Volleyball court a sandy setting for short film mulling land rights

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This article was published 07/10/2022 (1443 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A beach volleyball court doesn’t seem like the ideal place to stage a dance performance about Indigenous land rights — unless you’re Cameron Fraser-Monroe.

The 24-year-old dancer, who trained with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, looked at the court and saw a country. He looked at the net and saw a border. He saw two opponents standing on either side, ankles dusted by sand. He saw that sand, and he saw the lines drawn in it.

“I really like the idea of doing something I can’t do in a theatre,” he says.

Fraser-Monroe, a member of the Tla’amin First Nation from Powell River, B.C., says that when the question of land rights arises in Canada and around the world, Indigenous people are forced to defend their legitimacy and heritage to settlers and corporations, who consistently infringe on those ancestral borders.

In his latest piece, cišєt, Fraser-Monroe wanted to show audiences that even if individual nations disagree on territory, and how it’s used, those nations’ rights to that territory isn’t inherently less legitimate or devalued. Cišєt, pronounced Chi-shet, means “to challenge” in Ayajuthem, a Coast Salish language spoken by the Tla’amin nation.

The perfect theatre to illustrate that concept happened to be a sandy expanse in Kildonan Park, normally reserved for sets, spikes and bumps. “I wanted to see it as a sporting disagreement between two First Nations artists, arguing over who gets what side of the net,” he says.

This summer, Fraser-Monroe and local dancer Emily Solstice Tait stood barefoot in the sediment, each on opposing end lines, wearing shorts and tanktops. They slowly crept toward the centre, lunging and lifting, doing a dance as old as this country. Sand flew in the air, with the dancers carving their own borders under the net, swaying but remaining firmly in place. Solstice Tait —who is of mixed Ojibway and settler descent — and Fraser-Monroe traded solos, each drawing from their own respective styles, before meeting for a duet at the net, passing back and forth under the ropes before finally reaching a physical and emotional compromise at centre court.

The three-minute film, directed and choreographed by Fraser-Monroe with a score by Juno-nominated Cree cellist Cris Derksen and videography from Michael B. Osikoya, was produced for the Artists Climate Collective, a North American non-profit which uses artwork to shed light on environmental topics such as climate change. For Fraser-Monroe, Indigenous land ownership is an inherently environmental issue.

“The climate fight and the fight for land back are absolutely interlinked. Indigenous people maintain 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity, and we’ve always had an important role in preserving the natural beauty of the places we live,” he says. “Because of that, we’re frequently the first people to experience the negative impact of the climate crisis. It’s two-pronged. We’re very linked to the natural world around us.”

“Land is culture, land is language, land is worldview,” he adds. “It was important for me to recognize that.”

When the filming finished, Solstice Tait and Fraser-Monroe dusted themselves off and celebrated a job well done. And not a moment too soon: a volleyball team had just shown up for its afternoon match.

“They asked us what we were doing,” recalls Fraser-Monroe. “I told them, ‘Oh, we were not playing volleyball.’”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

Čišєt will be available to purchase at artistsclimatecollective.org as part of the Art 2 Action collection, which features performances from four choreographers in Winnipeg, Portland, San Francisco and Atlanta. All proceeds will go to non-profits fighting climate change.