Without words, dance piece speaks volumes
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Digital Subscription
One year of digital access for only $205*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*First annual payment billed as $205.00 + GST for one year. This annual subscription will automatically renew at $233.00 + GST every 52 weeks (10% off the regular annual price of $259.35). Offer available to new and qualified returning subscribers only. Cancel any time.
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Add Free Press access to your Brandon Sun subscription for only an additional
$1 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*Your next Brandon Sun subscription payment will increase by $1.00 and you will be charged $17.95 plus GST for four weeks. After four weeks, your payment will increase to $24.95 plus GST every four weeks.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/03/2019 (2696 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Finding Wolastoq Voice, playing in the smaller, intimate Colin Jackson Studio adjacent to Prairie Theatre Exchange’s main theatre, is primarily a dance piece.
For its hour-long uninterrupted duration, performer Aria Evans is alone on a circular platform, a magic-touched circular structure of wood, sand and water designed by Andy Moro. Without ever speaking, Evans dramatically and very physically interprets the words and song of Natalie Sappier, a Wolastoqiyik artist from Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick.
So yes, it’s a dance piece, but it’s one with the power to move you to tears with the journey it describes from innocence to hard experience, from depression to rebirth through art.
The show was directed by PTE artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones, who essentially midwived the work with Sappier while he was A.D. at Theatre New Brunswick. Prior to creating the show, Sappier was a painter. Jones presumably saw the writer within. So will the audience.
Sappier has a plainspoken quality to the monologue we hear that belies its poetry. She describes a life in chapters, starting with a very young girl watching her uncle fish for salmon in the Wolastoq (a.k.a. St. John River), and recklessly jumping into the river itself to fulfil a desire to be a salmon.
Raised without a father, her life takes a hard turn when her mother allows a new boyfriend into their home, a man bedevilled by alcohol, drugs and violence. His presence drives a wedge between mother and daughter, and instigates a 10-year twilight of restive “sleep” from which she must awake if she is to reclaim her life. That awakening entails an embrace of the Indigenous culture she abandoned, but which flows through her with the urgency of the Wolastoq current in springtime.
At least Evans vividly suggests that in her dance, which draws from modern, traditional Indigenous dance and presumably a grounding in the study of theatre movement, encompassing mime and stylized gesture.
It’s a lovely performance, lovingly braiding together the seemingly contrary qualities of her character: playful innocence, despair, courage and, in the end, a defiant pride.
Finding Wolastoq Voice is the latest in PTE’s Leap Series that accommodates smaller productions adjunct to the PTE’s mainstage season. It’s a fine choice, with the power to address themes we need to see more often on the Winnipeg stage.
randall.king@freepress.mb.ca
Twitter: @FreepKing
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Theatre Review
Finding Wolastoq Voice
By Natalie Sappier
Prairie Theatre Exchange
To March 31
Tickets $20 at pte.mb.ca
★★★ 1/2 out of ★★★★★
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Advertisement Advertise With Us
