Présence Autochtone

El Regreso

I've been in Montréal for a few days, at the Festival Présence Autochtone, or First People's Festival, run by my Innu friend André Dudemaine.  I've known André by email for some time - he wrote the piece on Alanis Obomsawin for the very first Origins programme book - and met him properly at Planet IndigenUs in Toronto in 2012.   He's very kindly invited me to his Festival both last year and this.  It's always incredibly helpful to see how other indigenous festivals operate - how they make their meaning felt in public space.

Public space seems to have been the big issue for André this year.  Although this is the 24th annual festival, it has been a struggle to get it properly funded - Canada, like so much of the world, is cutting back its public sector and shifting towards a "market" model, which of course is pretty hopeless for a festival designed to highlight the presence of a minority in the face of an over-arching cultural diet of blandness and mass-produced monotony.  As André put it in his email inviting me over: "It was like a western but with a happy ending: the Indians won  :)."  Aside of funding, public space is also a thematic preoccupation of the festival, which after all proclaims "présence" in its very title.  In Canada, it's all too easy to forget that the indigenous people are even there - particularly as the "rez" system remains so significant here (and the festival combines its Montréal presence with programming on the Mohawk reservation of Kahnawake).  The festival takes over the central Place des Festivals with an installation, concerts, traditional dance, a parade, information tents, food stalls, and a fun piece of street theatre based on a traditional story of the sun being put out and restored, with a clear lineage from the Bread and Puppet Theatre.  

Street theatre - the sun

This is the "fun" side of the festival - and it's very effective, particularly in bringing a younger generation of First Nations musicians into the public arena.  On Saturday night, when I arrived, Beatrice Deer was playing in the Place des Festivals.  She looked out at the audience and commented that there were more people there than lived in her home village in Nunavik - population 370.  The audiences in general seem much larger than they were last year - apparently as a result of a big social media campaign.  The mainstream press in Montréal has given the festival very limited coverage for 24 years - but now the new media are allowing different channels of communication to open up, and young Canadians seem genuinely to be embracing the indigenous stories of the country.

The other key focus of this festival is indigenous film - and the scope here is global rather than simply Canadian.  André has strong links all over the world, particularly in the Americas - but his programme also ranged as far as Tibet, with a fascinating documentary film about spiritual practice, A Gesar Bard's Tale.  A personal highlight was a feature from Venezuela, called El Regreso, in which a young indigenous girl becomes separated from her tribe as a result of a paramilitary attack, and somehow survives in the city.  There are echoes of Rabbit-Proof Fence, not least in the amazing central performance by a child - but this is also a very gritty urban drama.  Insurgentes from Bolivia is essentially a dramatised chronicle of the nation's history in costume-drama style - apart from a few moments of pure magical realism, when the world's first indigenous President, Evo Morales, himself appears in the film - at one point sitting in a cable car above La Paz, passing the heroes of historical struggles as they go the other way.  

Some of the Canadian films I saw were quite troubling, especially in the light of André's difficulties in getting the festival supported this year.  Maïna is a film about Innu and Inuit before the colonial period - and lays claim to authenticity because it uses indigenous actors and languages, even though the main narrative is a voice-over by the central character in the main language of the audience (which last night was French).  The effect, of course, is to distance the indigenous people, not to make them closer, and to compound the exoticism which is already present in the story and the style of filming, with all the familiar Hollywood tropes (wise Elders who die early in the film, children lost to their tribe, wise women uttering obliquely, love "across cultures", Inuit rubbing noses, fighting off polar bears....).  It's clearly made with an eye to the mainstream, and it compromises the indigenous cultures very drastically in the process.  The Healing Winds is a much more sincere piece of work - a portrayal of the traumas resulting from the Residential Schools - but again I felt a bit uneasy, particularly as the film concentrates so much on psychotherapy, seemingly passing the responsibility for dealing with the trauma onto the survivors, without really engaging with the larger political context, which is where true responsibility lies.  As with the Truth commissions, you can't help feeling that there is a failure to engage the bigger picture.  

The best Canadian films I saw were shorts - an evening commemorating the tenth anniversary of the wonderful Wapikoni initiative, which facilitates film-making by young people from indigenous communities.  One young man who spoke at the event explained that he had been "doing nothing", and had never been off the rez, until the programme enabled him to make his first film, which has done well at international festivals, and has led to him getting a university place and making more films.  The great thing about this is that it isn't simply a social development programme - the films themselves are very good.  One or two, for example Kevin Papatie's We Are, are quite superb.  My one niggling concern is why Kevin is still making films via this programme, when he should be seen as a major talent in artistic / activist video: we screened his powerful short The Amendment in the very first Origins, as long ago as 2009. 

Présence Autochtone

Last year, at Planet IndigenUs, I was lucky enough to meet André Dudemaine, an Innu man from Montréal, and director of the Festival Présence Autochtone there.  We'd actually known of one another and corresponded for longer - André wrote a piece on Alanis Obomsawin for our first Origins Festival programme - but meeting in person is always a big step forward....  and our discussions in Toronto led to my being invited to André's festival last week.

Unlike either Origins or Planet IndigenUs, the Montréal festival focuses primarily on film, which happened to be very useful to me, as we're coming to the end of programming Origins 2013, and the film programme is now the last bit of the jigsaw.  It meant that there were some serious experts on indigenous film around - I was able to spend time with Jason Ryle, who programmes ImagineNATIVE, and Elizabeth Weatherford, who heads the film section at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York.  It's one thing to get your own impression of a film at a screening - it's something else to discuss it with people who have that depth of knowledge.  They also proved the ideal companions to sample one of the Festival's other innovations - indigenous gastronomy....  The six-course tasting menu convinced me that food is not only central to First Nations culture, but is also an art form in its own right.  I've been thinking about ways of bringing food to the centre of our own festival -  and this approach helped the thinking!

The trip was also a chance to renew our relationship with Canada's extraordinary National Film Board: an organisation which has been leading the way in film for years.  I discovered on this trip that they developed synchronised sound and IMAX technology...  But what is really important about the NFB is its democratic function.  It gives a solid base for remarkable film-makers like Alanis - and allows them to be publicly funded in order to criticise the government and the society.  That, Ms. Miller, is what public funding of culture should be all about.

Tewanee Joseph

I was at the Canadian High Commission last night, to hear a talk by Tewanee Joseph. Tewanee heads up the Four First Nations groups who are hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. This does seem to be a genuine embracing of the Aboriginal people and culture of Canada by the IOC - they really are the hosts, their protocols are really being respected, and there are real economic initiatives which are allowing them to generate a legacy for the Aboriginal communities. Hopefully the 2012 team will learn a bit from this achievement.

This morning, our new intern, Annika Magnberg, started in the office. She's from Sweden, and at the moment she's wrestling with how to turn three files into a single .pdf to send as a funding application. What a way to begin.

Good news from New Zealand - Creative NZ have invited me to the International Festival in March, and the British Council in NZ have agreed to fund the flight. This will be a terrific opportunity for Origins. What's more, I'll be doing some workshops with Taki Rua while I'm out there. Very exciting.

Great press for Origins

Five days into the Origins Festival, and the press is buzzing with the excitement of this extraordinary programme.

In today's Guardian, Lyn Gardner reviews Strange Resting Places at Soho Theatre:
"The feast plays a central part in Maori culture, and it does too in this charming three-hander which tells the stories of the 28th Maori Battalion who fought in Italy during the second world war. It was clearly an army that marched on its stomach even more than most..... A little show with a big heart. It introduces personal tales into the weave of history and makes connections across thousands of miles and many generations.... Strange Resting Places takes the lost stories of small people caught up in war, and magnifies their tragedies with respect and a smile."

In The Times, Sam Marlowe says of the same production:
"It exerts considerable charm... Leo Gene Peters's production has a cartoonish vivacity... some lovely lucid moments of emotional connection, conveyed in dialogue, zany clowning and music that embraces Italian folk tunes and the sung traditional Maori waiata, as well as hints of big band jazz in on the wings of American fighter pilots."

And Jay Griffiths has written a Comment piece in today's Guardian about the importance of the Festival as a whole:
"Opening with the crazy thunder of Maori performers, parts of the festival are wryly amusing, including the satirical docucomedy Qallunaat – Why White People Are Funny, an Inuit reversal of the anthropological gaze..... In its very programming, it reveals what art itself can mean for indigenous people as something inextricably tied to healing, ecological balance and spirituality."

Exciting times....

Pete Postlethwaite

We've found an Elder of the British Theatre to welcome the artists to London at the start of Origins: Pete Postlethwaite. He's an ideal choice, really - very clearly indigenous to England, and very much in the mould of the Aboriginal "uncle". In fact, he tells me when I phone him to talk it through, Pete was given the title "uncle" when he did something similar to welcome some Australian Aboriginal performers to LIFT last summer. Great that he's already got some sense of what this task is. That's probably why he said "yes" so quickly to what is, after all, rather a strange request!

First Nations people set a very high store by ceremony and protocol. That's probably why their performances are so wonderful - they are used to performing their lives on a daily basis. They would find it very odd not to be given a ritualised greeting on their arrival here; just as Chinese people believe in taking you to restaurants, and Indian people invite you into their homes. For the First Nations, the key thing is that an Elder shows you their hospitality.

It's reassuring that Pete - who is, after all, not THAT old - has no objections to being regarded as "an Elder", but embraces the idea very warmly. "Uncle", he tells me, "is not a title that they bestow lightly". And I can hear him glowing slightly with a tinge of pride.

www.originsfestival.com

In case you hadn't guessed from the title, I'd like you to look at the website for the Festival, which the amazing Sam from Phuture Design has created (he's also re-designing our whole site as I type this). The site lists everything which is happening during those two weeks in early May, and very exciting it is too! Four plays, twenty-four films, a workshop, lots of panels, a lecture from Alanis Obomsawin and a whole programme of learning and participation. Plus there's going to be a wonderful opening ceremony on May 4th at the Scoop at More London - with Ngati Ranana performing a traditional Maori welcoming, and others responding in their own traditional ways.

If you think all this takes a lot of organising, you're right. I've hardly stopped since I got back from China, to be frank. Just finished the contracts - and realised I'd forgotten the Appendices. Also writing to the tax people to request reductions in line with the overseas performers' allowances, editing the programme, checking the venue brochures.... you name it. Luckily there's a great team working on this with me - Terry Adams on the marketing, Nancy Poole PR and Jon Hare as Production Manager. Plus huge thanks to Paul Glen at Canada House who designed the branding for us. They are all earning their keep! Yesterday I sent out the e-flyer to our mailing list - so it's all up and live now. Exciting times....

And a Happy New Year....

Just before Christmas, Penny, Seema and I drove up to Manchester for lunch with Chris Honer and his General Manager Adrian at the Library Theatre. It's a lovely, very comforting space, in the basement of the magnificent City Library. Chris has been very excited by the DVDs of the Trilogy so far, and wants to co-produce the whole thing in early 2010. This means that the trajectory of 2009 is mapped out in terms of preparing it: we workshop in Shanghai in February, followed by a period of dramaturgy with Brian; then we do the first version of Re-Orientations as a work-in-progress presentation at Goldsmiths in the summer, prior to getting the whole thing ready for 2010. I think that's a good way to time it - we can think a lot and not panic too much.

Christmas took me all over the place, including to Aberystwyth, where I managed to squeeze in a swift and fascinating meeting with Jeremy Turner, who runs Arad Goch there. With all my work on First Nations theatre and languages, it's as well to remember there are people doing indigenous theatre right here in Britain, and fighting the corner for minority languages. Jeremy will be in rehearsals when Origins happens in May - but is keen to come down for the middle weekend, and to talk on a panel about theatre and the survival of minority / indigenous languages and cultures.

The Guardian was nice enough to print my books of the year on Saturday, so I won't repeat them here! But it's been an exciting year for watching theatre and film too, especially at the wonderful Barbican, where I saw the amazingly contemporary German Hedda, the justly famous Black Watch, and Yael Farber's brilliant South African re-working of the Oresteia in the light of the truth and Reconciliation Commission, Molora. Elsewhere, I loved Yours Abundantly from Zimbabwe at the Oval House for its directness and its honesty, and That Night Follows Day at the Gothenborg Festival, for the same reasons. In film, I've had a great year watching First Nations films which we'll be screening in Origins in a few months: especially Tkaronto, The Waimate Conspiracy and Kanehsatake – 270 years of Resistance. Elsewhere, I loved Garin Nugruho's Under the Tree - which was also very valuable for the Trilogy!

See you in 2009.