. The passage of time can be indicated by movement and light.”48

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By scene eleven Elena is setting rabbit snares where she finds a sprout in the forest breaking free of the snow. It is Pink Moon, a time of wildflowers, sprouting grass, and the promise of springtime. They have both made it through a particularly harsh winter and now the promise of spring brings hope of survival and plans for the future. Elena’s joy however is tempered with the news of the young man, Bern had bought him into their camp. He later returns to his community, their community, the one that threw them out. Elena is mad and afraid that they will be found. But with the receding snow, life beckons them. The final moon, Sucker Moon, takes place in April/May and arrives in Scene twelve. This is a time to net fish, and to celebrate the return to light. Whilst going about their daily activities Elena discovers a fish left on the cabin steps. Bern realises that it was her young lover who has returned, but he is not alone. He emerges from the forest with someone with him. It is Elena’s grandson and her daughter. This is the moment when balance can be restored. Now the women are asked to consider their return, to family, to community, and to themselves. It is a decision they do not make lightly, but in the end, they decide that they have a responsibility to teach their community what they have remembered whilst in exile, the old ways of hunting and survival. During The Unplugging rehearsals the actors and the director spent little time coming to an understanding of the moon phases and the importance of the natural cycles in the life journeys of the characters. Instead, when the topic was raised, the actors quickly turned the discussion to working out the setting of each scene, or a character’s motivation, transitions, blocking, actions, beats, units, and in some instances the minutia of a particular line. By the middle of the first week of rehearsal the room had become a somewhat discursive battleground between artistic and cultural viewpoints, which at times was unbearable for everyone involved. Tough battles and differences of opinions about particular scenes and lines took place and these discussions highlighted the challenges of casting non-­ Indigenous actors in Indigenous roles. To be fair, one of the actors did identify as of Māori descent. When discussing the themes of the play on the Native Earth website actor Dianne Belshaw spoke candidly about her newly found heritage. Belshaw had discovered late in life that she had Maori heritage. In relating her experiences to those of the characters in the play, Belshaw stated, “to lose family, community, and culture resonates for me; my own Indigenous heritage [Maori] lay unacknowledged in my family until recently. Perhaps this is my chance to share Elena’s journey and

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learn from her courage and grace.”49 Although at times the rehearsals for The Unplugging were tough going due to the cross-cultural nature of the production, there was a sense from Nolan that the actors would bring a different view of the play to new audiences, but at what cost? During the rehearsal period there was much time and effort given to the artistic vision of the play, which the actors responded to. However, when the opportunity arose to understand the point of view of the writer, and the world views of First Nations peoples, such as those identified on Nolan’s list on the back of the wall, there seemed to be some resistance from some of the actors.50 When it came to embodying the characters and world of the play, its setting, the landscape and cosmology as culturally known, it was Belshaw, who played Elena, who had the greatest opportunity to access, navigate, and perform this understanding. This process would be helped along by the movement elements of the production. How Belshaw navigated this cultural understanding I talk more about in the following chapter. I now end this chapter with a brief reflection on the three plays and investigate the question of why the three Indigenous playwrights chose the medium of theatre as a platform to articulate their an understanding of the world.

Reflection I began this chapter by introducing the idea that for the Indigenous women playwrights in this study making theatre was means or way of reconstituting knowledge production. Form an Indigenous perspective, knowledge is generally understood as ‘culture’, which for Indigenous theatre makers means that making theatre can be viewed as cultural practice, except that ‘theatre’ is a Western and European form of performance practice. The question that this raises is, why theatre? Performance studies theorists have emphasised the role of performance as the medium through which culture is enacted, negotiated and constantly re-made. Australian academic Ian Watson argues that “culture shares much with performance because it is a living entity embedded in enactment.”51 For Richard Schechner, “cultures are the most fully expressed in and made conscious of themselves in their ritual and theatrical performances.”52 Lastly, Phillip Zarrilli makes the point that “performance as a mode of cultural action is not a simple reflection of some essentialised fixed attributes of a static, monolithic culture but an arena for the constant process of renegotiating

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experiences and meanings that constitute culture.”53 Hence, performance is a culturally charged medium through which Indigenous peoples platform, express, and impart their cultural knowledge in a very public way. What these three case studies highlight is that the process of creating and making Indigenous theatre is complex as it is one that requires the playwright to have a strong desire to connect with one’s cultural knowledge, heritage, and history. Each playwrights in this study articulated their intension for writing a play text as a responsibility to pass on what they knew for future generations. That making theatre was not only about exemplifying an artistic vision, more importantly it was about cultural maintenance. All three women playwrights used the stories, either told in rehearsal or written in the play texts, to reveal a contemporary Indigenous woman’s viewpoint of the world. These accounts and narratives as social memory spoke to historical and intergenerational traumas, of the experiences of loss and survival, and of family and community. Each play also contained an Indigenous understanding of land/place/country as historically and culturally known. In this way, all three women playwrights were involved in recreating new worlds by means of collaboration creating a shared space of engagement. Aunty once said to me, “We don’t just make plays”, and I believed that what she was trying to say is that for her making theatre was a way to articulate an understanding of the social and cultural responsibilities inherent in the telling these stories. Also, that theatre provides platform to demonstrate our knowledge, and to express these knowledge in a tangible way. For many Indigenous peoples writing down of our stories in textual form is a relatively new phenomenon. Historically, stories were handed down from generation to generation orally. Hence there are very strict protocols around who can share this knowledge. Stories were also expressed through ritual, and in performance such as in movement and dance. These corporal practices were a way to experience an embodied sense of these knowledge’s. This form of knowledge production continues today in many Indigenous communities across the world in various contemporary reconfigurations of historical dance and movement practices. In the following chapter I highlight moments were vocabularies of movement were applied in rehearsal to assist with an embodied sense of a character’s heritage, experiences, knowledge, and understanding of the world as culturally known.

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Notes 1. Ibid. 2. Moreton-Robinson. “Towards an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint,” 340. 3. Bridgitte Te Awe Awe-Bevan. “Koero Whakapapa: Stories from our ancestors, treasured legacies,” in The Many Faces of Storytelling: Global reflections on narrative complexity, edit. Jennifer Jean Infanti and Melanie Rohse (Brill, 2019). 23–33. 23. 4. Ibid. 5. Maryrose Casey. Telling Stories: Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Performance (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2012), 119. 6. Noted in rehearsal documentation, Monday 28th July 2014 Wellington New Zealand. 7. Noted in rehearsal documentation. Saturday March 7th 2015 at 9:30 am Toronto Canada. 8. The 1915 amendments to the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 gave the New South Wales (NSW) Aborigines Protection Board the power to remove any Indigenous child at any time and for any reason. The Aborigines Protection Act was finally repealed in 1969 but the legacy of the legislation and that of other states endures among the thousands of Stolen Generations in Australia. Many remain deeply traumatised by their experience as children. Because this trauma can be trans-generational, these policies continue to affect the Aboriginal and Torres Strait community today. https:// www.nma.gov.au/defining-­m oments/resources/aborigines-­p rotec tion-­act. 9. Chicka Dixon, Jumbunna lecture, 2005. YouTube: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=7Q-­S7WsaR3Q. 10. In May ‘73 Gough Whitlam invited Indigenous artists and activists from all over Australia for five days in Canberra to discuss the formation of an Aboriginal Arts Board. 11. Velma Wallis. Two Old Women (Seattle: Epicenter Press, 1993). 117. 12. Athabaskan is the name of a language group, also called Na-Dene or Apachean, that includes languages associated with Native American and First Nation people that today live in Alaska, northwest Canada, and coastal Oregon and California. 13. Noted in rehearsal documentation. Tuesday 17 February 2015, at 4:20 pm Factory Theatre. 14. Noted in rehearsal documentation. Wednesday 18 February 2015, at 12:45 pm Factory Theatre. 15. Yvette Nolan. The Unplugging (Toronto: Canada Press, 2014). 14.

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16. The town of Taupo is situated in Rotorua on lake Taupo. 17. Noted in rehearsal documentation. Friday 1st August 2014 at 1:55 am. 18. Noted in rehearsal documentation. Tuesday 5th August 2014 at 10:35 am. 19. Noted in rehearsal documentation. Tuesday 5th August 2014 at 10:45 am. 20. Noted in rehearsal documentation. Thursday 31st August 2014 at 1:45 pm. 21. Morton-Robinson. “Towards an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint,” 340. 22. Ibid., 341. 23. Memmott, Paul; Long, Stephen, Place Theory and Place Maintenance. Indigenous Australia Urban Policy and Research 2002, 39–56. 42. 24. Brian Murton “Being in the place world: toward a Maori ‘geographical self””. Journal of Cultural Geography (Taylor and Francis 2012) 29 (1): 87–104. 95. 25. Ibid., 92. 26. Lesley Malloch. “Indian medicine, Indian health: study between red and white medicine.” Canadian Women Studies (Inanna Publications 1989), 10: 105–112. 90. 27. Lesley Malloch. “Indian medicine, Indian health: study between red and white medicine.” Canadian Women Studies (Inanna Publications 1989), 10: 105–112. 90. 28. Moreton-Robinson. “Towards an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint,” 341. 29. Willie Ermine. Cree Cosmology. University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Encyclopedia: https://teaching.usask.ca/Indigenoussk/import/cree_ cosmology.php. 30. Kathleen Wilson. “Therapeutic landscapes and First Nations peoples: am exploration of culture, health and place.” Health and Place (Elsevier 200) Ontario. 9:2. 83–93. 87. 31. The Gadigal people of the Eora and Dharug nations never seeded sovereignty of their lands. 32. Aboriginal Arts and Culture. Alice Springs. http://www.aboriginalart. com.au/culture/dreamtime2.html. 33. Taylor, Jillian. Bangu, The Flying Fox: a dreamtime story of the Yuin people of Wallaga Lake. 1994. Illustrated by Penny Jones and Aaron Norris. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra 2009. 34. Sunset Road. Unpublished rehearsal script 30 July 2014, 3. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 7. 37. Maria, Samuela. The story of Mariri Toa (The Ministry of Education 2020) New Zealand. file: https://instructionalseries.tki.org.nz/ Instructional-Series/Junior-Journal/Junior-Journal-60-Level-2-2020/ Mariri-the-Flying-Man.

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38. Sunset Road. 9. 39. Aitu Nui Maruarua. E au tua Ta’ito. Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific (Ministry of Education 1984). Rarotonga, New Zealand. http://Aitu info.bluemoth.org/files/7114/5376/1970/ AituNuiMaruarua.pdf. 40. Brian, Murton. Being in the place world: toward a Maori “geographical self”, Journal of Cultural Geography (Routledge), 92. 41. Indigenous Astronomy: The Anishinabe of Central North America. Virtual Museums (Canadian Heritage Information Network 2003). http://www. virtualmuseum.ca/edu/ViewLoitDa.do;jsessionid=7D3AC2E36C5598 CB429F0E2C7219941F?method=preview&lang=EN&id=5186. 42. Ibid. 43. The Ojibwe are a clan group within the Anishinaabe-speaking peoples, a branch of the very large Algonquian language group. Yvette identifies as Anishinaabe. 44. Nolan. The Unplugging, 3. 45. The 13 Grandmother Moon teachings (Muskrat Magazine 2015). http:// muskratmagazine.com/ojibwe-­moons/. MUSKRAT is an on-line Indigenous arts, culture magazine that honours the connection between humans and our traditional ecological knowledge by exhibiting original works and critical commentary. 46. Nolan. The Unplugging, 4. 47. Ibid., 18. 48. Ibid., 46. 49. Diana Belshaw. Inside The Unplugging (Native Earth Performing Arts 2015). https://www.nativeearth.ca/theunplugging-­belshaw/. 50. Throughout The Unplugging rehearsals Anishinaabe playwright Yvette Nolan sat at the back of room, next to Ric Knowles, watching and taking notes. Stuck to the back wall behind her was a small parchment of paper with the heading “Yvette’s Indigenous World View”, under which Knowles had listed in ascending order the following words, “Elders, offering, values, meegwetch, language, generosity, the role of women, naming, ‘My Boy’, mutuality-in relation to the natural world-aminals ect, community over individual, prayer-our people’. This list outlined for Knolwes the key concepts that Nolan was exploring in her play. No one mentioned or spoke about the note, which may have been written as a road map for the nonFirst Nations theatre makers to consider when coming to grips with a cultural understanding of the world in which the play was set. I cannot comment on its influence on the actors as the list was never really given the much consideration in rehearsal.

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51. Ian Watson. “Culture, Memory, and merican Performer Training” (New Theatre Quarterly 2003): 33–40. 33. 52. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (eds), By Means of Performance. Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Cambridge. 1. 53. Phillip Zarrilli. Acting (Re) Considered (Routledge, 1995). 16.

CHAPTER 4

Embodied Knowledge

Without a story, you don’t know who you are, and the way you tell that story is through dance, through movement. —Stephen Fitzpatrick. “Tyrone Gordon, Dubbo man, brings family dances back to life for a new generation” (The Australian Newspaper 2016). April 9

To Dance I don’t know how to dance. By dance I mean in the customs and practices that Aboriginal women in Australia have practiced for thousands of years and performed with other Aboriginal women in a ceremonial way. My mother is not Aboriginal. She is a descendent from a first fleet English convict, Henry Kable. My father’s mother, my paternal grandmother, was born in Balmain and lived a long way from her family’s traditional lands of Biripi country near Taree on the mid north coast of New South Wales. Like many Aboriginal women my age that did not grow up on their ancestral lands, either because they are descendants of women who were removed and/or forbidden to participate in cultural or ceremonial practices such as corroborees, or like my grandmother, they were born in metropolitan cities—I do not dance, sing, or speak in the language of my people. According to Tyrone Gordon in his quote above, my story has not been performed yet, and as the following rehearsal accounts illustrate, my experience is not an isolated case. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L.-M. Syron, Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82375-7_4

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Early on in the development phase of rehearsals for The Fox and the Freedom Fighters Aunty had announced, “I just want to dance with my daughter”. I believe what Aunty was trying to say or meant was that she wanted to dance in the tradition of Indigenous cultural dance practice with her daughter on stage. I wondered if Aunty knew how to dance. As a mother and cultural Elder she has a very strong sense of the many layered and nuanced meanings of cultural practice. However, for some reason Aunty had never learnt to dance. More disturbing was that her daughter did know how to dance, which meant that in this now small family the passing on of intergenerational embodied knowledge was somehow interrupted. Auntie’s admission that she had never danced with her daughter seemed for her difficult to articulate, and in that moment no one in the rehearsal room could ignore the layers of meaning behind Aunties request. I reflected on a time when Indigenous women would dance, sing, play music, and tell stories on country at corroborees and community gatherings. I reflected on colonisation and the systematic subjugation of local cultures such as the banning of native languages, stories about country, and ceremonial dance gatherings. The removal of communities from their ancestral lands and of being dispersed and spread across the country to various missions and reserves. All of these actions contributing to the disruption of intergenerational cultural knowledge transfer. This is a familiar story for many Indigenous communities across the globe. So here we were, in 2015, in a rehearsal room, witnessing the consequences of these events manifesting in the lives and bodies of this one family who wanted to now tell their stories. Whilst many Aboriginal women, like Aunty, grew up not able to learn dance in the manner of our ancestors, many Aboriginal women have reconnected with cultural dance practices. Today in Australia there are a number of local community cultural dance groups across the nation, and many also deliver youth dance programs at pre, primary, and high school levels. For those desiring a professional career in Indigenous dance, the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association NAISDA Dance College in outer Sydney offers a tertiary training pathway. According to their website, NAISDA provides skills, as well as theoretic and applied knowledge across a range of dance genres from contemporary to cultural dance. Dance trainees engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, develop cultural connections, and learn cultural skills specific to each community.1 In Brisbane, Queensland, the Aboriginal Centre for Performing Arts ACPA also offers a dance program for Indigenous

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students. In many ways these institutions play a ‘surrogate’ role in cultural transmission, reconstituting and reconfiguring what was once a genuine transference of performance genealogies. Their programs are intercultural, interdisciplinary, local and global, drawing on diasporic cultural dance practices and contemporary dance styles. Today, historical Indigenous dance practices are rarely performed on country, but are mostly practiced in contemporary contexts and on sprung wooden floors. Some of the challenges of learning, teaching, or dancing in these contexts is best demonstrated through an example, and the following account is from a dance workshop I attended ghat was delivered by a colleague and peer Lily Shearer. Lily is a graduate of NAISDA, and identifies as Murrawari.2 Lily and I are the same age, but have very different upbringings. Lily was born on country near her ancestral lands in Brewarrina, North-Western NSW.  I grew up in a Balmain and attended local public schools. As a teenager lily had relocated to Sydney as a boarder at Saint Scholastica’s College in the inner west Sydney suburb of Glebe. We both spent our formative years at schools in adjacent suburbs, but our upbringings were miles apart. After leaving high school Lily went on to enroll at the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre AIDT where she spent the next few years learning a variety of dance practices including ballet, contemporary dance, and Indigenous cultural dance. I recently had the good fortune to observed Lily delivering a cultural dance workshop to Aboriginal high school students from all over the state.3 I had been hired to deliver the drama component, and had decided to also participate in and observe Lily’s class. What follows is a short description of my experience of the workshop, where I highlight some of the challenges associated with teaching dance in contemporary spaces through an account of learning to dance. Kicking Up the Dirt On the western banks of Sydney’s Harbour sit a prominent group of waterfront piers. Once bustling with maritime trade, the finger wharves, as they were known, are now a refurbished cultural precinct housing theatre spaces and offices for arts companies such as Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Dance, the Australian Theatre for Young People, and the Sydney Philharmonic. On a sunny March morning a swarm of young women were gathering outside one of the rehearsal studio spaces.4 Inside, Lily was

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waiting. As the students entered they all took off their shoes and neatly placing them inside the doorway. They all slowly moved into the centre of the space where Lily stood holding up a pair of wooden clap-sticks. Lily then welcomed the class. “Mittiga”. “Mittiga”, she repeated. “Does anyone know what Mittiga means? Mittiga means friend in the language of the Gadigal people of the local area” she replied. With a clap-stick in each hand Lily whacked them together yelling, “Gurrung”. Does anyone know what Gurrung means? Gurrung means happy”. Lily then surveyed the room. “Burruk. Burruk means see you. Gurrug Burruk Mittiga” she tells the group, “means happy to see you friend in the language of the Dharug.”5 Lily then asked the group. “Why do black fellas dance?” The answer came from one of the students at the back of the room in the form of a question. “Celebration?” “Yes”, Lily replied. “There are two main reasons why Aboriginal people dance. Celebration is one of them”. The lesson continued. “What do we celebrate?” she asked the group but answered herself. “We celebrate our stories, creation stories and ways of being. We dance to learn how to be decent human beings. We also dance for special events like marriages, births and death, or ‘sorry business.’ We use music to dance. We use clap sticks, and drums, and we also have modern Aboriginal music. Clap sticks are used to dictate the time and beat. We also sing and chant, we use gum leaves and slap our bodies to time”. She then told the group. “I don’t dance the same way as the old fellas. I dance my own dreaming. My dreaming is different from my Elders”. This was Lily’s description of her dance practice and what dance meant to her. After this introduction Lily began the dance lesson. The first technique that Lily taught the students was one that had been practiced by Aboriginal women for many thousands of years. Lily referred to this technique as ‘kicking up the dirt’. The group of girls all stood in a circle facing Lily who stood alongside the students holding tightly to her clap sticks. Lily then raised her hands hitting the sticks together and counted a slow beat. The clashing sticks echoed across the room as everyone stopped to listen. Then, turning her head and body towards the floor Lily started softly sweeping each foot across the other in a slow but methodical way. Shuffling forward, Lily explained that lifting the feet along the ground enables the body to be “one with mother earth”. She then explained, “I dance for my spirit and for mother earth”. Sweep, sweep, sweep, feet danced as the clap sticks kept time. I joined in. ‘Kicking up the dirt’ was harder than it looked. It required a continuous rhythmic activity that only a seasoned musician might skilfully

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conquer, whilst also keeping one’s balance. I decided to participate with the group because I needed to know whether if I did dance, in a cultural way, with other Aboriginal women, would I feel more connected to my Aboriginality? I danced on a studio floor and not on my country. I danced with younger women who were not my peers. Yet, I did feel an unusual awareness of my genealogy, my history, my heritage, and my culture in a way that I could not have done alone. I became mindful of all Aboriginal women through time, as well as my paternal grandmother, her grandmother, and so on all dancing across country for thousands of years. Through dance my body felt imbued by a sense of a collective past, yet like an ‘orphaned memory’, I danced with people I didn’t really know, on country that was not my own, and enacted a practice I was unfamiliar with.6 As performance scholar Joseph Roach explains, “…the voices of the dead may speak freely now only through the bodies of the living.”7 Dancing in this way certainly made me feel connected to my heritage and to my ancestors. I wondered if this was the experience that Aunty was looking for. The moment when Aunty and her daughter did dance together arrived late in the rehearsal process. It happened in the last scene of the play. Aunty and her daughter were watching archival footage of Chicka giving one of his final public addresses where he had shared his thoughts on life. I believe that every woman on this planet is my sister. I believe every man on this planet is my brother. Like all Koori’s I know the earth is my mother.8

In consideration of the last lines of this sermon, this moment seemed like a perfect place in the play for Aunty and her daughter to dance. Thankfully they both agreed. Their dance would herald the end of the show. A discussion then ensued when the daughter expressed that she wanted to dress in cultural attire. This was all the detail given. I would have to wait and see what “attire” the daughter wanted to dance in. The next day whilst rehearsing the same section of the play scene, the footage of Chicka’s lecture played in the background, this time however the daughter quietly got up from her seat and moved behind her chair. There she had placed an emu feather skirt.9 She tied the skirt around her waist as her mother watched on. The daughter then reached behind the chair again to reveal two sets of Eucalyptus leaves. She handed one pair to her mother who accepted them with her head bowed down in what looked

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like gratitude. The daughter then turned and faced the open stage. Her mother followed. Slowly, together, they ‘kicked up the dirt’ moving in unison towards centre stage as they swept the ground with the leaves. This sweeping gesture represented the brushing away of footsteps, removing their trace from the earth, and clearing the storytelling space to make ready for the new. This was the moment when Aunty and her daughter first danced together. After rehearsing the scene Aunty was once again overcome with emotion. Not only had she the courage to stand and tell her story to the world. In the end she was also able to transmit part of that journey of telling her story, although momentarily, through dance. More importantly she did this with her daughter. Aunty achieved her aspiration in a rehearsal room, on a wooden floor, in front of strangers. There wasn’t a moment to ask her how she felt, I don’t know if it was even right to, it was a very personal occasion, but her welling smile and slight glint of a tear said it all. In dancing together Aunty and her daughter were demonstrating their subject positions as Aboriginal women and acknowledging their genealogical inheritance. In dancing in the present, on a rehearsal floor, they indicated the current experiences that many Indigenous women find themselves in today, as cultural refugees in their own country, in the act of reconfiguring aspects of their cultural heritage to ‘fit’ a modern rehearsal context. For Aunty to dance on stage was to be a radical act. Her dance not only spoke to her cultural affiliations, she was asserting sovereignty over her own body and privileging her Indigenous identity. Each had recognised the significance of the moment. This approach to dance and movement as performative dialogue was a particular practice observed across all three case studies, but in very specific ways. In the following section I provide a detailed account of a rehearsal for the Kapa Rima, a Cook Island dance that was to be performed in the 2014 production of Sunset Road by the character of Lucia.10 In this instance, the particular dance form chosen by the playwright denotes not only the cultural heritage of the character, it also assisted the actor with an embodied sense of the character’s identity. The Kapa Rima The Kapa (dance) Rima (hand) or ‘hand dance’ is a contemporary form of dance from the Cook Islands in Central Polynesia. Described as an ‘action song’ or storytelling song’ by Marvyn McLean in his book Weavers

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of Song: Polynesian Music and Dance, the Kapa Rima was historically performed with chants.11 Similar dances such as the akaparu or akau ̄kaūka was performed by Cook Island men and women enacted at non-formal gatherings. Over time, with the rise of tourism, informal dancing became less common for a new generation. Today, the Kapa Rima is mostly presented as tourist entertainment or at competitions (like in Sunset Road). For the akaparu the whole body sways and each dancer can move independently from the other. Whereas for the Kapa Rima the upper body remains still, the arms are extended, hands are gestured, and the hips move from side to side. Each performer also moves in a synchronised group. What distinguishes Cook Islands dancing from that of the rest of Polynesia is the drumming. To the east, drums have a skin covering, and to the west a wooden drum is played, but in the Cook Islands it is a full ensemble of drums from both east and west which collectively create a powerful resonating sound. Most Cook Islanders now mostly learn to dance at school and not in the local villages.12 In Sunset Road, when Lucia dances the Kapa Rima she is proudly signifying and celebrating her Cook Island heritage, her cultural affiliations, and her social relations and identifications, which at the time in which the play is set (during the dawn raids), is a powerful and political act. In Miria’s play, Lucia has entered the local annual pageant, Miss Geyserland, every year for most of her young adult life.13 It is Lucia’s final year of competition age. In previous years she has only managed to come second. A lot is riding on her choice for the talent section of the pageant because this year she needs to win, she desperately wants to get out of Rotorua and the winner is given the opportunity to travel to the north island city of Auckland to compete in the national competition. Luka tries to convince her to not to perform a marching girl dance sequence, which all the girls in the competition perform. He wants her to consider performing the Kapa Rima. The following excerpt is taken from the selected scene. LUKA: Miss Geyserland 1975 doesn’t march! LUCIA: I didn’t ask you, Captain Cook Islands— LUKA: It’s Captain America—Peter Fonda was Captain America— there’s no Captain Cook Islands in ‘Easy Rider’— LUCIA: I told you before, I’m not going to do it— LUKA: yeah who cares man, it’s only Miss Geyserland. LUCIA: Miss Geyserland reigns over all of the Bay of Plenty!

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LUKA: it’s the only way you’re gonna win— LUCIA: I told you before. If I dance a Kapa Rima (hand dance) I’m going to lose—14 Later in the scene Luka reinstates his opinion to Lucia LUKA:

You dance, you win.15

For the 2014 rehearsals Miria had employed competitive Cook Island dancer Te Hau Teho (Aitu / Te Atiawa / Ngati Ruapani) to teach Maori actress Aroha White to dance the Kapa Rima.16 Aroha had already performed the dance previously having played Lucia in the 2012 production. Although a little rusty, Aroha did not take long to familiarise herself with the movements under the guidance of Teho. On a wet and chilly Wednesday morning in the second week of the August rehearsals, Hone and actor Taungaroa Emile were busy building a Kana at the back of the rehearsal space. A Kana is a stool-type coconut grater. I noted in my journal that they were very loudly bashing and hammering nails into wood with a frying pan, which wasn’t working. Hone and Emile switched to a drill and continued to work on the Kana when the actor Aroha arrived. Teho, the dance instructor arrived shortly after and was quickly whisked away to the kitchen by Miria. Hone and Emile continued to work whilst occasionally stepping back to admire their work. But this was dance time. This was women’s time. When Miria returned from the kitchen, she informed everyone that Teho was just getting dressed. I think that was Hone’s cue to finish up. Aroha was standing close to a small bar heater at the edge of the rehearsal space to keep warm. Teho, a muscular young woman dressed in hugging black leg shorts and a big sloppy grey t-shirt entered the rehearsal space. She had long black hair that she had rolled tightly in a top bun. Both Miria and Aroha also sported top buns that morning. Teho and Miria met at the side of the rehearsal room to discuss the ideas in the play that she wanted to be communicated though dance. The first concept was “restitution”, the second “sacrifice”, and the third was “love for family”. Miria then explained where the dance would be staged and went to get the set design drawings to show Teho. She returned with a sketch book and they both set about marking out a narrow catwalk on the floor. This is where Licia would perform the Kapa Rima. Teho then asked Aroha, “What are the emotions or feelings at the time and that

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come with it?” [When she dances]. Aroha replied that “She [Lucia] is confident, sharp and sparky. That the dance is a kind of “feel well” for Lucia. Teho took a moment. She adjusted her body and announced, “I need some music to stimulate my brain” and rushed over to her iPod. Her choice of song was melodic, a Cook Island love song sung by a man. Teho then turned to Aroha to begin the first lesson. Teho announces that “for the Kapa Rima everything flows. Cook Island feet are close together and bend at the knees. Never straighten the knees”. She then declared, “let’s do some technique.” Hone packed up his tools quickly left the room, but not before he wished them all a good morning of dance practice. As mentioned, Aroha had already danced the Kapa Rima and from her familiarity with Teho it seemed that Teho had taught Aroha previously. Teho began the rehearsal with what she called “a slow dance”. Teho and Aroha stood together in the middle of the room facing the mirrors with their knees bent slowly. Lifting one foot at a time, their hips lifting in unison. Teho gently coached, “From here your hips will naturally flow. Keep the upper body relaxed as you let it roll, let it roll.” Together their bodies slowly relaxed into the technique. Aroha asked if the feet should roll from the heal to the toes and then lift off the floor. Teho replied, “Not really, just up to the toe and then back”. Aroha and Teho watched themselves in the mirror as Miria followed along in the background. Teho seemed happy with Aroha’s progress and began to count in the hip movements, “5, 6, 7, and right, left, right, left.” Teho then decided to change the music to something more upbeat. Aroha took the opportunity to shed another layer of clothing. I notice that Hone had come back into the room quietly and was working on his phone in the background. A rhythmic drum sound suddenly roared out from the portable speaker filling the rehearsal room. I had heard the same beat and tone before. It sounded similar to the Torres Strait Islander slit drum. This sound however was of a Cook Island Pate. The beat was fast, really fast. Standing upright and still in front of the mirrored wall Aroha was to perform the Kapa Rima from memory. Miria would follow behind. Aroha began, first raising both her arms above the head. Her wrists moving backwards and forwards in a fluid motion. Slowly, her arms moved down the front of her body and extended forward from the shoulder like pushing something away from her body. Lowering the centre of her body her hips now swayed from side to side as she turned slowly on the spot. Teho instructed her to lower her centre of gravity though the knees. “It feels like I am pulling back” remarked Aroha. Teho replied, “Yes but what

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you want to do is that instead of pulling it back you want to pull it to the side and up into the hips.” In the background Hone tried not to look, but I caught him watching Miria practicing behind Aroha. Teho then suddenly picked up the pace. Aroha’s hips now moved fluidly from side to side. Her arms stretching up above her head reaching through the tip of the fingers. She then released her arms stopping at the shoulder. Still outstretched they folded at the elbows and from the of the body her hands and wrists moved in a graceful flowing motion. Arms lifted once more above the head and then back down to relax by the side of her body. After the first run through Teho informed Miria that she would like to workshop one more movement and that she would be “playing around and switching it up a bit”, and that Aroha just needed to follow along. The drums still played in the background. They both performed the previous routine again only this time Teho announced “Ok you are going to follow me to the right”. Holding her right arm up she moved her hips sideways across the room counting “1, 2, 3, 4.” Then in turning back to the centre of the room Teho instructs Aroha to swing her hips around in a circular motion on the spot fast. At the back of the room Miria began to laugh. They were having fun. When the music stopped Aroha took a short break. There were a few weeks of dance rehearsals scheduled. In the script, Lucia finally decides to perform the Kapa Rima and she wins the Pageant competition. For the theatre makers of Sunset Road and The Fox and The Freedom Fighters, performing dance was a means of articulating a particular connection to place and locality, it also situated the performers and play characters in a specific social context. For Aunty and her daughter enacting a previously prohibited practice together on stage would provide a type of healing and recovery of their personal stories whilst also offering an acknowledgement of a collective past. For Lucia, in Sunset Road, performing the Kapa Rima was initiating a conversation with her past, her present, and asserting a possible future that was all about renewing family and genealogical connections. Though their knowledge of the dances were limited, the Indigenous women identified the significance of performing or demonstrating these practices on stage. But what if the theatre makers were not Indigenous, as was the case with the 2014 production of The Unplugging? Would the body of performers in this rehearsal be employed in the same way as in the other two rehearsals? Would the bodies of the performers feel engaged in an embodied a sense of identity, connection, and relationality? Were the creative team of The Unplugging aiming to

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demonstrate through the body a particular experience, history, and or culture? Would the performing body be seen as a radical act, as a symbol of survival? Well, in many ways yes, and in many ways no. Of the three case studies The Unplugging was a most unusual project due to the casting of non-First Nations actors and the diverse cultural backgrounds of the creative team. Orphans or Mischief-Makers On the first Saturday morning of rehearsals for The Unplugging, it was −8 degrees Celsius outside (−17 with wind chill factor), the director Nina Aquino had just finished announcing that “movement was an essential part of the play.”17 This was an interesting statement given that there were no specific directions in the play text alluding to any dance or movement. There were only actions to describe the everyday goings on of the characters such as, ‘Bern comes in with a load of wood’,18 or ‘Bern is doing housework.’19 Aquino’s announcement did explain why she had appointed a movement coach, Clare Preuss, who was present in the rehearsal room from day one. Preuss, who identifies as Swiss Canadian, is widely known for her early career film roles in teen movies such as The Prince and Me and as Caroline Krafft in Mean Girls.20 Now an interdisciplinary artist, Preuss has collaborated with innovative theatre companies throughout Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and Uganda. At first, I thought Preuss was an unusual choice as movement director. One might have expected that a First Nations person be employed to take on the challenge of working with the non-Indigenous actors in the telling of a First Nations story. It has certainly been my experience in Australia that when dance and movement are applied in the telling of an Aboriginal story an Aboriginal choreographer is hired, or a person with cultural knowledge is consulted.21 This was certainly the case for the Sunset Road rehearsals. Aquino had worked with Preuss previously on a show called Singkill, a play written by Filipino playwright Catherine Hernand.22 There is an account of the Singkill rehearsal process published by Ric Knowles’ in ‘Performing Intercultural Memory in the Diasporic Present—A Case of Toronto’ (2009). In that article Knowles explains that Preuss works with ‘movement vocabularies’ that are associated and invested with the gestural vocabulary and physical embodiment of the play characters.23 Knowles also notes that Preuss mediates the mnemonic reserves of the cast’s embodied memory building a performance based on invented rituals,

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which Knowles later describes as a “model of contemporary, transformative, and interdisciplinary interculturalism”.24 Preuss’s choreographic method is not grounded in any one particular cultural form but is influenced by a diversity of cultural styles. Her process encourages the validation of ‘orphaned memories’. I was interested in how this practice might work in The Unplugging rehearsal context. Unfortunately, I had to wait and see. I was excited but nervous about the prospect of observing Preuss working with the actors in developing a sense of the characters and the play world of The Unplugging. For much of the first week of rehearsals, Preuss sat beside Aquino watching the director work with the actors on the opening scenes. That work mostly entailed discussions and insights on the meaning behind certain lines, actions, the environment, and the passage of time. Also present that first week sitting diligently at the back of the rehearsal room was the playwright Nolan, and dramaturg Knowles. Towards the end of the first week Aquino flagged that the movement workshops would take place in the mornings throughout the following week. On the Monday of the second week of rehearsals the stage manager AJ Laflamme announced that the full production team would not be needed until the afternoon from Wednesday onwards as only essential crew were needed in the room and only Aquino and Laflamme would be allowed to observe the movement workshops.25 I asked if I could document the workshops to which I was informed, nicely, “no” by the stage manager. Although I had managed to get myself inside the rehearsal room to observe and document the day-to-day activities of the cast and crew creating their production of The Unplugging, I now found myself consigned to the outside of the movement workshops. Although disappointed I had to respect the request and hope that what Preuss was developing in private would be revealed later on down the track. Until then, I could only notate movement offers made by Preuss during regular rehearsal times, which were mostly concerned with stage actions and exploring the physical and special relationships between The Unplugging characters. This was unfortunate because movement was looming as such a big part of the production. By the Friday of the second week Preuss explained to the open rehearsal that she wanted to “provide a safe space for the actors to explore movement”, and that there was a potential for the actors to feel “self-­ consciousness in front of other members of the production”.26 That afternoon Aquino announced to the cast that the movement elements that

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they had worked on with Preuss in the closed workshops would now be incorporated into the next day’s rehearsals. On arrival at rehearsal the next day Preuss was already warming up the cast. It was −21 degrees Celsius outside. The cast were about to rehearse scenes 3–5. Scene 3 was a transition scene with no dialogue. Knowles, from his position at the back of the room noted that this was the first time movement elements would be incorporated into a live performance of the play. He had seen the 2012 production with an all First Nations cast where light and sound were employed to denote key passages of time in the play and as a way to enhance the characters personal journeys.27 Although he did not talk further on this, Knowles, like me, seemed eager and excited by the prospect of watching the movement sequences. That day Preuss spoke to the cast and creative team on how movement ‘gestures’ would delineate between the three worlds in Nolan’s play. Preuss described the first world as the “everyday” that would be marked by a “gestural reality” or “movement elements in a scene”, and that these “gestures” would “invoke historical and cultural memory”. The second world would represent a connection to the metaphysical and be represented by “stylized movements”. Lastly, Preuss introduced the notion of “honey time”, where a series of slow movements would portray the body in the natural world, and represent a sense of time passing.28 I was curious, I wondered what or who’s historical cultural memories were going to be worked through and or towards? Were these memories those of the characters in the play, or were they those of the actors? It later became clear that Yvette had lead most of the cultural memory work in the closed movement workshops, which was also the kind of work that Nolan managed throughout most of The Unplugging rehearsals. I have chosen to highlight rehearsals of scene 3 entitled ‘New Year,’ and scene 5 entitled ‘Mukwa Geezis’ (Bear Moon). Both of these scenes are transitional, in that there is no dialogue to move the play forward. Instead, the movement of time is denoted by the cycle of the moon, and the activities of the characters. In the previous chapter I outlined each Moon Cycle in the play and here again to refresh the scenes intention. Scene 3: Time passes, moving from Little Spirit Moon, December, to Sprit Moon, January. The passage of time can be indicated by movement and light, by the characters building routines, by accumulating things, by building the space in which they live together.29

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In coming to an understanding of what moon cycle means to First Nations people I looked to the 13 Grandmother Moon Teachings from the Ontario Native Literacy Coalition.30 According to Ojibwe, Cree, and Mohawk beliefs, ‘Little Spirit Moon’ is a time of healing. That by “receiving both vision of the spirits and good health, one may walk with purest intentions, and share the most positive energy with families and friends for the good of all”.31 ‘Spirit Moon’ is described as “a time to honour the silence and realise our place within all of the great mystery’s creatures.”32 Preuss approach was to firstly work with the actors on building the ‘every day’ routines described in the scene 3, and on the accumulation of things to create the space Such activities to be explored in rehearsal included, making and tending to a fire, cooking, eating, sleeping and the care of weapons and utensils. At the start of the scene, the actors were mostly exploring these actions through gestures as there was no actual fire on stage, nor was there a kettle. Each actor did however have a real tea mug to work with. To denote the fire, a small circular red spotlight would be lit from above on to an imagined cabin floor. The actors took their positions standing over this light rubbing their hands—an everyday shared gesture, often humorously referred to by the cast as “fire acting”. The actors were curious as to which of their characters would have the knowledge on how to start a fire? As discussed earlier, the far north was a terrain that only a few would have a living knowledge of. After a short discussion the cast agreed that although Bern had guided the two women to the camp area, she had only ever travelled there during the summer months and never during the extreme winter conditions described in the play. Elena on the other hand had spent time as a child with her grandmother on similar country and it was she (in the play) who was slowly reconnecting to these experiences and the skills that she had learnt. In performing these seemingly mundane and simple activities the actors were also compelled to delve deeper into the histories and memories of their character’s past. After settling in to their new lodgings Elena goes out to set snares, and before long they both have food in their bellies, and they slowly find their strength again. There wasn’t a lot of confidence from the actors regarding the playing of these ‘gestures’ including the ‘fire acting’ and making cups of tea. But they broke for lunch, and on return moved on to rehearse scene 5.

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Scene 5: Time passes, moving from Spirit Moon, January, to Bear Moon, February. Again, the passage of time can be indicated by movement and light.33 Bear Moon, according to the 13 Grandmother teachings is for honouring the vision quest that began in the fall. “During this time, we discover how to see beyond reality and to communicate through energy rather than sound”. For scene 5 Preuss would work with the actors on what she described as “stylized movements”, actions that would assist in constructing a sense of influence from the spiritual and ancestral realms. The following is a short account of the afternoons rehearsal. In the middle of the rehearsal room, the actor playing Elena crouched over the imagined fire. She then stood up and slowly raised her arms reaching toward the sky. Her face taking on the form of some inner torment as she screamed with no sound emanating. Her body spun in motion as she travelled across the floor with arms outstretched, with eyes made wide like a Maori Haka. Her twirling motion like a whirling Mevlevi Ceremonial dance, articulating a revolution of movement. A leap towards change, like the revolving particles that spur life constantly on. But, like a dervish, Elena seemed to be spinning to signify a cycle or rotation of time. There was no cultural reference point for understanding what the actor was doing or what was going on. Although I do not know much about First Nations dance practices, some years ago I watched a video of a First Nations dancer who twirled. The woman who performed this dance wore an amazing colourful shawl and hopped in circles with her arms outstretched. I later learnt that the performance was called the ‘fancy shawl dance’. According to Autumn Whitefield-Madrano the ‘fancy shawl dance’ is less than a century old and one frequently performed at local Nation’s community competitive dance gatherings.34 In describing the form and technique of the dance Whitefield-­ Madrano explains that, “a competitor might spin heartily and repeatedly; she may whirl her way through her fellow dancers, resembling more an agile snake than a butterfly; she may kick, even leap, with her shawl extended above her head”. Whitefield-Madrano’s description through the use of metaphor might imply some cultural meaning or significance to the dance, however, no such reference was made in the article. Similarly, there was no discussion on the meaning attached to the twirling actions performed that day in rehearsal. Although Elena wore a plain brown shawl costume, which made her look more like a moth than a butterfly, the

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performance was neither a Sema Ceremony nor a Fancy Shawl dance. It was a performance seemingly constructed from various movement styles, which referenced and resonated such beliefs about spinning as an activity associated with transformation and change, and as a way to connect to, or have a dialogue with the spiritual realm, and, or cosmological worlds. While there was never any discussion on the particular meaning of the spinning movement in the open rehearsal, Preuss did however often talk about her movement/choreographic practice as a layering of cultural references.35 In this way Preuss imbued a sense of the dramatic and a prosthetic meaning to Nolan’s transition scenes. Throughout the weeks that followed I continued to document pieces of choreography that emerged during various runs of scenes and in moments where transitions were happening. Then on the Tuesday of the last week of rehearsals, during ‘production week,’ something shifted. The cast and crew had moved into the theatre space. It was an old converted drill hall with a proscenium arch stage, and velvet red seating for around two hundred people. On that day Nina asked me to observe the movement workshop. She wanted my feedback. I went back up to the rehearsal space at the rear of the theatre where Preuss greeted me. I felt welcomed. I considered that maybe I was to be rewarded for not being too pushy about documenting the movement workshops. My patience had paid off. In the room that afternoon were other members of the creative team, the sound designer Romeo Candido, the lighting designer Michelle Ramsay, Stage Manager Laflamme, the actors, and Preuss. As Preuss started going over the gestures worked on with the actors I came to understand the vocabulary of each movement sequence. Everything seemed to move so fast. The actors’ bodies were ready, their shared language of gesture complete. I barely had time to document what I heard and saw lagging behind like the new kid in class. I did however manage to sketch stick figures in my journal, which assisted with recounting the simple form of each gesture, and in reporting how these gestures were used in constructing a particular moment in the play. The first gesture Preuss worked on with the actors was called “heart arrow” also known as “fire arrow”. This movement required a strong arm extension away from the side of the body whilst the other arm bent across the chest like the pull of a bowstring. When complete the actors would hold this stance in a stationary position. The second gesture was “Moon Wash” or “Waterfall” This action required the actors to raise both arms parallel above their heads and then shift the arms across the top of the

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body. At the end of this sequence the actors covered their faces. The third movement gesture was called “Ghosts Away” Here one arm was extended and stretched out to the side of the body whilst the opposite hand was placed on the forehead. The actor Bradshaw described this position as “headache away”. The fourth gesture was identified as “Fire Bear”. Like hugging a tree, the actor stood in a strong lower body stance with bent knees with the head lowered. The next gesture “Hunger Heart” required that the arms cross the body touching the stomach as the head is turned to the left. After rehearsing the gestured activities everyone then packed up and moved back into the theatre where they readied to rehearse scene 5. This time, the movement would be performed by the actors playing Elena and Bern. The rehearsal then began with Bern moving from inside the cabin to the outside environment. She then stood upright and took the fire arrow position. This tableau was meant to represent Elena’s growing confidence in her surroundings and a feeling of being more aware of her spiritual journey. Returning to the cabin Bernadette falls asleep on the cabin floor. Meanwhile, Elena suddenly sat up as if awaking from a dream, yet still in a dreamlike state. With her chin pinned close to her chest her hands slowly raised into the air in Moon Wash. She moved effortlessly into Ghosts Away looking like she was confronting a vision that she did not want to acknowledge. Her arms then relaxed down to her side as her body moved into the Fire Bear position. She stood, strong, proud and centred. Here Elena invokes the spirit of Bear Moon to embrace her capacity to endure and to overcome. At the end of this movement sequence both Elena and Bern fall asleep on the cabin floor. When the Bear Moon sequence had finished the actor playing Bern looked up and remarked to Preuss and Aquino, “I hope I don’t look like the Disney Pocahontas”. She was referring to the Fire Arrow gesture.36 No one replied. There was only silence. Later that week Yvette returned to rehearsals and Preuss asked her if she saw any stereotypical movements or moments during a rehearsal run. Yvette replied that she liked the movement sequences and then commented, “Everyone is actively becoming”. For Yvette the movement sequences were doing the job of conveying a sense of the spiritual journeys of the First Nations characters in her play. In Yvette’s eyes, the characters were conveying the intention of the scene, and the objectives of her characters. By the last week of rehearsals the actors were coming to know, and embody a sense of a First Nations understanding of relationality to each other, to the natural world, and to the spirit realm.

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Reflection Whilst writing our stories down on paper becomes an act of inscription, it is through the repertoire of dance and movement that knowledge transfer occurs through the body, connecting theatre makers to past representations and present realities of being Indigenous. The immediacy of rehearsal made these gestures more personal, meaningful, and symbolic. When working with the body the theatre makers were not only creating fictional realities, they are imagining ‘being’ in a world. Through dance and movement the theatre makers were involved in connecting with wounds, losses, traumas, and memories carried by Indigenous bodies, whilst at the same time actively moving towards the restoration and celebration of the Indigenous body as a knowing subject. When my colleague Lily Shearer told a group of young Aboriginal women that through dance, we [Indigenous people] “celebrate our stories, creation stories and ways of being”, she was communicating a situated cultural standpoint. Through contemporary and reimagined dance and movement forms the theatre makers were reconstituting a sense of cultural memory and experiences, both real and imagined, in an embodied way. Lily’s dances were based on historical forms but reconfigured to fit into her contemporary world as she knew it and experienced it. All the while her body enacting new visions of a collective past. As mentioned, in participating in Lily’s workshop I was unable to transcend the everyday reality and context of my present circumstances. I did not connect with the landscapes, cultures, histories, and epistemologies of my ancestors. Instead, I felt only a deep yearning for these experiences. However, I did feel a relationality to all of the women who have danced through history, to all of the women in that room that day, and to a collective past. The reconfiguring of historical and contemporary Indigenous dance techniques, and various movement styles was applied to the rehearsal process as a way to assist the theatre makers in developing a shared gestural language to frame and discuss the various histories, heritage, experiences, knowledge, and understanding of the characters and their worlds that were envisaged by the playwrights. In each rehearsal however, the theatre makers had very specific objectives for including these practices. Aunty and her daughter were invested in repatriating their dance heritage, Miria had applied contemporary cultural forms to denote the heritage and locality of her characters, And Nolan and her movement director Preuss were guiding the non-Indigenous creatives and cast to discover Nolan’s

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understanding of her world as culturally known. Through dance and movement, the theatre makers were involved in developing a gestural language to frame and discuss the histories, heritage, experiences, knowledge and understanding of the worlds envisaged in the plays. For Aunty and her daughter this was an unspoken language shrouded in shame, with both sharing their understanding and very personal responses associated with the trauma, loss, and interruption of intergenerational knowledge transfer due to colonisation. In performing the Kapa Rima, Miria was conveying a sense of pride in and solidarity for her Cook Island heritage. Whilst Nolan aimed to convey to the actors an embodied sense of a First Nations perspective and understanding of the sacred world.37 In the last two chapters I have shown how Indigenous theatre makers employ various forms of communication, the spoken word, dance and movement to convey their cultural understanding of the world, and that of the imagined characters and worlds of their plays. These were major themes that emerged in each rehearsal context. In the following concluding chapter, I provide a brief overview of these key themes, followed by a discussion of the use of native languages in play texts, and some of the impacts of this study.

Notes 1. Curriculum Overview of Certificate III in Dance Practice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People. https://naisda.com.au/curriculum-­ overview. 2. The Muruwari, also spelt Murawari, Murawarri, Murrawarri and other variants, are a clan of people from the North-West of New South Wales at the boarder of southwestern Queensland. 3. The NSW Drama Unit workshops took place at the Australian Theatre for Young People in Sydney on the 23rd of April 2016. 4. The NSW Education drama and dance workshops took place from 22–30 March 2016 at the Australian Theatre for Young People rehearsal rooms. 5. The language that Lily used at the workshop was of the Dhurag Nation. It is a current belief that the Gadigal people do not belong to the Eora Nation, as ‘Eora in the local dialect of the original inhabitants of the Sydney Cove area means ‘people’. Dhurag people do not recognize Eora as a language group. 6. Ross Chambers. “Orphaned Memories, Foster-writing, Phantom Pain. The Fragments Affair.” In Nancy Miller and Jason Taugaw (eds). Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois Press, 2002). 92–111.

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7. Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead (Columbia University Press, 1996), xiii. 8. Dixon. Jumbunna lecture, 2005. 9. The Emu is the largest flightless bird, very common in Australia and worn by women and girls from south-eastern Australia. The skirts were made from many bundles of emu feathers tied together and then fastened onto vegetable fiber string belt. Some were decorated with red ochre. 10. Taken from the 2014 rehearsal script of Sunset Road. 11. Mervyn, McLean. Weavers of Song: Polynesian Music and Dance (University of Hawaii Press, 1999) Honolulu. 66. 12. Jean Mason. Ori, koni, ura, kapa? Cook Islands Dance, what is it? Cook Islands Sun. http://enjoycookislands.com/stories/ori-­koni-­ura-­kapa-­ cook-­islands-­dance-­what-­is-­it. 13. Local beauty pageants take place across New Zealand annually and winners go on to compete nationally and internationally. Miss Geyserland is a fictitious event. However there is a Miss Taupo pageant that takes place close to the where the play is set. The only New Zealander to go on win an international competition was Lorraine Elizabeth Downes who won Miss Universe in 1983 at St Louis Missouri USA. http://www.pageantsofnewzealand.co.nz/. 14. Taken from the 2014 rehearsal script of Sunset Road, p. 15. 15. Taken from the 2014 rehearsal script of Sunset Road, p. 16. 16. Te Hau Teho has been a recipient of a Pacific Dance New Zealand PDNZ residency. PDNZ fosters and encourages the development of the Pacific dance sector of New Zealand running dance workshops, conferences, community and professional events. 17. Noted in rehearsal document. Saturday 21st February 2015 9:40 am. 18. Nolan. The Unplugging, 17. 19. Ibid., 37. 20. Preuss played the role of Stacey in The Prince and Me (2004) and Caroline Krafft in Mean Girls (2004). 21. For example during the early 1990s it was renowned choreographer Michael Leslie who worked on many productions of Indigenous plays in Australia including Bran Nue Dae and Shark Island Storiess. Also known as the father of modern Aboriginal dance in Australia Leslie had trained as a young man under the esteemed American dance trainer Carol Johnston during the political heat of the 1970s land rights movement in Australia. He also spent seven seasons with the New York Based Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre. An internationally recognised choreographer and dancer Leslie now runs the Pilbara Performing Arts Program working with Aboriginal kids from the region in the performing arts. Leslie is a strong Aboriginal man with cultural knowledge who dances in contemporary contexts. Today there are plenty of first peoples dance practitioners like Leslie who work with theatre makers.

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22. Aquino was the director and Preuss was employed as the movement coach. Singkill is a story about Filipino women. Singkill is also a traditional Muslim dance and major archetype of Filipino identity. 23. Knowles, Ric. Performing Intercultural Memory in the Diasporic Present—A Case of Toronto. Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2009, 16–40, 25. 24. Knowles, 26. 25. Noted in rehearsal document Monday 23rd February 2015 9:30 am. 26. Noted in rehearsal document Friday 27th February 2015 9:30 am. 27. The 2012 production was presented at the Arts Club Revue Stage Vancouver in November. 28. Noted in rehearsal document Saturday 28th February 2015. 29. Nolan. The Unplugging, 16. 30. The 13 Grandmother Moon teachings. Ontario Native Literacy Coalition 2010. 31. Ontario Native Literacy Coalition, 9. 32. Ibid., 11. 33. Nolan (2014, 26). 34. Autumn Whitefield-Madrano. The Evolving Beauty of the Fancy Shawl Dance. Indian Country today. 2011 https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/ the-­e volving-­b eauty-­o f-­t he-­f ancy-­s hawl-­d ance-­w K17KgU8FUSu QlmXdIpmgA. 35. Noted in rehearsal document. Sunday 1st of March 2015 at 12:00 pm. 36. Ibid., 1:30 pm. 37. Casey. Telling Stories, 22.

CHAPTER 5

The Way We Make Theatre

I began this transnational study in 2013 when there was little conversation circulating within the academy on Indigenous research methodologies. At the time Moreton-Robinson had already published three books on Whiteness, Indigenous sovereignty, and race.1 Her publication on Indigenous methodologies was released in 2013. Around the same time in 2012 Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith had released her book on decolonising research methodologies. In Canada many First Nations artists and academics had already considered Indigenous knowledge as a methodology for undertaking research. Yet somehow, performance scholars were still looking toward the Western and European paradigms such as sociology, post-colonial, ethnography, and anthropology to frame investigations of Indigenous performance practices. It was only after writing the first few drafts of this book that I understood that this study had to embrace Indigenous methodologies in order to make sense of the worlds studied and to understand my position as a theatre maker and researcher undertaking Indigenous research. What I observed, and the practices and processes commented on in this study does not constitute a definition of Indigenous theatre. Instead I offer an Indigenous perspective of that practice. I describe particular ways of making theatre, that were observed, as being led by the Indigenous playwright’s own particular Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, and practices and processes, which were culturally informed. I recognise that this view is limited and partial, that this study privileges the Indigenous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L.-M. Syron, Rehearsal Practices of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82375-7_5

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voice and in doing so highlights the often indefinable instances of meaning making. This study also draws attention to the position of Indigenous theatre makers as knowing subjects, and shifts their role as research subjects to be studied, or part of a phenomenon being recorded, to collaborators sharing knowledge about their practice. In this final chapter I briefly outline some of the key findings of this study and open a discussion on the little discussed practice of inscribing native languages in play texts as this subject will be the next topic of investigation for my next research project. Lastly, I conclude by presenting some the legacy impacts of the research for the sector, the collaborators, and my own professional arts practice.

Key Findings My claim at the start of this book was that this study constitutes a new entry point to the investigation of contemporary Indigenous performance practice. This research offers a fresh insight into a practice from both inside and outside of that practice. I have sat inside two rehearsal rooms in three different countries documenting the day-to-day goings on of Indigenous theatre makers making theatre. In one case study I took on the role of director for the Indigenous production. I asked the questions, how might Indigenous research methodologies, specifically Indigenous woman’s standpoint theory, be applied to the study of contemporary Indigenous theatre making? Also, what could we learn about the role of the Indigenous woman playwright in the rehearsal process. I asked what new knowledge might be uncovered in regard to a common philosophical approaches to making theatre across three different Indigenous contexts. Would there be evidence of local Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing), ontologies (ways of being), and axiologies (ways of doing) reflected in and impacting on the theatre making process? If so, my goal as an Indigenous researcher was to honour and privilege these distinct practices. In undertaking this task I drew on a First Nations understanding of performance making as storytelling, and story as a methodology of knowledge transfer. In this way I emphasised the types of stories told in rehearsal and of the play texts and unpacked the knowledge held within these narratives. I also asked a question that many of my contemporaries regularly ask, what is Indigenous theatre? I argued that this is an unhelpful question in the context of a colonised country, people, and culture as there are so

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many levels of power at play in the making of a modern Indigenous story for the stage. Instead I asked, what makes a work Indigenous? To which I suggest there are a number of key elements, which I frame as ‘ways of theatre making’.2 Firstly Indigenous ownership of a story is central to what makes a play Indigenous. The right to tell that story in any way is the privilege owed to the owner of that story, and even though a story may belong to a community of people, or a collaboration of writers, an individual owns their part in that narrative. ‘The way’ requires that an Indigenous person be the primary creator with creative control over the processes and shape of production whether wholly or partly. Each artist is an individual in their own right with their own life trajectory and cultural reading of history and the present. Beyond a playwright’s subjective experiences, it is important to recognise that Indigenous peoples of the world are made up of a wide range of different communities, languages, and cultural variations.3 The second ‘way of making Indigenous theatre’ is to, where possible, have the playwright in the room during some of the rehearsal process. Alternatively, having an Indigenous dramaturge in the room would also be beneficial. Over three years of this study I observed Indigenous women playwrights in the rehearsal room all contributing to the theatre making process in a dramaturgical way guiding and influencing that process in a culturally informed way and practice. This process began on the very first day of each rehearsal. All three Indigenous playwrights performed a local welcome custom specific to their countries. Conducting ceremonial customs were performed at the start of each rehearsal signifying a spiritual and physical commitment to the work on many levels.4 In performing ceremonies, all actions were symbolic, with each playwright communicating a particular ‘way’ of working, whilst also actively involved in reclaiming the rehearsal space to engender a sense of sovereignty over that space and the theatre making process. Each of the playwrights would often refer to their plays as a legacy work. The purpose in writing and creating their stories for the stage was not necessarily seen by the playwrights as educating a broader non-Indigenous audience on the Indigenous experience, but was instead viewed as way to reconfigure their knowledge and experiences as Indigenous women through the play form. Throughout the rehearsal process each playwright would shift, expand and contract a ‘way’ of working through the practice and methodology of story sharing, and theatre was seen as a platform for knowledge transfer, specifically through the practice of story sharing in its various forms.

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Story sharing is a ‘way’ of making theatre. From the very beginning and continuing throughout the rehearsal process all of the Indigenous women playwrights were observed involved in weaving their real life stories with those of the imagined worlds of their plays in ways that situated their texts in the intricate landscapes of their own lives, cultures, histories, and epistemologies. Stories told in rehearsal were all socially situated, partial, and grounded in the subjectivities and experiences of the playwright’s everyday life. Common threads emerged out of these stories that were relational, made up from configurations of personal accounts that converged on the broader issues of family and community, loss and survival, and ways of knowing and understanding the world as culturally known. Various forms of story sharing practices were also observed in each rehearsal context. For example, elements of dance and movement were employed to assist with an embodied sense of knowing enhancing a corporeal awareness of relationality to family, place, and spirituality. The theatre makers were also observed actively involved in sharing their cultural affiliations with the other theatre makers, and enthusiastically connecting these affiliations with those of their play characters in a way that assisted with an understanding of a character’s particular way of knowing. In The Unplugging rehearsals various elements and cultural forms of movement were employed to assist the non-Indigenous actors with an embodied sense of a First Nations understanding of the celestial influences on the spiritual lives of Indigenous people and the play characters. In the Sunset Road rehearsals, the theatre makers were observed practicing a contemporary form of a displaced traditional dance practice, the Kappa Rima to allow for an actor’s embodied sense of place and relationship to Cook Island cultural and heritage. Similarly, in The Fox and the Freedom Fighters Aunty and her daughter performed an historical dance technique known as kicking up the dirt, allowing the theatre makers to explore a sense of connection to their heritage and people, whilst also highlighting the displacement of these connections. I now touch on a little discussed practice of Indigenous theatre making that requires further investigation. Many Indigenous stories are written in English with the inclusion of Indigenous language words, phrases and or local slang.5 This was certainly the case for all three women playwrights in this study. The rational for this practice is complex and varied. In this regard it is important to contextualise the different histories of Indigenous languages across the three colonised contexts. The following discussion provides a brief introduction of these histories and offers a rationale for the use of local language terms in inidgenous play texts.

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Contextualising Indigenous Languages In coming to an understanding of the place of native languages in colonised contexts it is important to firstly acknowledge that not all experiences of colonisation are the same, and that in each country Indigenous peoples were treated according to the specific needs and desires of each foreign incursion. In Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples In British Settler Colonies 1830–1910 an outline of this history provides a contextualisation of the associations between the British Empire settler colonies and local Indigenous peoples and their communities during the mid–late nineteenth century. Far from uniform, these practices were very distinct in their processes at various sites and times across the Empire.6 The authors note that, These associations would later become entrenched both in the legislative, administrative and legal systems of the colonies and in the constitutions and institutions of the independent nations they generated. They also came to inform and justify the common understandings that emerged within the settler populace about the different groups which inhabited the colony/nation and the various rights to which they were entitled.7

The level of rights afforded Indigenous peoples in colonized countries was closely associated with the status of language, and the subsequent lack of opportunities to contribute to the political discourse that defined their existence. For example, in Aotearoa the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi negotiated between Maori peoples and the British Crown has two texts, one written in English and the other in te reo Maori. Having a bi-lingual Treaty greatly assisted Māori peoples in later negotiating for the recognition of te reo Māori as an official language of New Zealand, which was achieved in 1987 with the introduction of the Maori Language Act. Whilst, First Nations communities in Turtle Island on the other hand were subject to various encounters with French and English settlers and military forays. At this time there were over seventy recorded native languages spoken across the Canadian territories. In defending their lands, First Nations peoples were pressured into alliances, treaties, and proclamations by subsequent authorities on native issues and legislative Acts. Today Canada has a Charter of Rights, which relates to all Canadian citizens. On his appointment as Canadian Prime Minister, Justine Trudeau and his government recently passed a law recognising only French and English as Canada’s official languages.8 This act effectively marginalising First

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Nations languages from any formal capacity or status. In Australia, the history of colonisation presents a very different history of that of Māori and First Nations peoples. According to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATISIS), prior to European invasion there were more than 250 Indigenous languages, including 800 dialectal varieties, spoken on the continent.9 Sadly there were no historical transactions negotiated between local communities and colonial settlers. Instead, our communities lived under the legal presumption of Terra Nullius, a concept of an empty land and the subsequent absence of any legal rights. Although overruled in 1993 by the Mabo versus the Crown high court trial, Terra Nullius effectively permitted the Crown to occupy and own the territories of which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had lived on for over sixty thousand years. The history of Australia is therefore strewn with a litany of unrecorded practices disrupting and prohibiting the speaking of local dialects. Today there are only thirteen Indigenous Australian languages that have enough young people speaking them to sustain the language into the future. It is a sobering thought. In more recent times, different state and territory governments have introduced various language policies and Acts in Australia that address the decline of native languages and speakers, such as the 2009 National Indigenous language Policy. While most discussions about language and its preservation focus on extinction, education, local dictionaries, and anthropological recordings, there has been little interest in the modern phenomenon of inscribing local languages in play texts, and the recent of plays written entirely in local native dialects. This practice raises many questions about this practice such as, is theatre a platform for language revitalisation? In what way is language written, learnt, and discussed in a rehearsal context? How might the inclusion of language in a play text shift the theatre making experience? In consideration of these questions, I offer the following examples to highlight the scope and range of conditions and processes that are under consideration by Indigenous theatre makers from Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island in relation to the way language is negotiated in the rehearsal context. The first example is from The Unplugging rehearsals where the non-First Nations theatre makers were working through some of the Algonquin language terms in Nolan’s play text. I also provide an account of producing a new language play in development at the 2019 Yellamundie Festival in Sydney to show some of the challenges associated with working with a language text in the rehearsal context.10 Lastly, I discuss the rise of presentations of te reo Māori plays in Aotearoa.

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How Language Is Written, Learnt, and Discussed in Rehearsal Contexts It was during rehearsals for 2014 production of The Unplugging that I began to note the times when the theatre makers were involved in exploring the First Nations language terms in Nolan’s play text. Remembering that for this production the actors were not First Nations, the following account describes this activity as it unfolded in rehearsal highlighting the ways in which Nolan as playwright engaged with these conversations. During the first week of rehearsals for The Unplugging the question of language was raised several times by the actors.11 Most of the time these discussions were around attempting to define a setting such as the type of cabin that the characters would have settled into. Was it a cabin, a shelter, or a yurt? Nolan describes the cabin in her play as a ‘log house’. When questioned about the term, Nolan seemed uneasy in her response, “I am still learning about language dialects in plays”. At the time I only noted her reply but later on reflection it seemed that Nolan was articulating a need or want to use more Algonquian words in her play, and that this was something she was unsure about. Was it an issue of confidence? Nolan had sprinkled language terms throughout her play, so perhaps her concern was about the placement of terms. These questions were never really reconciled. The first time language is spoken in The Unplugging is in scene 4 where Elena is cooking something over the fire. Bern enters and cries, “Oh my god, what is that smell? ” To which Elena replies, “that is pebeepebobon-­ rabbit stew”.12 Later when they are both about eat the stew Bern asks Elena, “is that your language?” To which Elena replies, “I don’t know, I don’t think so. Because in the language, a rabbit is—waaboos-and soup would be-saaboo-waaboosaaboo … which doesn’t sound a lot like pebeepebobon.”13 Elena is confused, as a child the stew was called pebeepebobon, but she understands that this term is grammatically incorrect. Perhaps this discussion is a reflection by the playwright on the loss of knowledge around language use. In the play, there is no specific identification of language. We do however know that it is Algonquin, Nolan’s family language. The only time during rehearsal when Nolan spoke about language was in reference to a “language tree”, which for Nolan reflected a process based on “Aboriginal principles” that connects people.14 So, if for Nolan, language reflects Indigenous principles, then it could be said that the use of language in her play was to articulate her ontology and epistemology as being relational. Although at times seemingly uncertain about the process

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and practice of using language in her play, it was Nolan, as the playwright who was able to translate the Algonquin words into English, she also assisted with the pronunciation, and led many of the conversations regarding the meaning of each term. This practice supported the actors in coming to speak and understand each language term. It was also the case that first time playwright and language speaker Donna McLaren also lead a similar process for the all Indigenous cast for rehearsals of her new play Dhinawan Burraalga Yaraay. Written in the playwright’s local Gamilaraay language and in Australian English. McLaren had submitted her play to the Yellamundie Festival to be developed and presented as a reading at the festival.15 This was the first time that the Indigenous company was to present a language play. Although much thought went into the structure of the rehearsals, working with the playwright, there were some unexpected challenges that emerged that threatened to completely holt the development process. On receiving the play the company decided employ another language speaker and a cultural advisor from the Gamilaraay nation to assist the actors, the workshop director, and the playwright.16 It was also decided that where possible the actors should also identify as, or have genealogical ties to the Gamilaraay nation. This approach was unprecedented in the eight year history of the festival. In aiming for a ‘culturally led’ rehearsal process, the company didn’t realise that this approach would create tensions in the room for the language speaker and cultural advisor who were struggling with the structure and process of play development, which for them was not as important than ensuring the proper pronunciation of the Gamilaraay language and structure. Although all of the actors were of Gamilaraay heritage, many had not grown up on Gamilaraay county and most struggled with the accent and tone of their ancestral language. They only had only two weeks to learn and speak Gamilaraay fluently. The other issue was that the two language speakers spoke different dialects of Gamilaraay. One speaker was form the north and the other was from the south of the Gamilaraay nation. As mentioned throughout this study, for many Indigenous peoples language is a reflection of country and our relationality to that country. The rehearsal room became a tense environment for everyone as each speaker argued with the other on the ‘proper’ meanings and pronunciation of language terms. The result was unfortunate. The contracted language consultant left the process. This was not a good outcome for the company, the festival, the actors, or for the language speaker. The

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Dhinawan Burraalga Yaraa example highlights some of the potential challenges when working with a disrupted or displaced language in a rehearsal context. For although both language speakers were of the same nation, and from different parts of that nation, they were not from a time when their nation, clan, and community languages were shared through organised gatherings and ceremonies. The Dhinawan Burraalga Yaraa example also begs the question: how might the rehearsal process have been better managed? After all, Moogahlin is an Indigenous company, it has an artistic process led by Indigenous principles, and the entire Yellamundie creative team were Indigenous. There are instances in Australia where language has been applied in developing and rehearsing a new text. Most of these ventures are translation projects taking English texts from the English Cannon such as Shakespeare plays and sonnets, or Brecht, and translating them into local dialects. The case of writing new plays in language and on country is quite a new phenomenon in Australia, and it is a practice that is growing in interest from local playwrights and storytellers. In Aotearoa and in Turtle island full language plays are gaining attention and being programmed and presented at Indigenous festivals. Recently, as part of the 2018 Kia Mau Festival in Wellington I witnessed the acclaimed te reo Maori production of He Kura E Huna Ana by Hohepa Waitoa.17 This play is set in two distinct time periods—one ancestral (Te ao turoa) and one contemporary (Te ao marama)—He Kura E Huna Ana. Based on the story of the pounamu (green stone) in Arahura (a river located on the West Coast of New Zealand) the play was written and performed entirely in te reo Maori. This production was ground-­ breaking for Maori theatre in Aotearoa. I saw the production and although I cannot speak Maori I was still able to be enthralled by the production and understand its significance to language revitalisation. In turtle Island Canada at the 2019 Moshkamo Festival an entire series of language plays were programmed as part of the inaugural season at the National Arts Centre Ontario. According to the Arts centre web site, “Mòshkamo embodies the art of appearing out of water and invites others to bear witness to its arrival”.18 Only Indigenous performers would appear on NAC stages speaking languages that have never before found a home on the national stage, including Coast Salish, Kalaallisut, Cree, Gitxsan, Nlaka’pamux’stn, and Wolastoqiyik.19 I wondered then whether the artists working on these plays and presentations encountered similar challenges to those we experienced in Australia? I also wondered in what way did they approach working with language in the rehearsal context. Did they also

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seek guidance from Elders or community for the pronunciation and comprehension of language terms. Were there specific values or principles underpinning the transfer of language between theatre makers in the rehearsal process? These are questions that require further consideration especially if we are to understand and embrace a way of theatre making that is inclusive of, and celebrates Indigenous languages. A topic of further study. In coming to the last section of this final chapter I provide a discussion on some of the sector impacts, and the artistic and research opportunities that have emerged from the relationships formed during the course of the study. Having stayed in each city for the duration of rehearsals, up to four weeks in each country, the connections formed during this time have lasted well beyond the context of this study and each of the collaborators agreed that it would be important to ‘do something with each other’ in the near future.

Impacts of Study After spending time in the worlds of Maori and First Nations Canadian theatre makers, and in following an Indigenous research methodology of reciprocity, I felt it necessary to follow up on conversations had with the theatre makers about potential collaborations between the theatre companies Tawata, NEPA and Moogahlin Performing Arts. At the time as a Co-Artistic Director of Moogahlin I was involved in presenting the 2015 Yellamundie National First Peoples Playwriting Festival, which I thought would be a perfect platform for an initial gathering. So, I invited Hone and Miria from Tawata, and Ryan Cunningham (then Artistic Director) from NEPA to come to Australia to take part in a discussion on how the three companies might confer on a model of meaningful cultural arts exchange. To this end I organised an international panel on making First Peoples’ performance in the twenty-first century as part of the festival program. As guests of the festival, the artists would also have access to observe the Yellamundie workshop process, attend the presentation of play readings, and participate in a day-long closed roundtable meeting between the three companies. At that roundtable meeting each company talked about their approach to theatre-making in their local contexts, the types of works they develop, and their creative and cultural visions for their own development festivals.

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At the time Tawata were producing the Matariki Development Festival, now called Breaking Ground, which is a development and presentational festival for local Maori and Pacifica work. Tawata also produced the Pūtahi Festival which was remodelled in 2015 as the Matariki Festival and later became the Kia Mau Festival. Kia Mau is now a bi-annual two-­ week festival in July that incorporates a development component called Breaking Ground where there are artists panels and play productions of new Maori and international First Nations work. Similarly, NEPA present the Weesageechak Begins to Dance Festival annually, and it is the oldest and longest running development platform of the three festivals. Weesageechack has been part of NEPA’s programming for over thirty years and is a celebration of new First Nations playwrights from Canada and across the world. Although Tawata and NEPA had worked together in the past, this was the first time that such an exchange would be held by an Australian Indigenous arts company. Each company agreed that day to pursue drafting a set of actions that would underpin the international cultural arts exchange initiative. These actions included: taking time in building the relationships between the three companies, a commitment to supporting opportunities for continued international artistic and cultural exchange, developing and applying a new model of cultural arts exchange for rehearsing and presenting international First Nations work, and for each company to source local funding towards these aims. The process and practice of developing and implementing a new model of cultural arts exchange would be based on First Peoples principles, and recognise the cultural and artistic sovereignty of each company, whilst acknowledging each other’s specific process of relationship building. The following example describes this process in application.

A Model of Cultural Arts Exchange It is not uncommon for First Nation artists to be invited to attend and/or perform at international First Nation festivals. In reframing this activity as hosting and presenting international creatives, the members of the t transcultural and transnational initiative suggested that we each bring a local script to each other’s festivals to be developed and presented by local theatre makers and to a local audience. Hone named this process “our people with your culture”. Through this model, we aimed to create a deep process of cultural arts exchange between First Nations playwrights, actors, directors, dramaturges and audiences. For the playwrights involved the

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importance of place would ultimately come to define their experience, as being out of place exposed them to a strangeness that might not otherwise be experienced at home. The aim in taking playwrights out of their local contexts was to get them to participate in cultural articulations about their identity, story, and arts practice, and to consider locating their stories and practice in a global context. In other words, how might local Indigenous stories, themes, and experiences transfer to international audiences? As part of the initiative in November 2017 members of Moogahlin artistic team travelled to Turtle Island with a first-time playwright Henrietta Baird and her new play The Weekend to participate at Weesageechak.20 Developed as part of the 2017 Yellamundie Festival, The Weekend, set on Gadigal land in Redfern Sydney, is an intimate story based on the real life experiences of the playwright. The play blends laughter, love and loss, and a family’s search for a new beginning. The story centres on Lara, a young Aboriginal mum with two boys. She is working interstate as a dancer when she receives a distress call from her youngest son. Their father hasn’t been seen for days and they are out of food. Lara has the weekend to travel back to Sydney and track him down. Her journey introduces her to various women characters who live in the housing commission high rise apartments of Redfern. The Weekend is a comment on the intergenerational effects of colonisation from a woman’s perspective highlighting issues of domestic violence, substance abuse, poverty, and economic disadvantage. For the Weesageechak rehearsal and reading of Henrietta’s play, NEPA had assigned Ojibway and Mohawk performance maker Penny Couchie as dramaturge, and Black Foot performer Cherish Blood. The playwright Baird, and Co-Artistic Directors of Moogahlin Lily Shearer and I were present throughout the rehearsal process. On the first day of rehearsals there was no welcome or smudging performed to prepare the room as the rehearsals took place at the Anishnaabe Health Centre situated behind NEPA’s office. We were, effectively, working at a local healing site. So, the day began with all creatives sitting around a table where we introduced ourselves, a process that included identifying our cultural heritage and clan/tribe affiliations. The playwright then talked about her story and afterwards all listened to a reading of the play script read by Cherish Blood. Baird had not included any language in the play text yet the discussions that followed the reading centred on the challenges of tackling the pronunciation of particular terms. We talked about the process as not being about mimicking an Aboriginal or Australian accent but to engage in a

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dialogue about the multiple meanings and contextualisation of Baird’s choice of words. Cherish had become fixated on Baird’s pronunciation of ‘fuck’, which is used liberally throughout her script. “Faark!” Cherish yelled, and again “Faark!”. This she did back and forth with Baird until she felt happy with her own phonic response. Later that day there was a long conversation about the word ‘bum pack’. Where were these discussion going? It was Lily who quietly mentioned to me that there was a “deep exchange” going on. I questioned her further as there didn’t seem to be that much depth of conversation going on to me. It was just to people exchanging words. Shearer replied: “Think of the way Cherish and Penny are talking about what we call a ‘bum pack’. They call it a fanny pack, yes, but their interpretation and discussion of this item isn’t about the name or utility of the object, but on how it might represent something else, like a dilly bag is to us”. It was the dramaturge who lead the conversation spoke about the bum bag, which for her represented a medicine pouch. In applying this metaphor the dramaturge was searching for a way to understand the play character from a first nations perspective. This was not a cultural overlay but a reinterpretation of the script from a First Nations perspective. The following examples from Baird’s script show how this understanding may have come about. While fleeing the police across the housing estate car parks Ronnie asked Lara to hold her bum bag. Lara has no idea what is in the bum bag until much later when she suspects the worst. Lara: What’s in this fuckin bum bag Ronnie? Ronnie: Oh, you heard that? alright, so maybe the bag has got my emergency joints and maybe a few sticks, possibly a couple of shards [needles], aaanndd the last of my hammer [heroin] in it. You never know when you might need your tools.21 Later in the play Lara confronts Ronnie on the contents of the bum bag. Lara: I thought the bum bag was just here to keep you comfortable. Ronnie: Yarndi [Marijuana] does keep me comfortable. it helps me deal with the pain Lara: The other drugs are my tools. They keep me safe. Everyone wants something and I’ve got it. It’s the best way I know how to help. I’m just trying to help everyone. I’m trying to help you.22

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When discussing the above moment in the play Penny and Cherish talked about how in a similar way a medicine pouch may contain sacred materials and objects that symbolise a sense of personal well-being and tribal identity. That traditionally these bags were worn as part of everyday clothing. They discussed the importance of the bum bag to Ronnie who is described in the play as ‘holding it close to her chest’.23 They also spoke about issues of healing, of the trauma of women’s experiences, of how we carry those experiences with us in our everyday lives, and of how people deal with the toxicity of modern life. There was also a conversation about medicine as material, spiritual, and physical. In this example, the word “bum bag”, which was substituted with “fanny pack” for the reading to a local Canadian audience, retained the same function in performance (as a character’s prop) but through the dramaturgical process a cultural significance was applied to that object. Through this exchange process, at the intersection between cultures, language became unfixed. Subsequently multiple and simultaneous meanings emerged forming a new collective experience where specific knowledges, beliefs, and values were (re)located. This experience was seen as highly innovative transnational and cross-­cultural practice by all of the theatre makers involved. Each year the tri-nations initiative continues to be redefined broadening and deepening the levels of exchange between Aboriginal, Maori, and First Nations theatre makers and audiences. At each point of contact, we learn something new about each other’s artistic practice, the local culture, and our ways of knowing the world by critically engaging with our sense of identities and positions in the world. In developing the tri-nations project vision we were also all deeply involved in creating a global sense of community as Indigenous theatre makers. Here relationality was key. Understanding that relationships take time to build, and are formed from a knowledge of and a respect for local protocols, and in some cases the local language. There was a growing understanding at the intersection of research and practice something new can always be discovered and learnt about a practice. Also that in each encounter, or through future conversations, new connections can be made that further our understanding of our distinctive experiences, and that there is always the potential for mutual advancement and opportunity to be realised. Murrumboo (Gathang), Meegwich (Ojibwa), Tēnā koutou (Maori).

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Notes 1. Aileen Moreton-Robertson. Whiteness, Epistemologies and Indigenous Representation. In Aileen Moreton-Robertson Whitening Race: Essays in social and cultural criticism. Aboriginal Studies Press 2004. Canberra. 75–88. 2. Similar to the Yanyuwa people of the Northern Territory who view traditional performance practices as a ‘way’ to know, perform, and embody knowledge. John Bradley and Elizabeth Mackinlay. “Singing the land, singing the family: Song, place and spirituality amongst the Yanyuwa” in Christine Logan and Fiona Richards (eds), The Soundscapes of Australia: Music, Place and Spirituality (Ashgate, 2007). Farnham United Kingdom, 75–92. 3. Maryrose Casey. “Ngapartji Ngapartji: Telling Aboriginal Australian Stories” in Performance Interventions edit. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 122–139. 123. 4. Casey. Telling Stories, 21. 5. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins. Post-colonial drama: theory, practice, politics (London: Routledge, 1996). 170. 6. Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips, Shurlee Swan. Equal Subjects. Unequal Rights: Indigenous People in British Settler Colonies, 1830s–1910 (Manchester University Press, 2007), 9. 7. Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips, Shurlee Swan. 2007, 9. 8. The introduction of the First Official Languages Act of Canada in 1969. 9. https://aiatsis.gov.au/living-­languages. 10. Since 2013 Yellamundie has been a biannual event produced by Moogahlin Performing Arts—an event I co-founded and participate in as a rehearsal director, for the expressions of interest for submission Yellamundie receives over twenty-three scripts from around the country and selects six each year for further development and public play readings. 11. The first week of The Unplugging rehearsals went from Tuesday 17th February-Saturday Sunday 22nd February 2015. 12. Nolan. The Unplugging, 17. 13. Nolan. The Unplugging, 22. 14. As noted in rehearsal documentation. Wednesday February 18th 2015 at 2:20 pm. 15. Gamilaraay, also spelt Kamilaroi, Kamillaroi are an Aboriginal Australian people whose nation lands extend from the mid-north west of the New South Wales boarder and into southern Queensland. Gamilaraay people belong to one of the four largest Indigenous nations in Australia. 16. The assessment committee comprised of the then company co-Artistic Directors Lily Shearer, Fred Copperwaite and myself.

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17. He Kura E Huna was produced by Taki Rua and directed by Nancy Brunning. First performed at Bats Theatre Wellington. 18. The National Arts Centre https://nac-­cna.ca/en/Indigenoustheatre/ moshkamo. 19. Ibid. 20. Baird is a Kuku/Yalnji/Yidinji woman, a dancer, and performer. 21. Henrietta Baird. The Weekend. Unpublished script 2017. 33. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 12.

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