From a painful past, a look ahead
Ask playwright and director Yvette Nolan and dancer, actor and director Michael Greyeyes how long their latest collaboration, the dance opera Bearing, has been in the works and the short answer is about three years.
But the longer, more complicated answer is that its creation has happened slowly throughout their lives; over decades, over generations. In fact, they were born with it.
“Both of us are kids of residentialschool parents and it finds itself into everything we do because that’s where we come from. That’s who we are,” Nolan said from the rehearsal room, as the cast of Bearing prepared for its world premiere at the Luminato Festival on Thursday.
Residential schools — in which Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed in government-operated institutions to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian culture — and the trauma they created have always been present in the work of Nolan’s and Greyeyes’ company Signal Theatre.
Both of Greyeyes’ parents, who were of Plains Cree descent from the Muskeg Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan, were placed in residential schools. Nolan’s Algonquin mother met and married Nolan’s father, an Irish math teacher, at a residential school.
Now Signal Theatre is presenting a more explicit exploration of the issue in Bearing, the most ambitious production yet for the small company, featuring an orchestra of 22, six dancers, three actors and soprano Marion Newman.
“It’s such a big story and it needs a big form. And opera is the biggest form,” Nolan said, explaining that Bearing breaks down into three acts: J.S. Bach’s “Jesu, meine Freude”; Claude Vivier’s “Wo bist du Licht!” and a piece commissioned for the work, “Sojourn” by Spy DénomméWelch and Catherine Magowan.
A group of dancers representing modern-day Canadians take on various roles to re-enact the residential-school experience, and then emerge from the experience to move on with the Indigenous characters with shared knowledge and understanding.
“It’s abstracted, it’s a different form. We have to keep telling this story in different forms so everybody gets it,” Nolan said.
Residential schools have already been the fodder for several large cultural events and productions leading up to Canada’s sesquicentennial: the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Going Home Star; Secret Path, the Gord Downie and Jeff Lemire mul- timedia production about Chanie Wenjack; and, most recently, the National Arts Centre/Urban Ink musical Children of God.
Nolan remembers her experience watching Going Home Star in particular, not because of how it moved her personally but how it drew tears from the well-dressed audience member near her.
“She saw something she had never seen before or it got to her in a way it hadn’t before. So this spoke to a ballet-goer in a way that did not speak to me. So be it! We all have to be in the conversation,” she said.
These productions “are all incredibly important because this part of history has been purposefully obscured,” Greyeyes said. “But we’ve decided to contribute another angle on the conversation. We are not particularly interested in historicizing it. We believe that the aftermath of Indian residential schools plays out in our lives every day.
“It’s much more difficult for a contemporary audience to watch what’s happening in the present. It makes them complicit,” he added. “That’s where the problems are, that’s where society can actually effect change. We cannot change the past. We can, however, affect the future by acting in the present.”
Nolan and Greyeyes did not prepare Bearing with any major Canadian anniversary in mind (“I wasn’t even aware that Canada was heading into a 150 celebration until early last year,” Greyeyes said), but both are pleased about the new attention that Canada 150 has sparked to Indigenous artists and issues, including their spot in Luminato.
“We’ve made progress with this little company. We exist and we make work, and we’re not sorry about that. And now we’re part of Luminato. That’s progress, right?” Nolan said.
“Even the fact that we’re having this interview right now is an indicator that things are shifting,” Greyeyes said, adding that the recent announcement of Kevin Loring as the National Arts Centre’s first artistic director of Indigenous theatre is groundbreaking globally.
“We have been involved in these conversations for a long, long time and we will remain activists. But it’s gratifying to also know that the national consciousness is opening,” he said. The NAC appointment “was the result of years of lobbying and activism. We’ll never take our foot off the gas.” Bearing is at the Canadian Opera Company’s Joey & Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre, 227 Front St. E., from June 22 to 24. See luminatofestival.com for information. Carly Maga is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Karen Fricker.