Events Archive

Indigenous Communities and Puppetry: Talk and Workshop

Department of Drama & Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London: 29 October, 2009.

On October 29, the ‘Indigeneity in the Contemporary World’ project, in collaboration with The Puppet Working Group and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research, hosted Australian designer, director and puppeteer Sandy McKendrick (Sandpiper Productions) who gave a talk and workshop on indigenous communities and puppetry. Sandy McKendrick has created, directed and designed performances based on indigenous legends and myths in collaboration with indigenous artists . She has developed performances with and for indigenous communities in East Timor, South Africa and Australia. Her company’s collaborative performances Turtle and the Trade Wind, Cry of the Seadragon and Indigo Sand toured and participated in festivals nationally and internationally. Photo: Turtle and Trade Winds (2008) by Sandy McKendrick.

The talk and visual presentation covered several puppetry projects that McKendrick has undertaken with indigenous communities in Australia, Zambia and East Timor. It touched on the various projects’ creative development, including the methods and materials used, with a particular focus on puppetry and animation. Following the talk, the workshop concentrated on exploring and playing with different materials and found objects to create simple puppets. Participants designed and constructed their own puppets using various media, allowing time to explore how they can be animated and brought to life. McKendrick showed a variety of construction techniques, looking at how materials impact on character and style of manipulation. Participants worked in pairs or individually to create a puppet.

Indigenous Performance Poet Romaine Moreton

As part of the launch for the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World Project on 18 September at Royal Holloway, Dr Romaine Moreton (Goenpul nation from Minjerribah) gave a 20-minute performance. Romaine is a spoken-word artist and writer of poetry, prose and film with a PhD in philosophy from the University of Western Sydney. Romaine published her first book of poetry, The Callused Stick of Wanting in 1996, and her second anthology, entitled Post Me to the Prime Minister, in 2004. A Walk with Words, a documentary on her life and poetry, won the award for Best International Short Film at the World of Women Film Festival. She has also scripted films, and her first two, Redreaming the Dark and Cherish , were selected for the fringe programme at the Cannes Film Festival. Her third film, The Farm, was screened at the 2009 Message Sticks Festival in Sydney. As an academic, Romaine specialises in Indigenous philosophy and knowledge with a focus on media technology and communication, informed by her experience as a practitioner of film and performance art. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Umulliko Higher Education Research Centre of the University of Newcastle (Australia) as well as the National Film and Sound Archive’s 2009 Indigenous Research Fellow.

On Saturday 19 September, also at Royal Holloway, Romaine contributed to discussions on the theme of Heritage and Material Culture and presented her latest short film The Farm as part of the AHRC-funded workshop series on Indigeneity and Performance.

Project Launch and Joseph Roach Lecture

Renowned performance studies scholar Professor Joseph Roach (Yale) gave a public lecture on 18 September to launch the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World project as part of a larger celebration of the Drama department’s new Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research. The Centre fosters research across a range of historical, geographical, political and methodological spheres to advance cutting-edge thinking on specific topics with a distinct international inflection. Areas of special focus include postcolonial, cross-cultural and intercultural performance; indigeneity in transnational contexts; Asian and Australian theatre cultures; international performance training practices; and the impacts of nation, diaspora and globalisation on theatre and performance. Joseph Roach is Sterling Professor of Theater and English and director of the World Performance Project at Yale University. His award-winning book, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), has profoundly influenced thinking about history and memory, not only in performance studies but across the humanities disciplines. His most recent book is It (2007), a study of charismatic celebrity.

Professor Roach’s lecture draws from his extensive research into performance history and contemporary culture in the Circum-Atlantic region:

The Return of the Last of the Pequots: Disappearance as Heritage
As a Native American society decimated by disease and massacred by New Englanders and their Native allies in 1637, the Pequots are often said to have been totally annihilated. In Moby Dick, Melville describes the Pequots as ‘extinct as the ancient Medes’ (Chap XVI), which is why he named the doomed Nantucket whaler of the story ‘Pequod’. But people calling themselves Pequots have been turning up ever since the seventeenth century, including Hannah Ocuish, whose public execution by hanging in New London in 1786 made news because she was 12 years old at the time. Today 785 tribal members claim Mashantucket Pequot identity as indigenous locals. Enjoying the special status of dual sovereignty with the State of Connecticut, they run the Foxwoods Resort Casino, which vies for the title of the largest gaming destination in the world, with 7,400 slot machines and keno drawings every eight minutes. At the same site, they also operate the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center to document their continuous history and celebrate their heritage. But what sort of heritage is founded on periodic erasure? This paper will interpret the experience of the Museum, which was originally designed as a theme-park ‘heritage ride’, as a performance/counter-performance of disappearance.

The launch included brief performances featuring Indigenous Australian poet Romaine Moreton and excerpts of practice-led research being undertaken by staff and postgraduate members of the Department of Drama and Theatre.

A streamed audio broadcast of the lecture is available here.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Indigeneity And Performance

A workshop series convened by Helen Gilbert (Royal Holloway) and Ian Henderson (Kings College), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain under its ‘Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects’ programme.

Workshop One: Mobility and Belonging

13 February 2009, Institute of Commonwealth Studies

Chair: Helen Gilbert

This workshop focused on relationships between mobility and belonging as expressed in, and mediated by, indigenous performance practices. Following Tim Creswell (2006), mobility was conceived as socially produced movement that is intimately connected with the ways in which we encounter people, objects and places, both in real and imaginative terms. Participants discussed indigenous performance as an embodied material practice that rehearses, reproduces and/or revitalises forms of mobility, as well as creating new modes and patterns. It may also express disruptions in social movement and attachments to place brought about by colonisation. Tensions were perceived between indigenous performances of mobility and traditional – if problematic – notions of indigeneity as a marker of rootedness or belonging to particular geographical spaces. Overall, the day highlighted ways in which mobility reflects and negotiates cultural power and how modes of social movement are transmitted, including the transnational circulation of indigenous arts and their reception by non-indigenous audiences.

Stimulus questions:

• What forms of embodied knowledge (sensual, spatial, kinetic) are encompassed in indigenous performances of mobility?
• How might indigenous conceptions and enactments of mobility inflect current thinking about cosmopolitanism and cultural belonging?
• In what ways can indigenous performance contribute to our understanding of the politics of mobility in past and present times?
• How does performance negotiate ideas about mobility and belonging in relation to issues of rights, citizenship and heritage?
• What can indigenous kinetics reveal about connections between social practices, communities and places?

Workshop Two: Orality and Transmission

15 May 2009, Goodenough College

Chair: Rachel Fensham

This workshop examined cultural transmission by focusing closely on oral practices as aspects of intangible heritage. As contemporary indigenous performance demonstrates across a range of artistic, social, legal, cultural and educational domains, orature functions not so much as a preliterate mode of communication but rather as an emphatically embodied transaction. In this respect, this workshop sought to explore the ways in which orality, literacy and mediality dynamically interact, particularly in the reception and preservation of oral practices. Performative aspects of storytelling and witnessing, and their role in collective constructions of historical memory in indigenous cultures, were encompassed in this theme. Drawing from readings by Diana Taylor on the distinction between the archive (stored, written memory and histories) and the repertoire (living, oral memory practices), the participants discussed how the concept of orality shapes and informs an understanding of transmission of cultural knowledge in and for indigenous communities and performance. The day concluded with a powerful and moving lecture from Alanis Obomsawin at the Origins Festival, Riverside Studios, London.

Stimulus questions:

• What can indigenous performance reveal about how oral practices and traditions are transferred across time and place in minority cultures?
• What is the status and function of oral transmission in rapidly modernizing indigenous societies?
• What are the key tensions between orality and textuality in various genres of indigenous performance and what is invested in each?
• How are ‘traditional’ oral practices being preserved, modified or mediated in print and electronic media? What kinds of rhetorical documents ensue and what is their status in relation to live performance?
• What are the connections between oral storytelling, collective listening and social memory in indigenous performance situations?   

Workshop Three: Heritage and Material Culture

19 September 2009, Royal Holloway, University of London

Chair: Ian Henderson

This workshop explored how the study of indigenous performance practices might illuminate key characteristics of heritage and how these practices relate to social cohesion. Invited speakers and participants discussed the functions of heritage within its specific social/cultural groups as well as in cross-cultural situations. Heritage was considered not just in terms of transmitting and perpetuating objects, discourses, values and practices, but also in an expanded sense as mobilising historical understanding or social memory to nourish a desire for solidarity between generations. Heritage practices and industries were thus understood to be dynamic expressions as much concerned with modes and impulses for transmission as with the creation of tangible archives.

Stimulus questions:

• How is heritage transmitted and reinvigorated across different genres of indigenous performance and in multi-media forms?
• What can site-specific performances by indigenous artists reveal about relationships between land, place and heritage?
• How are aspects of indigenous heritage presented and consumed in global and/or transnational contexts?
• How do the politics of authenticity work in relation to indigenous heritage as created and transmitted in live performance and to diverse audiences?
• What can we understand of heritage from the material remains of indigenous performance, especially those archived in non-indigenous repositories?

Origins Festival London 2009

The Origins festival, curated by Michael Walling of Bordercrossings, was held in various venues throughout London in May 2009 to celebrate the creative arts of First Nations peoples from around the world. The wide-ranging and exciting programme included four theatre productions, numerous film screenings and a number of workshops and panel discussion opportunities to encourage greater awareness and debate on indigenous arts practices among the wider public. The programme primarily focused on the indigenous cultures of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the USA, although there were a few examples of productions from other regions of the globe, such as Fiji. The festival provided the public with First Nations’ perspectives on current political and environmental crises, and stimulated intercultural exchange through the arts.

The Indigeneity in the Contemporary World project at Royal Holloway was instrumental in the organisation of the festival, providing advice as well as financial support towards the travel expenses of three of the invited playwrights, Diane Glancy, Daniel David Moses, and David Milroy. All three contributed to the Orality and Transmission workshop organized in conjunction with the festival as part of a three-event series on Indigeneity and Performance. Diane and Daniel, along with Margo Kane and Yves Sioui Durand, also participated in a panel discussion on Native American theatre chaired by Helen Gilbert.