Lasting impacts

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This article was published 20/06/2023 (1197 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Reckoning, the newest production from the theatrical team of Tara Beagan and Andy Moro, began as a stage show. But for the work to live inside that medium felt unsustainable. Each performance required actors to bear witness to the traumas of the residential school system, digging deep into communal and personal pain, over and over again.

It was a challenge, and somewhat mirrored the narratives the show sought to explore, centred on the reverberations of tragedy that emerged in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the experiences of its more than 6,500 witnesses.

So Beagan and Moro grabbed a camera and transferred their artistic interpretation of lived experiences into the realm of digital memory.

“The ubiquity of film is very appealing,” says Beagan, 47, a Ntlaka’pamux artist based in Calgary. “If you lay a thing down on video and send it out into the world, that’s one less time you have to explain the history to someone who hasn’t done their homework.

“It exists in perpetuity on video,” she adds.

Moro and Beagan, life partners who have been working together since 2007, are the co-founders of Article 11, an Indigenous arts activist production company. The 10-year-old company is named for the section of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights that states: “Indigenous Peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs,” including through design, visual and performing arts, and literature.

Since beginning her career in theatre in the early 2000s, Beagan has used her artistic platform to explore the lasting impacts of colonization, cultural erasure and genocide. As a contemporary Indigenous artist, she considers herself to be part of a generation of privilege, able to interrogate both historical injustice and contemporary struggles with vigour, urgency and humanistic truth.

Reckoning, which is being showcased by Prairie Theatre Exchange from today through Sunday, is very much in line with that artistic mission statement. The 90-minute filmed production is divided into three scenes, which explore “sideline stories” of the lasting impact of the TRC.

It’s not an educational piece and it isn’t meant to be watched “out of duty,” says Beagan, a daughter of a residential school survivor. “If you love great acting and strong storytelling, (you should) watch the film.”

The first section, Witness, is a solo dance piece, featuring an immigrant serving as an independent assessment hearing adjudicator (Pam Tzeng), who gets startling insights into Canada by reading through the “cold, bureaucratic” guidelines for compensation for residential school survivors.

By listening to survivors, Beagan says, adjudicators performed a sacred duty, but as shown in Witness, that was not without its own pain.

“We wanted to honour that,” she says.

The second section, Daughter, depicts a first date gone wrong between a survivor (Telly James) and the daughter of both a survivor and someone accused of abuse within the residential school system (Quelemia Sparrow). Presented as a realistic two-hander, Beagan says the scene showcases how the aftermath of the residential school system continues to be felt on both macro and micro levels.

“It’s a reminder that so many people in the world are walking around with this history imprinted on our DNA,” she says.

The final section, Survivor, features a man (Jonathan Fisher) laying bare the abuses he and others suffered in residential school, delivered directly to the viewer as a call to attention and action.

“I think it has become more pressing now that more people in this nation we call Canada… have even a baseline understanding of what happened on this land,” says Beagan, who hopes Reckoning expands empathy and helps preserve stories in perpetuity as survivors age.

“If more elders and survivors can know that people younger than them understand to some small degree what they experienced, I feel like that may be a piece of a peaceful way for them to spend their final years,” she says.

“We learn a lot about intergenerational trauma, but the great thing about our intergenerational understanding, which Indigenous people have always had, is that (there’s also) intergenerational strength, excellence in storytelling and the pursuit of rigour,” she adds.

“The endless capacity to love — that didn’t get stolen from us. That exists still. And it’s important to celebrate that by continuing to create.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com