Rehearsal Practices Of Indigenous Women Theatre Makers

This transnational and transcultural study intimately investigates the theatre making practices of Indigenous women playwrights from Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island. It offers a new perspective in Performance Studies employing an Indigenous standpoint, specifically an Indigenous woman’s standpoint to privilege the practices and knowledges of Maori, First Nations, and Aboriginal women playwrights. Written in the style of ethnographic narrative the author affords the reader a ringside seat in providing personal insights on the process of negotiating access to rehearsals in each specific cultural context, detailed descriptions of each rehearsal location, and describing the visceral experiences of observing Indigenous theatre makers from inside the rehearsal room. The Indigenous scholar and theatre maker draws on Rehearsal Studies as an approach to documenting the day-to-day working practices of Indigenous theatre makers and considers an Indigenous Standpoint as a valid framework for investigating contemporary Indigenous theatre practices in a colonised context.

This introduction to the staging of genders and sexualities across world theatre sets out a broad view of the subject by featuring plays and performance artists that shifted the conversation in their cultural, social, and historical moments. Designed for weekly use in theatre studies, dramatic literature, or gender and performance studies courses, these ten milestones highlight women and writers of the global majority, supporting and amplifying voices that are key to the field and some that have typically been overlooked. From Paula Vogel, Split Britches, and Young Jean Lee to Werewere Liking, Mahesh Dattani, Yvette Nolan, and more, the chapters place artists’ key works into conversation with one another, structurally offering an intersectional perspective on staging genders and sexualities. Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political, and artistic development of foundational subject areas.

Despite a recent increase in the productivity and popularity of Indigenous playwrights in Canada, most critical and academic attention has been devoted to the work of male dramatists, leaving female writers on the margins. In Indigenous Women’s Theatre in Canada, Sarah MacKenzie addresses this critical gap by focusing on plays by Indigenous women written and produced in the socio-cultural milieux of twentieth and twenty-first century Canada. Closely analyzing dramatic texts by Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan, MacKenzie explores representations of gendered colonialist violence in order to determine the varying ways in which these representations are employed subversively and informatively by Indigenous women. These plays provide an avenue for individual and potential cultural healing by deconstructing some of the harmful ideological work performed by colonial misrepresentations of Indigeneity and demonstrate the strength and persistence of Indigenous women, offering a space in which decolonial futurisms can be envisioned. In this unique work, MacKenzie suggests that colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence against Indigenous women. Most significantly, however, she argues that resistant representations in Indigenous women’s dramatic writing and production work in direct opposition to such representational and manifest violence.

This foundational study offers an accessible introduction to Native American and First Nations theatre by drawing on critical Indigenous and dramaturgical frameworks. It is the first major survey book to introduce Native artists, plays, and theatres within their cultural, aesthetic, spiritual, and socio-political contexts. Native American and First Nations theatre weaves the spiritual and aesthetic traditions of Native cultures into diverse, dynamic, contemporary plays that enact Indigenous human rights through the plays' visionary styles of dramaturgy and performance. The book begins by introducing readers to historical and cultural contexts helpful for reading Native American and First Nations drama, followed by an overview of Indigenous plays and theatre artists from across the century. Finally, it points forward to the ways in which Native American and First Nations theatre artists are continuing to create works that advocate for human rights through transformative Native performance practices. Addressing the complexities of this dynamic field, this volume offers critical grounding in the historical development of Indigenous theatre in North America, while analysing key Native plays and performance traditions from the mainland United States and Canada. In surveying Native theatre from the late 19th century until today, the authors explore the cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual concerns, as well as the political and revitalization efforts of Indigenous peoples. This book frames the major themes of the genre and identifies how such themes are present in the dramaturgy, rehearsal practices, and performance histories of key Native scripts.

On the twentieth anniversary of its first volume, Staging Coyote's Dream Volume 3 is a curated collection of new works rooted in Indigenous values, aesthetics, and narrative structures. Inspired by their own dramaturgical practices and current conversations in contemporary theatre creation, co-editors Monique Mojica and Lindsay Lachance identify the invaluable and understudied ways that many Indigenous theatre artists are creating culturally specific dramaturgical processes and shifting the paradigm for what is considered "text." By presenting models for relational theatre-making and land-based explorations outside the traditional "well-made-play" structure, Staging Coyote's Dream Volume 3 is more than just a collection of plays; it offers some strategies and tools for how Indigenous artists can reimagine the structures of new-play development and performance on Turtle Island. An anthology that identifies and highlights a vast array of anti-colonial performing arts processes, including reclamation, embodiment, and community-engaged work--to name only a few--Mojica and Lachance gather the works of artists leading these practices to not only honour how their plays are expanding dramaturgy, but to build Indigenous performance literacies for all practitioners creating on Turtle Island.

In this tale of survival, two women are exiled from their post-apocalyptic village because they have passed their child-bearing years.

"Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is just over thirty years old, if one begins counting from the premier of Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell's Jessica in Saskatoon and the establishment of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Since those contemporaneous events in 1982, the Canadian community of Indigenous theatre artists has grown and inspired one another. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture traces the work of a host of these artists over the past three decades, illuminating the connections, the artistic geneaology, and the development of a contemporary Indigenous theatre practice. Neither a hsitory nor a chronicle, Medicine Shows examines how theatre has been used to make medicine, reconnecting individuals and communities, giving voice to the silenced and disappeared, staging ceremony, and honouring the ancestors.

A collection of essays by native women writers in which they argue for a radical re-visioning of culture and the functional relationship between the artist and the community.