REMEMBRANCES - a new project for Birmingham 2022

 

Remembrances in development 
Georgia Rose Thompson, Avatâra Ayuso & Amy Hollinshead

It was more than two years ago that Avatâra Ayuso started to think about the need for the Birmingham 2022 Festival to acknowledge Indigenous peoples in its programming and its approach to performance.  Avatâra had been part of ORIGINS 2019, with her piece NO WOMAN'S LAND, in which she collaborated with Inuk Elder Naulaq LeDrew, so she has a strong awareness of the political complexities that the Commonwealth holds for Indigenous people, and the importance of welcome in their cultures.  As an artist based in the Midlands, she was acutely conscious that the conventional sub-Olympics torch-lighting would not be adequate to encapsulate the shifting relationships between the City that had supplied the arms that sustained an Empire and the Indigenous athletes and artists who would be visiting this year.  When #BlackLivesMatter highlighted the historical roots of current inequalities and racial tensions, the need seemed more urgent still. And so we approached the Birmingham 2022 Festival for a commission.  

There is a significant Canadian investment in the Festival's commissioning programme, and so it was to First Nations Canadian partners that we turned. As often happens, this pragmatic choice became creatively and politically potent.  b.solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE had also been part of ORIGINS 2019, creating the wonderful WESTWAY SOLSTICE with the North Kensington community, and presenting THE NDN WAY at the Playground Theatre, so he seemed an obvious choice. What we hadn't realised was just how acute and immediate the challenge of welcoming First Nations Canadian artists would become with the discovery of the mass graves at the Residential Schools in Kamloops and elsewhere across Canada. These atrocities of colonial policy drove home the question we have placed at the heart of REMEMBRANCES:

"Who are we now to welcome you?"

b.solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE & participants in WESTWAY SOLSTICE

We have been working on the understanding that we occupy different physical and cultural spaces: that the performance itself will represent our dialogue, and so, in a very real sense, our processes need to be distinct. Avatâra and I have been exploring British identities and responses to our colonial past, working with a very diverse group of dancers, and taking cues from a First Nations Canadian poet, Matthew James Weigel. b.solomon has been creating his work in his own country: what he knows of our work is that it will attempt to offer a nuanced and considered space of welcome, with an awareness of past wrongs. We do not know how he will respond. He may accept or reject that offer - certainly he will shift its meaning in some way.  

REMEMBRANCES will be performed in the open air in the centre of Birmingham on June 25th and 26th.  We'll also film it for streaming. We don't know exactly what's going to happen: but the dance will be extraordinary, and it will be a performance like no other. 

Totem in Glasgow, at COP26

 Guest blog by Ailsa Clark

Totem Latamat at the Minga Indigena Fire Ceremony.  The Hidden Gardens, Glasgow.

As TOTEM LATAMAT makes its journey towards Glasgow for Cop26, we are asking people who encounter it along the way to write guest pieces about their response.  Ailsa Clark is the founder of Inspiralba, which delivers social enterprise development and support across Argyll and Bute.  

What an incredible and humbling experience to be with Totem Latamat and these kind souls who travelled from their Indigenous homelands to connect their spirits with ours, sending a collective prayer for a better future for humanity, ecology, our planet and beyond.

As if through the serendipity of a higher wisdom, Totem Latamat was in the very place that Indigenous leaders from all corners of the world had chosen to create a collective prayer for Pachamama and Pachapapa. And so it came to be that I, a wee lassie from Argyll, now in my more mature years, was there to join my own indigenous roots with all of their collective might in the most powerful and profound ceremony of this time in Glasgow. Our connections across continents run deep across our soils and rock and through our sea beds, touching every living thing, like the mycelium of the forest with the wisdom of the plants.

I journey from my home in ‘Campbell’ town - renamed/stolen (Ceann Loch Chille Chiarain) as a ‘royal’ seal of approval to the Campbells for their support in a colonialism learned then exported. James VI and I, who made various endeavours during his reign to improve the condition of the Highlands, erected Campbeltown as a Royal burgh, and encouraged the settling of people from the lowland districts. I think we call that cultural genocide. I pass my family home at Furnace en route to the Indigenous ceremony. Seeing the fumes from the quarry above the fish farm hatchery on the shore reminds me of how very far we are from climate care, with humanity and ecology overshadowed by corporate greed.

Then Inveraray: always a stark wee reminder of land ownership and feudalism, which still deeply affects the psyche across Argyll and the islands. Land stolen, gifted, bought and sold. More recently a return to community ownership has been supported across Scotland, with inspired places like Gigha and Ulva: but this remains very much a drop in the ocean with the vast majority of the land still owned by wealthy external interests.

I travel the last leg of the journey with my younger colleague: a dynamic force of nature with strong Argyll roots who has come back to work in her own community, and her friend who through kindness agreed to drive and offered us space to stay.  Arriving at The Hidden Gardens the calm of the space and sense of community is instantly apparent. I meet a friend who is there to film the events of the day. Sadly the mainstream media will likely dumb down the messages, but if just one glimmer of light gets through, that may spark an interest. We also meet a phenomenal group of women when we get to the Totem. They, like us, are in awe at the energy and beauty of Totem Latamat. 

We leave messages of hope on ribbons as we circumnavigate the garden space, then enjoy the colour and vibrancy of a vast textile creation brought by the Indigenous leaders. As we continue round we visit the medicinal garden, then come to a space waiting on the fire ceremony.

We wait and enjoy the sense of togetherness as more and more people arrive to share the ceremony. We meet Graham Harvey, a man with a wealth of wisdom on Indigenous culture, and he shares his insight with humility in an unassuming and modest way. Graham has journeyed part of the way with Totem Latamat and introduces us to colleagues from Border Crossings who have been instrumental in bringing this significant symbol of hope and shared connection on its journey from Mexico to our shores.

The ceremony unfolds. The collective wisdom, passion and focus of these Indigenous leaders  can be felt, as they call on the spirits to assist at this momentous moment in shifting the energy from evil and greed to love and care for all things. They invite us all to join the ceremony: our western culture of roping off the ceremonial area must be baffling for our visitors! Some of us are distracted by the desire to capture images, and the shaman asks us to set aside our cameras as the most sacred moment approaches. With greater focus we add all our energy to the ceremony, which builds in volume and connectedness.  The fire is sparked and we are all encouraged to add fuel, with a collective intention for peace and compassion so intense it resonates within and beyond. It's an experience that I am privileged to hold now as part of myself, and to connect with my own cultural roots, thanks to the kindness of these elders.

I have had the great privilege of traveling and working with Indigenous peoples in Australasia, Asia and the Americas; and now, I realise, in my own community also. I have become aware of the shared burden of colonialism.  I have always come home to Argyll, Earra-Ghàidheal, the border area of the Gaels, land and sea connecting Scotland and Ireland. I retrace my ancestral roots with folk in both these lands: migrants, refugees, Indigenous people forced to leave their homes.

Our great great great great great grand parents were cleared from their land. Half-starved and flea-bitten from Ireland they arrived by boat to start a new life on these shores, shunned for being different (like the refugees that come across the channel).  That misery and despair, shame and disconnection permeates a huge amount of the Scottish psyche. There’s us Irish migrants, and those cleared from their rural lands to make space for sheep. I think that experience of trauma, that feeling of shame and self-loathing are carried forward generation to generation, not in a way you would directly recognise, but in the self-destructive ways we live our lives. We have some of the highest addiction rates in Western Europe, and that’s only what’s reported. Life expectancy is very low. It’s a pretty dire picture.  But we as a generation have an opportunity to heal ourselves and to heal our planet, so that we don’t carry forward these wounds to the next generations. In order to do that, we need to talk about our feelings, our fears, and to explore our ancestral roots.

My sense of place and of the need for collective healing has been building over recent weeks, with support from friends at Heal Scotland and with Ariane, my younger colleague. We aim to bring back to our community a shared insight and a connection with our lands and waters, informed by the strength and wisdom of Indigenous elders, accelerated through our experience with Totem Latamat and the fire ceremony. 

I receive a gift from Professor Graham Harvey (the modest and wise) - an ancient piece of yew. As we prepare to leave, we make a promise to reconnect. Later, as we share food to celebrate the birthday of Ariane, I am honoured to hand on this yew pendant - to share the gift.  I realise the importance of us working together, the strength of our young along with the wisdom of elders, the nurturing of our mothers, the feminine wisdom of Pachamama along with the masculine energy of Pachapapa, and collective leadership of our communities as a whole.

Festivals and Healing

Remembering Pocahontas

It was very sad that we had to cancel PASIFIKA.  It would have been the second ORIGINS event to be held at Emslie Horniman's Pleasance, after the amazing Voladores da Papantla and Grupo Sotz'il in 2015.  Those performances and ceremonies had created a real bond between the Festival and the very vibrant communities of North Kensington - a bond that we were building on in this year's celebration of Pacific cultures.  But then Grenfell Tower happened - and the Council, I suppose rightly, felt that they couldn't do anything "fun" in the area.  It might look like fiddling as Rome burned.

At the same time, the Festival's presence might have helped build some bridges and heal some wounds.  It may, of course, be too soon - we should probably be content to wait for 2019 before we return to the area, at which time we can work with the community to do something affirmative.  There were many who felt the Ariana Grande commemorative concert in Manchester came too soon after the event - and that was in a place where the community had been united by the tragedy.  In North Kensington, there is great anger.

For all that - there is a genuine role for Festivals in healing wounds and building bridges.  On Monday, Marcia Langton talked about this aspect of indigenous festivals in Australia as part of her ORIGINS Lecture - and last week we saw it in action at our REMEMBERING POCAHONTAS event at Syon House.  The visit of Pocahontas to the London home of the Percy family was a full 400 years ago, of course, and was a diplomatic mission, not a catastrophic inferno.  But the arrival of three Native American women to commemorate a Native American woman was still a highly significant moment, precisely because they have been so shut out from history. As Graham Harvey said at our AFTERNOON OF TALKS, the Pocahontas 400 events so far have concentrated not on where she lived but where she died, not on her indigenous but her Christian identity.  A ceremony of smudge, drum and dance felt like a redressing of the balance, an invitation to bring previously excluded voices to the centre.

I hope we will be able to go back to North Kensington soon, and to offer a contribution to that community's healing.

Sierra Tasi Baker, Gabe Hughes, Stephanie Pratt