Ondinnok: the First Nations Theatre of Quebec
To be, or not to be, that is the question: and that's the question of all theatre. In everyday life, it is the question being asked by thousands of indigenous youth who are at the end of their ropes in the face of alienation and cultural imprisonment. Some answer and prefer “not to be” because...
| Published in: | Canadian Theatre Review |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ctr.150.56 https://ctr.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/ctr.150.56 |
| Summary: | To be, or not to be, that is the question: and that's the question of all theatre. In everyday life, it is the question being asked by thousands of indigenous youth who are at the end of their ropes in the face of alienation and cultural imprisonment. Some answer and prefer “not to be” because they no longer feel native; that is they don't feel like free or autonomous people. I would have had to go into exile to survive, to escape the alienation, to flee the suffocation—exile to undertake the paradoxical quest for my roots outside of my own, for the birth of a vision, the quest for my dramatic art and my theatricality. What is theatre? Its source is intimately linked to shamanic practices, which begat the arts of psychological and physical healing and all the forms of art that followed. Theatre is simultaneously place and action. It is the place of speech clarified by the body, carried by the body until it glows. It is an “acting” on the profound archetypes which instantly connect the individual and the community. It proposes the experience of a collective consciousness, of a shared consciousness of what makes us human through the celebration of the attempt despite all the fears, all the childishness, to produce an encounter of man and of the universe at the core of his angst. Theatre is also an intrusion of the imaginary into the heart of reality, magnifying reality with the power of performance in the face of death. It is an expression of survival, of life that dares to laugh in the face of death. Violence, suicide, idleness, and political foolishness keep us in this “neo-colonial inferiority” of indulgence that means that under the yoke of the disdain of others, we feel disdain for ourselves. Theatre is “Amerindian” because it questions the origins of the culture, of the indigenous man at the heart of this continent because he makes himself a vehicle of ritual actions which have an actual effect on the audience. My dramatic art expresses a visionary spirituality; it takes the spotlight, exposing the ... |
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