Have a laugh with Tomson Highway
“My favourite sound in the world is human laughter,” he says
Onstage Saturday at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre Studio
Tomson Highway is best known as an award-winning playwright, novelist and essayist with an international profile. His writing has earned him several honorary degrees, a National Aboriginal Achievement Award, and membership in the order of Canada. Maclean’s magazine even named him one of the 100 most important people in Canadian history. But his first love is music. “My first ambition in life was to be a concert pianist,” says Highway, who performs a solo show Saturday at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre that combines reading, storytelling and some original piano compositions.
Highway, who was born near the Nunavut-Manitoba border to Cree parents, vividly remembers the first time he set eyes on a piano. It was at the Guy Hill residential school in northern Manitoba, a place he attended from age six to 15 before going on to high school in Winnipeg.
“There was this piano at the boarding school in this room kind of locked up and hidden away,” Highway, 65, says from his home in Gatineau, Que. “We weren’t really allowed to touch it. But I used to sneak in there and started teaching myself because I couldn’t resist it.
“There was a nun who taught there who noticed I was interested. She had about 10 students and took me on as an 11th student. I learned very f ast and worked very hard. I was obsessed with it. It was a very positive experience and I loved it, it changed my life. Music is the key to happiness, the key to having a fantastic life.”
Highway went on to study music and literature at both the University of Manitoba and the University of Western Ontario.
He set aside his musical ambitions, however, to do social work on reserves and in urban centres across Ontario. That experience led him to write a series of plays, chronicling life in Canada’s communities, most notably “The Rez Sisters” (1986) and “Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing” (1989), the first Canadian play to gain an extended run at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre.
Music, however, never left him. He wrote it into his plays and composed his own instrumental work. Not quite classical or jazz, he calls it “Cree Cabaret.”
When he plays in front of audience, he says, his main ambition is to make people enjoy themselves.
“I have to warn you,” he says. “My favourite sound in the world is human laughter. I will do whatever it takes to hear it and I will hear it as much as I possibly can. As I get older, I realize I have more and more trouble being serious.”
It’s true. Highway’s conversation seems to flow from one joyous laugh to another. Always upbeat, his glass always more than half full, he even asks if you’ve heard any new jokes he can tell his grandchildren.
And he refuses to look back on his own residential school experience as anything but positive. It is after all, the place where he first learned how to play piano.
“There is only so much time left in our lives and when I’m asked about the residential school experience my answer has to be, ‘I honestly don’t have time to think about it,’” Highway says. “There are so many beautiful books to read, so much beautiful music to listen to, so many beautiful words to write, so much laughter to be engaged in, so many people to love, that’s how I think. That’s all I have time for.”