Echoes from the past come to life
First Nations project based on old recordings
The Talking Stick Festival, which explores aboriginal culture through the arts, was founded by performance artist Margo Kane in 1992.
The Full Circle First Nations Performance artistic managing director has worked tirelessly to present a wide range of creative disciplines in specialized settings and there is no question the careers of many First Nations artists have benefitted from it.
Governor General award-winning actor and playwright Kevin Loring (Where The Blood Mixes) appeared at the inaugural Talking Stick cabaret.
“I trained in acting at Studio 58 and then did the very first cabaret before there even was a festival, performing my solo show which developed into my Governor General’s Award-winning play,” Loring says. “And I also signed up for the very first Full Circle First Nations training program which was so important as it was completely different education from traditional theatre school. It really helped to explore new modalities of developing and telling our stories, which has been vital to my work since.”
Loring’s company, Savage Society, brings the community-based theatre project titled the Battle of the Birds to the 15th annual Talking Stick Festival. Based on the Nlaka’pamux/ Thompson tribal story of a community confronting the issue of domestic violence, it is set in the mythical time and incorporates historical source materials.
“The Battle of the Birds was started about three years ago as part of a larger work called Songs of The Land,” he says, “which is a community engagement project begun from century-old wax cylinder recordings of our people done by a Scottish ethnographer (James Teit) who married into our tribe. He was fluent in our language, learned all the customs and was a secretary to the government who tirelessly advocated for Aboriginal rights. The Battle of the Birds was one of the ancient stories he documented that we wanted to bring back into a format that could be told by the community for the community.”
Working with a team of artists in Lytton, Loring and a group of artists worked with about 30 local people to put together the show. Among those giving support were noted artists Sam Bob, Ron Dean Harris, Renae Morriseau, Sandy Scofield, Kieran Wilson and Bronwyn Bowlby.
“And, in a nutshell, we’re bringing about half that cast into the city to showcase the story at the festival.”
Following up on his award-winning first work was daunting. But the author had so many acting gigs, he certainly wasn’t stressing. From TV series such as Da Vinci’s Inquest, Arctic Air and APTN’s Health Nutz and the feature Pathfinder to a 2012 National Arts Centre all-First Nations production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, he kept busy. The second draft of the film script for Where The Blood Mixes is just being finished.
“I’m always working, which is great,” he says. “But these smaller community projects have been a real love of mine since I started on them in 2010. Ultimately, I not only want to revitalize our stories, but also to tell the story of James Teit in a script I’m building right now that gives it a contextualized placement in the longer history.”
He emphasizes how important that early Full Circle training was to the sort of work in which he’s involved in today. Bringing 30-plus community members out every day for months in the baking heat of the Lytton summer still amazes him and keeps him inspired to continue developing his craft, along this line of storytelling.