Bearing the weight of history

Before a single soul appears onstage in The Mush Hole, the atmosphere of this unsettling and deeply affecting journey of resilient storytelling is already set by its sonic atmosphere.

In the not-so-distant past, church bells chime and children stifle their weeping while unseen vehicles rumble further and further away from the front steps as silence floods the theatre.

None of this was by accident: for 142 years, until its closure in 1970, the Mohawk Institute — the template for all residential schools in Canada — was an outpost of a national campaign for cultural erasure, abuse and elimination of Indigenous identity.

Behind the bricks, the truth was concealed.

In this piece from Toronto’s Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, composed of 17 motion-driven tableaus, the architectural facades are removed to reveal a framework of intergenerational trauma. Drawing from the experiences of several survivors of the institute — nicknamed the Mush Hole for its legacy of malnourishment — the first mainstage production of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People season amplifies history beyond doubt and denial. This is what Canada endorsed and what it allowed to happen.

Divided into three wings of parallel storytelling is Andy Moro’s brickless set, erected to resemble the institute’s blueprint, reminding viewers that these buildings were designed by professionals, outfitted by trained tradespeople, constructed to suit a genocidal end.

In the central section, three young people — played by Montana Summers, Kali Kennedy Bomberry and Katie Couchie — march as if at war, their movement manipulated and mechanized, scattered and shaken.

They sit at their desks, each topped by a cross made up by broken bricks and labelled with a number – 11, 34, 17. As composer Jesse Zubot’s tectonic score shifts in unpredictable fashion, these children, whose names have been replaced by digits, disassemble and rebuild their crosses, taking themselves apart in the process.

No Lego or Duplo at this “school”: these are the building blocks for a sanitized identity, in keeping with prime minister John A. MacDonald’s desire to instil “the habits and modes of thought of white men.”

Nearby, two adults (Falciony Patino and Santee Smith) etch their numbers and their names onto brick walls, designed as projections by Moro.

Throughout the rest of this hour-long production, the narratives of struggle emerge from within the architecture, with video footage shot on the institute’s grounds transporting the audience into a realm defined by a gradual descent into spiritual struggle, darkness and isolation.

On their hands and knees, the children scrub the floors. They’re confined to small spaces. The food they eat — shown by projection — is stirred by the undulation of meal worms.

Through repetitive motion, the award-winning production, which premièred at MTYP in 2020, induces visceral response, even when the tableaus occur beyond the institute’s walls.

A kitchen-table duet between Patino and Smith, who are presented as parental figures as well as survivors, set to Nick Sherman’s rendition of I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, is particularly illustrative of the far-reaching impacts of the removal of children from their home environment, including PTSD and substance abuse.

As Patino’s Ernest sips from a beer bottle, Smith’s Mabel repeatedly hugs the air where children once sat. Ernest removes the unused chairs, gently urging Mabel to accept reality, but the woman keeps setting the extra places, unwilling to relinquish her hope for familial unity.

Aside from several musical interludes and a few lines of dialogue, there are hardly any words spoken in The Mush Hole. It’s a creative choice that encourages quiet reflection and consideration of the weight of speaking out that the survivors of these institutions must have felt and resisted in order to stay alive.

That reality gives every movement in The Mush Hole the feeling of living history — one we cannot afford to see erased. It’s a living history that needs to be underlined.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca