NORTHERN TOUCH
Stratford production led by festival’s first Inuit director, an Indigenous cast,
For most actors in Canada, an email offering work from the Stratford Festival would be something to click open immediately.
Johnny Issaluk almost didn’t read his.
The Inuit actor was on a movie set last autumn when the message came in. “I don’t read emails when they’re too long. I was sitting beside my movie wife, and I was about to delete it . . . She was like, ‘What?!’ She took it from me, started reading it. ‘Are you f---ing kidding me? You’re invited to Stratford!’”
He bursts out laughing, as do Ujarneq Fleischer — another of the Inuit performers in Stratford’s world premiere production of The Breathing Hole — and Lisa Cromarty, a voice coach intern at the festival who is Ojibwe, Cree and Scottish from Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island.
“I didn’t realize what it was all about, what they did here,” says Issaluk.
The three artists are at Stratford in a historic year: the first time the festival is presenting a commissioned play focusing on Indigenous histories with a largely Indigenous cast, and the first time it’s hired an Inuit director, Reneltta Arluk.
If Stratford wasn’t exactly on Issaluk’s radar, Fleischer’s cultural distance is of a different order: he is from Greenland and never imagined coming to Canada before he was asked to join the 2017 ensemble. He and his girlfriend struggle with homesickness, but they’re enjoying the place: “For us it’s a big city!” (Stratford has more than 31,000 residents; the total population of Greenland is 56,000).
Cromarty, who is in her second Stratford season and is voice coach to The Breathing Hole’s child actors, says she’s also often homesick but — though Inuit culture is “totally different” from her own — “Johnny reminds me of people back home . . . his humour, his manner.” For Cromarty, “hearing the laughter in the room, the jokes and that kind of thing” helps her feel comfortable.
The Breathing Hole is written by Colleen Murphy, whose Governor General’s Award-winning play Pig Girl draws on the real-life story of Robert Pickton’s serial murders of Aboriginal women.
Its 2013 premiere in Edmonton was controversial because there were no Indigenous people in the cast; Murphy is not herself Indigenous.
Arluk performed in Pig Girl’s next Canadian production, at Montreal’s Imago Theatre in 2016, an experience she calls “incredible” and which allowed her to build a relationship with Murphy.
Stratford approached Arluk about directing The Breathing Hole when it was in a first-draft stage; she read the script and saw “where I could really help.”
The narrative is set in the Arctic and spans 500 years in the life of a polar bear; the combination of subject matters it treats — Inuit knowledge, the Franklin Expedition and climate change — “nailed my interests,” says Arluk.
Casting was complicated. While the play’s first act involves eight Inuit characters, Arluk says she “knew right off the bat” she would not fill those roles with Inuit actors.
Working with Stratford’s casting director, Beth Russell, she cast three Inuit (Miali Buscemi, Fleischer and Issaluk) and then filled the remaining roles “with great First Nations actors”: Jimmy Blais, Yolanda Bonnell, Jani Lauzon, Nick Nahwegahbow and Gordon Patrick White. (The cast also includes 11 adult nonIndigenous actors and four children.)
Arluk faced questions about her casting choices during a workshop of the play last year with the Qaggiavuut Society, which advocates for the performing arts in Nunavut. She pointed to the daunting prospect of nine months away from home and to a dearth of trained Inuit actors: “I said it’s not your fault, it’s not their fault; it’s a fault. Why would you train more Inuit actors to do theatre if they are not going to be able to work in Canada?”
Arluk, who takes up the position of director of Indigenous arts at the Banff Centre in November, is approaching The Breathing Hole as an “opportunity.”
“I believe some of our actors will be asked back. I believe Stratford will continue to engage in Indigenous stories, perhaps even more of an Indigenous story in that it’s Indigenous-inspired. I think there’s a lot of dialogue that’s going in that direction.”
For his part, Issaluk says his experiences at this place he barely knew of before have led to an epiphany.
“I’m in the best of the best for theatre, learning all these things I’d not have learned. I’m very privileged to be here.” The Breathing Hole is at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre from July 30 to Sept. 22. See stratfordfestival.ca for information. Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Carly Maga.