Cultural connections MTYP's Blue Beads and Blueberries inspired by playwright’s unearthed Métis heritage By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:34 PM CST Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025

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This article was published 20/02/2025 (549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In town from Victoria, B.C., to première Blue Beads and Blueberries, her Métis take on a traditional English folk tale, Erin Macklem is staying in Pablo Felices-Luna’s guest room.

The playwright considers Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s artistic director a member of her extended theatre family, but Macklem’s first visit to the homeland of the Métis nation also led to an unexpected reunion with a long-lost biological cousin.

“It was a bit of a revelation,” Macklem says.

After the writer’s aunt donated an ancestral journal — featuring insights into the lead-up of the 1869-70 Red River Rebellion in Manitoba — to a provincial archive, she got a message through the business-networking site LinkedIn from a branch of the family that she had never been able to trace despite decades of effort.

Macklem, whose family has roots in St. Norbert, says her aunt received similar emails every so often, but this one felt different.

“She was dumbfounded,” she says.

As it turned out, the relative’s great-grandmother was Macklem’s great-grandmother’s sister, and to make matters even more exciting, like Macklem, her newly discovered cousin, Seraph-Eden Boroditsky, was an artist too.

No longer so far removed, the cousins met, and before long, they were collaborators.

“I roped her in,” says Macklem, who invited her cousin to serve as a cultural consultant on Blue Beads and Blueberries, enlivening the production with her background in traditional jigging and broom-dancing.

“It’s been such an incredible gift.”

It sounds a little bit like a folk tale, and its overarching theme of reconnection inadvertently spills over into Blue Beads, which follows a young woman (Emily Meadows) who discovers her own familial roots after she’s banished from her father’s (Simon Miron) house.

Her major blunder? When asked how much she loves her old man, her response — “As much as pemmican loves blueberries” — falls short of his expectations.

A retelling of an English folk tale called Cap O’ Rushes, which shares some narrative DNA with Cinderella, Blue Beads and Blueberries began as a half-hour show, developed for the young audiences at Victoria’s Story Theatre Co.

After seeing it in its abbreviated form, MTYP’s Felices-Luna encouraged its expansion to an hour, with the story ballasted by original songs by Avery Brown and fiddlework by Manitoba musician Sierra Noble.

“For me, a lot of the work for this play has been in its expansion and contraction. I overshot the hour mark and we didn’t realize until the first day of rehearsal, so right from the get-go, I was up at night cutting, and every time you cut, you have to rewrite around it because you might impact a song,” says Macklem, who, with the help of director Katie German, was able to make the story fit its 60-minute runtime.

One of the benefits of Macklem’s excision was the renewed emphasis on the production’s original musical compositions, most of which weren’t part of that initial Victoria run nearly a decade ago.

“There were three songs in that first version, and in this version, there are so many more,” she says.

A light-hearted musical that draws some inspiration from Macklem’s childhood diet of The Muppets and Carol Burnett, Blue Beads and Blueberries is a personal work for the playwright, whose mother’s Métis heritage was obscured from her growing up, owing to a combination of societal pressure and shame.

“She grew up thinking she was French, but it wasn’t until her dad passed away and her aunt started speaking more freely that they learned of their Métis heritage,” says Macklem, who became a registered member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia about 25 years ago.

After her great-grandparents were displaced from St. Norbert, they moved to North Dakota, “heading undeground” before younger generations decided to bring their traditions back to the fore.

In Blue Beads and Blueberries, Macklem tells two folk tales of hidden beauty at once. There’s the story of Celina, the banished daughter who uses a crown of bullrushes to cloak her true identity, and there’s the story of Alexina, who discovers the power of sharing stories that for decades were told too quietly or not at all.

This play — which runs at MTYP until Sunday and again on March 2 — marks the first time Macklem has engaged so directly with her Métis roots, but she says that in retrospect, she’s been working toward this point throughout her career as she’s developed her own storytelling values, which often lean into fantastical, familial, anthropomorphic and naturalist territory.

“I think that I’ve often inadvertently or unknowingly incorporated some sort of cultural lens into my writing. My cousin and I were talking about this: there’s culture that’s learned and there’s culture that’s inherited, and I think that even if things are repressed, they persist anyway,” says Macklem, who was inspired to dig deeper into her family history once her daughter was born in 2012.

“That’s the thing about culture — it can be sneaky in the best way.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com