Stage crafting

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This article was published 22/09/2023 (1059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Around this time last year, six aspiring playwrights sat down together for the first time as part of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Pimootayowin Creators Circle.

They each arrived with an open mind and open notebook, ready to build upon what they knew, and accept what they didn’t, to create from scratch six original works of theatre that put Indigenous experiences and stories at centre stage.

For eight months, the participants met weekly with one another and Governor General Award-winning playwright Ian Ross, the program’s director, to embark on their creative journeys; Pimootayowin means journey in Anishinaabemowin.

Next week, those six Indigenous creators — Eric Plamondon, Emily Meadows, Victoria Perrie, Mary Black, Michael Lawrenchuk and Ryan Black — will hold the first public readings of their works-in-progress during Pimootayowin: A Festival of New Work, a free script-reading series at the Tom Hendry Warehouse.

The Free Press spoke with Perrie and Plamondon about their respective works and experiences as program participants.

A trial revisited

After Victoria Perrie graduated from Robson Hall in 2018, she started studying a legal event that forever altered Manitoban and Canadian history: the 1885 trial of Louis Riel in Regina.

“Law school developed me to be a certain kind of person and it must have changed my brain,” she laughs. “Before, there was no way I would have spent even more time studying.”

But Riel’s trial, which found the Métis statesman and politician guilty of treason and sentenced to death, demanded her attention as both a member of the Red River Métis and a newly minted criminal lawyer, not to mention as an aspiring playwright.

The trial certainly had the makings of a courtroom drama, Perrie explains.

“For example, it’s questionable whether the (Saskatchewan) court had jurisdiction to try Riel,” she says, noting that there wasn’t even a full complement of jurors.

“The starkness of how unjust the trial was quickly unfolded.”

When Perrie — an actor, co-founder of the MTYP Native Youth Theatre program and former theatre instructor — came to the initial meeting of the creators’ circle, she was determined to use the theatrical medium to explore the legal intricacies of Riel’s trial.

And while her script in its current iteration contains a decent amount of courtroom scenes and legalese, Love, Louis ended up being more focused on the human side of Riel, looking at his emotional and mental states as he awaits a decision.

The show ended up being “a poetic exploration” of Riel’s life, drawing on poems written by Riel about his political struggles, his family and to his wife, Marguerite. Several of those pieces are embedded within Perrie’s text, establishing Riel’s complicated persona — as a revolutionary, as a god-fearing man, as a rebel, as an artist and as a patriarch — in his own words.

In its current state, she hopes the show represents a “Métis-written account of the creation of this province.”

Perrie, who is in the early stages of establishing a criminal law practice in Winnipeg after several years working in Nunavut, had heard about Pimootayowin from friends who had participated during its first two years, including Cynthia Wolf-Nolin and Nova Courchene.

Her ultimate goal with Love, Louis — a play with a cast of 15 — is to have it produced on the RMTC stage, much like last season’s The Secret to Good Tea by Rosanna Deerchild, which was developed during the first Pimootayowin circle in 2021.

Love, Louis will be presented on Tuesday, Sept. 26 at 7 p.m. at the Tom Hendry Warehouse

A colourful take on intersectional identity

Eric Plamondon is playing double duty next week. On Tuesday, the indigi-queer multi-disciplinary artist will read as Louis Riel in Perrie’s production, a few days after his English-language debut play — Differential Colours Waking in Darkness — kicks off the festival Sunday night.

“The title should give you a bit of an indication of the style, the approach and what to expect from the play,” says Plamondon, a veteran of the Francophone theatre and the executive director of the non-profit Artspace. It’s meant to give importance to words and how they’re received and understood, he says.

Take the title’s third word — waking — for example.

“The double entendre was purposeful. If you throw a stone in the water, it creates a ripple, or a wake. It’s distinct. But when two stones are thrown, their wakes compete against each other,” he explains.

With Differential Colours, Plamondon was interested in exploring the ways different ripples, or different voices, interact when given the opportunity to exist and speak freely in an open and accepting space.

The three characters in Plamondon’s show are nameless, but not colourless and not shapeless. The first is the Peach persona, a 20-something First Nations man; the second is Azure, a queer Indigenous man in his forties who passes for both white and straight; and the Purple persona is a mature Indigenous woman.

Throughout Plamondon’s script, the different personas share their own stories in asides to the audience, but also speak in interwoven fragments; one sentence might begin with a few words from the Peach persona and end with some from the Purple, with a dose of Azure in the middle.

“The goal of this play, without revealing too much, is to show that we all carry our own intersectionalities, and once we understand that, empathy becomes natural and innate,” says Plamondon.

Over the course of the Pimootayowin program, Plamondon, who is Métis, says he came to appreciate the opportunity to create theatre in a group setting and alongside Indigenous peers who each were generous and empathetic in their feedback.

“It’s such a fantastic group of people, who each brought their own lived experiences that were valued,” says Plamondon, who like Perrie was especially inspired by seeing Deerchild’s Secret to Good Tea last season and hopes his play gets to grace RMTC’s stage as well.

Regardless of where the shows end up, the result of this year’s Pimootayowin, he says, are six works that help “decolonize” the theatre by telling stories that have historically been suppressed or hidden from the spotlight.

“We are in this transitional period (in theatre) where we have some pretty amazing talent and tools at our disposal,” he says. “It feels incredible, but also vulnerable and fragile. It means a lot to us.”

Differential Colours Waking in Darkness will be presented Sunday, Sept. 24 at 7 p.m. at the Tom Hendry Warehouse

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com