Aboriginal Music in Contemporary by Anna Hoefnagels

Author:Anna Hoefnagels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2012-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

14

Musical Form as Theatrical Form in Native Canadian Stage Plays: Moving through the Third Space

KLISALA HARRISON

In Canada, stage plays written by Aboriginals developed along a musical trajectory after Tomson Highway (Cree) became a renowned First Nations playwright in the mid-1980s. Highway trained as a classical pianist in England1 and fused music styles of opera, serialism, blues, and Cree lullabies with characters from Greek and Eastern Woodlands Aboriginal myth. Subsequently, eastern Canadian playwright Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway)2 evolved blues structure as theatre structure, and Daniel David Moses (Delaware/Tuscarora) adapted forms of minstrelsy to contemporary theatre about Saskatchewan. Marie Humber Clements (Métis) in British Columbia borrowed operatic form, and an extensive list of Native Canadian playwrights and theatre groups based plays on traditional Aboriginal music and ritual forms and functions: Floyd Favel Starr, Margo Kane, Maria Campbell, Lisa C. Ravensbergen, Injun’Nuity Theatre Company, Tunooniq Theatre, and the Igloolik Dance and Drama Group, among many others.

This chapter is the first survey of music in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit theatre throughout Canada. I document several overarching trends in the uses that Native Canadian playwrights have made of diverse Native and non-Native musical genres and sonic structures as bases for theatre forms. My focus is stage plays penned partly or solely by Native Canadians, in English, from 1986 to 2007. These Native Canadian plays are primarily performed for intercultural Canadian audiences yet, importantly, are staged in Aboriginal communities. Here, I am interested in how the authors, producers, and performers of the musical stage plays have evoked instances of cultural and social marginalization by drawing attention to differences between Native and non-Native expressions, histories, and relationships. I highlight (re)makings and (re)readings of relevant culturally and socially engaged meanings that evolve as musical genres and structures are adopted in Aboriginal Canadian theatre.

My thinking is inspired by Homi Bhabha’s ideas about the third space and a “third area.” Bhabha articulated his third area idea in an interview on the visual art work of Brian Jungen (Dane-zaa/Swiss Canadian). The notion names a space of social interpretation that may emerge when different ideas that are culturally iconic and rooted in distinct meaning systems interact with one another in a human expression or object so as to engage power relations of social, ethnical, and cultural difference (Bhabha in Jungen 2006, 15–16). His related third space idea, in its most classic sense, focuses on active social negotiating of such difference and power around a specific structure of symbolization – for example, a book or a performance – that occurs within one cultural group but in ways that engage different cultures abutting on one another (Bhabha in Rutherford 1990, Bhabha 1994). I also am interested in other sorts of intercultural negotiations – the juxtaposition of cultural ideas and the creating of hybrid expressions, for example – that are at play as Aboriginal Canadian theatre adapts musical forms and structures.

This chapter is informed by fieldwork in Toronto, Ontario, from 2000 to 2002 on stage plays produced by Native Earth Performing Arts and the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, by archival research at the University of Guelph’s L.

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