Musical Form as Theatrical Form in Native Canadian Stage Plays

• Main Author: Harrison, Klisala Rose
• Other Authors: Hoefnagels, Anna, Beverley, Beverley
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: McGill-Queen's University Press 2012
• Subjects: 6131 Theatre; dance; music; other performing arts; Ethnomusicology; Indigenous studies; Theatre; Canada; Igloolik; Kane; Moses; First Nations; inuit
• Online Access: https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/publications/musical-form-as-theatrical-form-in-native-canadian-stage-plays(e99d734c-e1bd-4b13-8240-7bb7487e03b2).html

This article is the first survey of music in Aboriginal theatre throughout Canada. I focus on stage plays, penned solely or partly by First Nations, Métis and Inuit, in English, between 1986 and 2007, and in non-linear or third wave styles among others. In addition to incorporating diverse Native and non-Native musics, Native Canadian playwrights based the forms of certain stage plays on musical performance genres and structures for example of: art music such as opera, popular music of African Americans and Native Canadians like minstrelsy and the blues, and a variety of Indigenous traditional songs, dances and musical rituals. As Native Canadian theatre is performed primarily for intercultural audiences yet importantly in Indigenous communities, the stage plays have reflected and engaged histories of Native – non-Native and Aboriginal community interactions, including through the borrowings of musical form. I discuss in some detail, stage play authorship by Tomson Highway, Drew Hayden Taylor, Daniel David Moses, the Igloolik Dance and Drama Group, Injun’Nuity Theatre Company, Margo Kane and Marie Clements. Like Marie Clements, who offers a new theoretical concept for discursive marginalization, the rare voice, these Aboriginal Canadian playwrights and collectives have worked to move beyond social marginalization.