Living Stories Development Log, 16. April 2014

"Can you imagine a world without electricity?"

Phil Albers' discussion topic at the end of his cultural movie night for Karuk TANF was particularly resonant for me. He was trying to make a point about how narratives existed for us on the Klamath River pre-contact, but for me the evening was one of looking at the usefulness of delicate technology.

Phil curated a selection of movies by Karuk videographers for movie night, including Living Stories (in which he appears as an interviewee). I went to the event planning on having a talk-back after Living Stories where I could suss out what was particularly engaging and where the video lost them to help me figure out the next stage in developing this project. The talk-back didn't happen, but what happened instead was probably just as informative.

The biggest problem with the current iteration of Living Stories is its visual stasis - it's all people talking to a point just off camera for an hour. As a theater artist, I've been brainstorming spatial ways to improve the viscerality of the experience. The video before Living Stories had the same visual stasis, so when the sound went out a few minutes into my movie and the audience perked up, I found a possible answer.

Video offers a lot of paradoxical possibilities as a medium. For example, as a recorded medium, it ought to have a stable longevity. Without constantly converting formats, however, that's not the case. It's also surprisingly brittle: the wrong combination of technologies can result in the video not playing, or not playing correctly. Third, and probably most alarmingly, video and film promote audience passivity. When we watch a movie, we sit back and consume the information, assuming that we're in good hands. It's only when something goes wrong, the instability and brittleness of the medium creeps in, do we sit up. This medium, that promotes passivity, has an equal potential to promote activity.

So what's next? First, I need to take a cue from the length of the other videos. I want to re-edit Living Stories into a series of discussions-by-juxtaposition on the central topics addressed in the interviews: books versus oral transmission, problems of translation, the role of traditional stories in mental health, etc. These smaller videos ought to play equally well separately as together. More importantly, I want to use the weaknesses of the medium to engage viewers as active participants in the issues under discussion. How can I present these problems using video in a way that the audience is not satisfied by the recorded material and needs to seek their own answers? And how can I structure that exploration? Ought I use curricula or game-play? Or a combination of the two?

And I need to figure out why the sound went out.

Storytelling Workshop at the Piggyback Fringe Festival

Yesterday, Chris and I did a workshop on telling family stories theatrically. We were in Wakefield/La Peche's brand new community center, and had a pretty substantial space. It was a smaller class with only four participants, but that meant we were able to give each group individual attention. But before we split them into groups, we did a warm-up for the whole class. It was one that Chris knows called "Wa", and it was fairly challenging with just six people (four students plus two teachers), but it did the job we needed it to do: got everybody into their bodies and playing around. Then we split them into pairs, and Chris and I each stuck with a pair to help them develop their skit. We called one partner "A" and the other partner "1" to get rid of any semblance of hierarchy - this was also a workshop in devising, after all. First A told a story from their family to 1, who told it back from the first person point of view. Then they switched. They selected one of the stories to develop into a skit to perform in front of the class. We got two very different, very good skits. I had the impression that it was a very empowering experience for the students: if they can accomplish that in an hour, just imagine what they can accomplish after three months of development and rehearsal!

"The Baskets" World Premiere

Last night The Baskets opened for the first time ever, anywhere. The audience wasn't has big as we would have hoped, but they were very appreciative. It was a great experience to gauge their reactions throughout the show. They loved the opening story - an old one about the Greedy Father and the creation of basket materials. When I finished it and jumped forward millenia to the 90s, it seemed like they were a little disappointed - they were just having so much fun in the world of the First People! But they really started to get into it when I began to hang pictures up on the network of clothes lines we rigged up above the stage. When I went back to an old-time story, I could feel them kind of sit up. Something's changed? What's happening? Then they got really curious - it was our Flood story, so it was a recognizable theme, and yet markedly different from the Bible version they're probably used to. After the show, Chris and the young woman up after me in the church told me that everybody was smiling as they left. Today we're going to hit the street (there's only one in Wakefield) advertising to see if we can't bring in a few more people for the Sunday show. Also, we're going to teach a class on devising theater based on family histories.

Oh, and when I asked if anybody had ever heard of the Hoopa Tribe during the play, about three people raised their hands. So right on, Hoopas.

Our venue.

All Night All Day, or How I Debuted on Broadway

This weekend, a group of local theater artists created a 24-hour variety show on Broadway. By Broadway, I don’t mean in one of the big Broadway theaters. I mean on Broadway the street. Occupy Broadway, in solidarity with the NYC GA, opened the event on the red steps on Times Square, and then moved north to 50^th and Broadway – Paramount Plaza, a private-public park that they renamed “People’s Performance Plaza.” They describe themselves in their manifesto:

“We join in solidarity with fellow occupiers from Tahrir Square to Davis, California by challenging this restriction on access to the public commons [described earlier as private owners of public spaces reneging on their obligations to keep the spaces constantly open to public use] and by extension to democracy itself. Our creative resistance is using public space to create an exciting mix with public performances, art, and music in vacant, lifeless corporate, bonus plazas. Through such art, New York artists re-imagine their city as a work of art, rather than a shopping mall. With capitalism gone amuck, foreclosures increasing, and bank crises consuming whole communities, we are demonstrating another, more joyful way of living.”

And joyful it was. When I arrived, at around 1 in the afternoon, they were in kind of a lull, and the performance space was occupied by a discussion about the financial issues that have created the Movement.

But, the organizers found a way to pick back up the performative energy by bringing back “dramatic karaoke” from the wee hours of the morning (the event occurred from 6PM Friday to 6PM Saturday). Dramatic karaoke is when somebody recites, as if they were a dramatic monologue, song lyrics. I volunteered, and did the Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby.” Unfortunately, I can only do one thing at a time, so I didn’t record my Broadway debut. But here’s OWS photographer Eric doing “Sympathy for the Devil”!

Dramatic karaoke was one of the staples of the event, as well as readings of the First Amendment every hour on the hour.

There was also real singing, monologues, storytelling, short scenes, and dance. It was a variety show of the first degree. But probably one of the most telling things I heard there was the story of Big Bank: The Musical. Not the story of what happens in the musical, although that’s certainly fun, but the story of how the musical came to be and where it’s at now, which is looking for funding. The problem with doing even a light-hearted musical about a Big Bad Bank that takes sick pleasure in foreclosing on people is that “producers like banks.” Later that evening I was speaking to a young man named Raymond who told me that he feels that we are taught a shallow, unfulfilling lifestyle by corporate America in which we value material things above human affection. If what Adam Rapp of Big Bank says about producers is correct, then the musicals and plays happening in doors on Broadway are a part of the problem that Raymond sees. The street performance of Occupy Broadway offers an interesting alternative to that: it’s Off-Off-Broadway on Broadway. 

Borders and Colonial Structures in Rogue Reading's "Coyote"

Rogue Readings is a group of graduate students at Stony Brook University who put up readings of new plays that have come to our department for the John Gassner New Play Competition, but have not been selected for that particular event. On Wednesday, November 30, Rogue Readings put up Kevin Kautzman’s Coyote.

I remember being one of the first in our department to read Kautzman’s play a year ago. I remember being thrilled until about the middle or end of the second act. As far as story-telling goes, Kautzman keeps you on the edge of your seat as the plot thickens, and you learn (spoiler alert) that the young good-looking Arizona Minuteman is actually a coyote using the old racist Minuteman to help him get immigrants across the border. And the suspense and the intrigue came across splendidly in the reading – Steve Marsh was riveting as the disgusting Vince, and Gareth Burghes gave us all the sweet-faced innocence of a man who has something to hide.

My problem is that Kautzman has Luke’s (Burghes) Mexican girlfriend Anna (Andrea Penaherrara) tell “Fire Race,” a Karuk myth. I wrote, in my initial comments on the play, that for all the play’s strengths, the use of this story outside of its cultural context – I wrote “permission of the community” at the time – is probably enough to sink it if Indian audiences get wind of it. Cultural appropriation, while certainly a topic of debate in Indian communities, can get the appropriator a lot of bad press and alienate a lot of Indian audiences. For good examples that have made headlines, take a look at the ongoing acrimony over Indian imagery used as team mascots, or the lawsuit by the Navajo Tribe against Urban Outfitters. Needless to say, I was miffed when I found out that Rogue Readings had decided to go ahead and do it anyways. But, to their credit, when I brought up my concerns a second time, Erin Treat and Stephanie Walter of the Rogue Readings board invited me to be on the talk-back panel after the reading.

As the play concerned immigration across the US-Mexican border, the other panelists focused on today’s immigration controversy. Gallya Lahav, from Political Science, talked a bit about it from a raw political standpoint; Margarita Espada, a Puerto Rican artist and activist, talked about immigration to Long Island; and Erin Treat, who hails from Tucson, talked about her community’s discussion of the issue. They spoke far more eloquently and knowledgably about immigration than I can, so I’d like to continue with my discussion of cultural appropriation in Kautzman’s Coyote.

My statement was similar to the one I’ve written above, except that I also took Bill Bright and Tony Platt as positive examples. Bright came to the River, and worked with individuals to record and analyze our language. His work is crucial to the continued restoration of our language. Tony Platt actually went to the Yurok tribal office and asked permission. It wasn’t given or withheld, so he proceeded to engage individual Yuroks as he wrote his book, which seems to be well received by the community. The through line for Bright and Platt’s success is that they actively and humbly worked with the community to produce their works, which in turn benefit our community. The Urban Outfitters scandal is a bad example in that they went behind the Navajo people’s collective back, and as such have gotten a lot of bad press as exploiters of an indigenous community.

The panel’s response bears discussion. I was able to touch some upon some of the specific points that they brought up at the talk-back, but having spent some time thinking about it, I would like to continue by looking at the overarching colonial structures that have shaped this whole event. But first, here are the three counter-arguments and something of my response at the time:

• “Fire Race” belongs to the same mythological archetype as the Greek story of Prometheus. Really, there are only maybe about seven myths, and all are cross-cultural.
• Stories have a historical fluidity across cultural boundaries.
• Indians don’t believe in property.

My response at the time was to say that archetypes may all be well and good, but that thought process doesn’t account for the tenacity with which indigenous people often hold onto the things that remain ours. By telling one of our stories, or using our images, out of their cultural context, the story becomes less ours and has less potency as a symbol of our ethnic identity. The second point seems legitimate, but I believe that it still ignores the current political climate. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was not able to address the third point, which is wrong on two levels – first, every people has a different culture; and, second, yes we Karuks most certainly do.

Stepping back, I believe I can argue that all three of these arguments and in fact the event as a whole, shed interesting light on current colonial treatment of borders. This is almost poetic, since a border is the central issue and conflict in Kautzman’s play.

In order for colonialism to exist, borders must be transgressed. When this play first crossed my desk, I lay down a boundary based on what seem to be generally held principles of propriety in my community, to wit, that this is our story and you need permission to use it. I spoke as a Karuk, and as a member of the Karuk community. Rogue Readings ignored this stated boundary when they chose to do this play. The Rogue Readings board consists of non-Karuks or any other indigenous person who can claim that this is one of their people’s stories. The structure seems to be one in which a group of outsiders ignore the boundaries set by an indigenous person on the behalf of his people’s cultural integrity.

When I stated my misgivings a second time, Rogue Readings invited me to speak on the panel. This belies three things that indicate ongoing changes in colonial structures, as well as ongoing stasis. The first, and most obvious, is that the Karuk voice was given a place at the table. The second is that I could not have done any of this if I was not a grad student at Stony Brook University. My very being here is a sign that the racial borders around academia are vanishing. In fact, one of Stony Brook’s greatest strengths, in my eyes, is its diverse demographic landscape. The flip side of that strength is that, in order to get ahead in the world, I have to accept a degree of assimilation. It’s like Julian Lang says: “It’s hard to be Indian because you have to live in two worlds.” The third is that we Indians really have to push to even have our voices heard – it would have been nice not to have had to repeat myself.

The third stage of this journey is the talk-back after the reading itself. All three of the arguments employed against Karuk intellectual sovereignty (archetypes, geographic fluidity of stories, and lack of ownership amongst “Indians”) tend towards one conclusion – the borders don’t exist. Now Kautzman definitely seems to be against borders by the way he demonizes the minuteman and creates sympathetic characters out of the coyotes, so it’s consistent for him to deny cultural boundaries as well. My problem is that, in order for indigenous sovereignty to happen, borders around what is ours must exist. To look at this in terms of an “us-them” binary would be incomplete, and therefore dangerous. The aspects of assimilation caused by me being a student in a Euro-American education system, and by my accepting the structures of the predominately white Rogue Readings board to voice my protest mellow this binary and soften the border. Outside of this assimilation, however, the overarching structure has been one of an indigenous person setting a boundary that makes sense in terms of modern decolonial politics, and a group of outsiders using a variety of tactics (the act of ignoring, the act of assimilating, academic arguments, and colonial historiography) to weaken this boundary.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Closing

Ranae Hedman

I tried things a little differently last night. Just before I left, I was listening to Jetty Rae on YouTube and got all inspired to be a musician. So I started playing on my box drum that I’m borrowing from my mom. I packed it with me to the theater, and when house opened, I was the

house music!

Ranae Hedman, Waylon Lenk

The show went fantastically again, and the talk back was once again longer than the show itself. People’s concerns about it maybe moving too fast in parts, script-wise, were apparent to me last night – it did feel like a race across the continent, as opposed to the 20 days one story says it actually took Pihnêefich. Afterwards, during the talk-back, we were able to focus in on where the play needs to be developed. I need to further develop Chris’ characters – the child, the Messiah, and Makataimeshkiakiak – and I need to explore the possibilities of setting it in a class room. After all, the Schoolteacher is the glue that holds Coyote Hunts the Sun together. And, to Ranae’s credit, she makes the role happen. I asked if maybe I should change her stories into the kind that exist in most text-books. Reidy Estevez, one of my students, showed me quite clearly that the answer is “no.” The Schoolteacher’s and Pihnêefich’s tellings of “Coyote and the Sun” form the bookends to the play and the journey – without her telling the colonial histories, there is little or no excuse for her to tell the pikvah.

Chris Petty

Waylon Lenk, Ranae Hedman

So what’s next for Coyote Hunts the Sun? Well, rewrites. I need to explore and develop the characters and their worlds. There are two stories that it seems I need to tell that don’t quite fit into Coyote Hunts the Sun. One is the Ghost Dance story – as I’ve mentioned earlier, I have a pretty strong bias against that particular ceremony, and what that tells me is that I need to learn more about it so that I’m not walking around carrying bad thoughts about those that did it. The second is the cannibal story that I try to tell during the Messiah scene. It was the first scene that I wrote for this play, but I’m realizing more and more that it isn’t part of Coyote Hunts the Sun, but is obviously a story that I feel compelled to tell. I need to tell it separately and get it out of the work at hand.

Ranae Hedman

It was a fun process, and now I have the post show blues. But while this phase of the project is over, we certainly haven’t seen the last of Coyote Hunts the Sun!

Waylon Lenk


 



Waylon Lenk



Ranae Hedman

Waylon Lenk, Chris Petty, Ranae Hedman, Darci Faye







"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Opening

That’s right folks! Coyote Hunts the Sun opened last night! Darci and I got there early to run lights, and that went pretty smoothly. She just needed a little more practice. Then we took a little break to eat dinner and set up the marquee and fold programs, and then Ranae and Chris got there. We ran through it with lights and only one hitch – Chris accidently got locked outside. So we ended up taping the locks down on the doors.

When we finished, we started to do a little photo shoot. I took the first picture, and then the room went dark. Apparently five lights, a laptop and a projector are too much for our poor little Cabaret, and we blew a fuse. We rushed to plug everything that needed to be plugged in to sockets that still had juice, and we tried to pick the lock to the breaker room. We couldn’t, though. I guess that’s I new skill I need to learn on YouTube.

But we got everything rigged up in the nick of time, we got Chris’ stigmata on, and we opened the house (special thanks to Erin Treat for agreeing to be house manager at the last minute).

I killed the house lights, and Darci brought up the stage lights. I gave my little intro about the play, and Native Arts Forum at Wompowog (of which this is the flagship piece – more about that later) and then we started.

Half an hour later we finished. The coyote was cooked and the sun was risen. We took a five, and then started the talk back.

What an informative event! I realized that Coyote Hunts the Sun is not even close to finished. Some of the things that bothered people – like the non-linearity and layered voices – are things that they’re not used too, but that I loved. They’re staying for sure. But I do appreciate that things moved fast, and that combined with the layering makes it easy to get lost. When I start rewriting, I’m definitely going to take more time to develop relationships between Pihnêefich, Wovoka, Makataimeshkiakiak and the Schoolteacher. When I was talking to the two Natives in the audience (that I knew of) afterwards, they brought up that the Schoolteacher was doing exactly what schoolteachers should do – they should talk about the Wounded Knee Massacre and the boarding schools – these are things that the dominant culture has a responsibility to address and take a responsibility for. In the new, longer version then, the Schoolteacher is going to have to tell the stories that we find in history books. You know, how Indians are in the first chapter and then poof! we’re gone.

This version is going remarkably well, though, and I’m really grateful to have Darci, Ranae and Chris on board. But I am finding out where this piece needs to go next, and I can’t wait to learn more tonight.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, Tech

Last night was our great big tech rehearsal, which went very smoothly. For the first hour, Chris and Darci and I focused the lights and got Darci set up with the light board. It’s her first time running lights ever, so that’s pretty exciting. She’s kind of nervous, but I’m confident that she’ll get it. At 8PM, when Ranae got there, we worked through all the tech cues, and then ran through it cue to cue. Darci’s still getting to know the light board, and, like I say, she’s nervous. But I know that once she familiarizes herself with it a little more, she’ll get confident and it’ll be a breeze.

The lights themselves are awesomely badass. We aren’t messing around with levels, so the high contrasts, along with the dramatic angles in which the lights are focused, give Coyote Hunts the Sun a film noire look. Combine that with the reds and blacks of our costumes, and I feel like I’m in an indigenous Nosferatu or something. The projections look cool, skewed and keystoned against the black cinderblock wall. The whole affect really augments the raw and driving atmosphere of Coyote’s hunt across the continent, and the conflict between him and the Schoolteacher.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Poster

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, Dress Rehearsal

Last night we held our first and only dress rehearsal! And I remembered all my lines! Running them before with everybody helped. While we ran them, we painted stigmata on to Chris’ hands for the Messiah scene. He looks super badass/creepy in his black cowboy boots with his black shirt buttoned all the way up.

So we ran lines, and then we ran the show, which happened without a hitch. Darci didn’t even have any notes! She is getting nervous for tech though, because that’s going to be her one shot to learn the light-board. We’ll figure all that out on Wednesday.

Adding the costumes did give me some more information about the play, besides just how cool Chris looks as the Messiah. It didn’t seem to affect anything with Ranae – she always dresses like a teacher anyways – but adding in my hat gives me a good bit of business in the Messiah scene. In it, I have a line, “I have to go find the sun,” that I usually say as I go out the door. Chris’ line, “The sun? The sun will come in the morning. Wait here a while with me,” doesn’t seem to have the force to stop me. That’s always been an awkward part. But having the cap to put back on before I go outside does give me something to do before I open the door.

The blanket that Chris and I wear has a pretty cool effect, at least on him. I haven’t looked at the footage I took last night, so I don’t know how it looks on me. But it adds a substantial bulk to Chris in the Makataimeshkiakiak scene that makes him imposing without him having to really do anything about it.

All in all, a good rehearsal, and one that I filmed! Look forward to the commercial that I’ll be putting out on my YouTube channel (“WaylonLenk”) later today!

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, November 4

This baby has legs! Today we ran this sucker through twice, but before that, Becky and Christina helped Chris and I move the curtain across the space to create our backstage, and we set up the chairs. The space is what it’s going to look like now!

Then we did it for Becky and Christina. Man, that felt good to do it for new people! Ranae said it felt the same for her. B & C couldn’t get over how well she’s doing. They said this idea I had to give her lesson plans instead of lines is sheer genius! It definitely seems like Ranae and Darci are people that we’re all going to be keeping in mind when we cast future stuff.

After our first run, Darci had Chris and I run our lines for the Messiah and Makataimeshkiakiak scenes. It’s a little obscene how poorly I’m doing with memorizing two of the lines I wrote: “It smells good” and – shoot, I can’t remember the other one. Chris and I were a little afraid of Darci when we started doing it again, so the Messiah scene was kind of halting, but other than that the run went well. We’re down to 26 minutes now, and it’s feeling like nuclear fusion! Or fission! Whichever’s cooler. We just decided that before tomorrow night’s rehearsal, Chris and I are going to have to run lines. But once we’re running it, we just have to let it roll.

My Reply to Vickie Ramirez

Here are my thoughts on non-Natives using Native images in their plays written in response to Vickie Ramirez at The Public. Her thoughts on the subject are on their blog, which you can reach here:

http://publictheaterny.blogspot.com/2011/11/manifest-destinys-my-co-pilot.html

Ms. Ramirez,

It seems like your argument hinges on two suppositions. The first I question, the second I take issue with. Like Mr. Yellow Robe, I certainly mean this in the spirit of dialogue, and I appreciate and respect your bravery in publishing words you recognize to be controversial in the Native community.

Your first supposition is that the plays you list, in which outsiders co-opt our images, have “inspired plays to answer them.” This is my question. I don’t know what those plays are; I’m sure to my detriment.

Your second supposition is that those plays have made “the pantheon of Native plays…richer for the dialogue.” This is where I take issue. I certainly have not been in Native theater for as long as Mr. Yellow Robe or many others who are perhaps reading this, so please correct me if my facts are wrong, but I have a sense that part of the need for a Native theater came from us needing to reclaim our images. I know how bad I feel after watching movies like The Searchers, and I can only imagine how my grandparents’ generation felt being inundated with those images. By your logic, it seems that we are to say that films like The Searchers or Apache are worthwhile works of art in spite of the psychological damage that they caused and cause. These movies, as well as the plays you mention, are products of colonial views of colonized peoples. Are we to say that colonialism and its incumbent genocide are good things, since without them the Native Renaissance could not have happened? I think not.

We Native peoples are fighting aggressively in the fields of politics and law to repatriate our homelands and cultural objects that have been stolen from us. Our images and stories have also been stolen and continue to be stolen. There seems to me to be no difference between fighting for our homelands and fighting for our sovereignty with our images. But for that to happen we need to be living peoples and a living pan-Indian community. And that means lively dialogues like the one you’ve started, so I thank you for your words. I hope that mine are taken in the spirit of dialogue in which they’re written.

Yôotva,

Waylon Lenk

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 30

It’s been one heck of a week, and what a productive way to cap it off! This afternoon Darci, Chris and I worked through the Makataimeshkiakiak, or Black Hawk, scene. I’m trying to refer to him by his name in Sauk. It seems more respectful.

Darci had to get there late today, so Chris and I read through the scene several times just getting the feel for it. Several textual changes were in order, but the blocking flowed pretty naturally out of it.

When Darci arrived, she watched the scene. Her note was, “It’ll be interesting to see how it works with Ranae in it.” In this scene, the Schoolteacher is trying to give a lesson while Makataimeshkiakiak and Pihnêefich have their jailhouse scene. The gist is supposed to be competing storytelling. But Ranae couldn’t be with us today, so I asked Darci to step in and read her part. I wasn’t sure it was working, but after talking to Darci and Chris when we were done, I’m convinced that the competing storytelling will work as compelling theater. But we’ll find out for sure when we plug Ranae in on Wednesday.

Now it’s time to rest up. I feel the start of a sore throat coming on.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 29

Today it was just Ranae and me. Torrential weather outside, so perfect weather for telling the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre inside.

The “Wounded Knee Sequence,” as I’m calling it, is really Ranae’s scene, where her character has regained power in the play, and is regaining momentum. The process with all of these lesson plans seems to be to get her comfortable enough telling the story that she can put it into her body. Once she gets to that point she’s really an engaging storyteller.

After we got that sequence up to speed, I had her do all of her lesson plans in sequence without interruptions. The only transition that was tenuous is the one between the stealing of Indian children and the Ghost Dance. That tells me that the Ghost Dance lesson plan is a direct reaction to the Pihnêefich/Messiah scene.

Radclyffe

I finally made it to my friend Kestryl Cael Lowrey’s show! I missed hir earlier 348, but I’m glad I made it to Radclyffe. It was playing at the Theatre Workshop on

36^th St.

as part of the Fresh Fruits Autumn Festival. “Fresh Fruits” is actually a pun, because it’s a festival of plays by queer artists.

Kestryl and I went to Lewis and Clark together, and ze was a year ahead of me in the theater department. Kestryl is transgender, and seems to have always been interested in queer theater. Back college, ze used the masculine pronouns for hirself, but now it seems like ze’s using “ze” and “hir.” This is my little disclaimer to say that I’m not totally familiar with these words, so let me know if I get one of them wrong.

So Radclyffe. Radclyffe Hall was an “invert,” or butch writer in the earlier 20^th Century. Kestryl’s one-person show is a meditation on Radclyffe’s life and its lessons for queer culture today. The show, as it stands, is definitely geared towards a queer audience. However, it seems to me to be a first draft of something bigger, and, if I may, more important. Radclyffe’s life goal, as presented by Kestryl, was to communicate lesbian life as it is unashamedly to the mainstream. She had to compromise this goal because of the times she lived in: she felt, according to Kestryl, that the only way to do this was to make the lesbian protagonist miserable. Hence the title of her book, The Well of Loneliness. Kestryl is pushing for Radclyffe’s original concept, in which the protagonist is happy, leads a fulfilling life, and nobody has a problem with it.

Radclyffe the play is the first draft of that. But the burden, it seems to me, isn’t on the queer community. It’s on the mainstream. After all, for all their political activism, Kestryl and hir compatriots can’t force anybody to accept them. It has to come from us. In a later draft of this play, I’d like to see it done for an audience of more than ten, in which more than 10% is part of the mainstream. And that we’re there because we want to be there, not because it makes us feel like a bigger person. That’s a terrible reason. The good reasons are things like: it’s a fun thing to do, to support your friends, because you’re curious about who, exactly, Radclyffe Hall is. You know, all the reasons I went. So I guess the burden on the mainstream is to be more like me.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 26

Last night’s rehearsal was smooth sailing. The only troublesome part was hashing out how the songs towards the end are going to work, and the only change I had to make to the script was actually an un-scripting of the car-chase scene. Just like I’ve been creating structures for Ranae to riff on as the Schoolteacher, and for me when I tell the story at the end, I let the words I wrote for the car-chase go, and just riffed on the high points. This allows me to have a much more organic, even flirtatious, relationship with the audience.

The transition songs between the Battle of Kekionga and the final story troubled me at first, because I just wasn’t feeling it as an organic transition. So we tried a thing or two, tweaked this and that, and ended up pretty much with the structure I’d written, with only the minor change of having Ranae sit after she starts singing. My singing, while it felt unmotivated when we started rehearsing it, seems to derive organically from the tension that Ranae and I create in the Battle of Kekionga. The songs do provide the atmospheric bridge that I need between the Battle and the final story.

All in all, I’m pleased with the direction Coyote Hunts the Sun is headed, and I’m especially confident with this final sequence that we rehearsed last night.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 22

Last night we finished the second week of rehearsals with the Ghost Dance sequence. As a playwright, director and actor, I’m excited with how this scene is shaping up, especially since it’s descended from the first scene I wrote for this play. From a storyteller’s perspective, however, I’m concerned with how much I’m leaving out.

In this scene, Pihnêefich confronts the Ghost Dance Messiah, and begins to take control of the story away from the Schoolteacher. Ranae Hedman, who is playing the schoolteacher, is doing fabulously. She’s one of those awesome actors who have a penchant for research, and she came in knowing more about California Indian slavery than I do. She knows the stories better than she thinks she does, and so our process with her is just to get her out of her own head.

The confrontation really works. I hadn’t blocked it out before-hand: I wanted Chris Petty and me to do it and see what happened organically. With my assistant director Darci Faye’s help, we created a tense standoff between two vicious predators. Pihnêefich is, after all, Coyote, and there’s nothing lamblike about this Messiah!

And that’s where I feel I’m not doing the Ghost Dance story justice. I don’t think Wovoka was a bad person, and I think most of the Ghost Dancers did it with their hearts in the right place. After reading Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, the seminal book on the Ghost Dance, it became clear to me that the tribes that really took to it had seen their religions decimated, and perhaps had already been pushed from their homelands. It’s easy for me, a 21^st century Karuk, to say they should have stuck with their own religions, but in too many cases that was impossible. Do I think they would have been better off if they had? Absolutely, and I take that stance strongly in Coyote Hunts the Sun. Do I appreciate that they were doing the best that they could? Yes, I do, but I’m concerned that that part of the story does not come out in my play.

Indian Eyes in Times Square

Cops make me nervous on the best of days. After too many stories of them picking on Indians and blacks because they can, or my dad because of his long hair and beard back in his Coos Bay days, I know that they can do whatever they want to you. As sick as it makes me to say it, cops are above the law. But I was especially nervous heading in to occupy Times Square on October 15^th. I’d seen videos on YouTube that morning of cops running over peaceful protesters and clocking a girl in the face on Wall Street on Friday morning. And when I saw all the blue and white and their metal barricades assembled around Times Square, I felt afraid. Welcome to the America the rest of us live in, white part of the 99%!

I have to give the men and women in blue and white their due, though. They were respectful and acted like civilized human beings during the first part of the protest. When the marchers from Washington Square Park arrived, Times Square filled up with signs and chants for a chance in our American economy. Where my friend and I stood, under the Stars and Stripes between 46^th and 47^th, a brass band played, and dancers in formal wear and stilts danced. It was a beautiful feeling to be there. While they danced, organizers came around and passed out sparklers and candles. When dusk came, we lit them and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m including a link to my video of it. Please excuse my monotone: I don’t really know that song.

If you watch the second video, I don't sing as loud, so it sounds nicer. Then we did a speech using what I think is called the “human microphone.” The speaker shouts out a phrase, then the group nearest her or him shouts it behind them, then the next group shouts it behind them, and so on and so forth. This is to facilitate a more democratic style of public speaking: where one or a few people have a microphone or a bullhorn, they can monopolize the discourse. After the speech, about 6:30, Amy and I left to grab dinner: we were hungry, and she had to grade. Darn grades, they get in the way of everything.

After dinner, about 7:30, we headed back to the Square, me to check it out some more, and Amy to catch the subway. The cops had it locked down. Here’s a video of some of the bad parts that were thankfully away from where Amy and I were standing:

I couldn’t get through the Square, so I cut out to 6^th Ave. The cops were there in force, too. And there were some protesters, but not for long. The boys and girls in blue moved us on out. I heard a rumor that they were authorized to use tear gas. Whatever it takes to protect the rich, I suppose. On the train ride home, I saw on Twitter that there was a standoff happening at Washington Square Park. Earlier in the day, NYPD arrested a group of people closing out their accounts at Citibank. Interesting fact, on October 3, JP Morgan Chase gave the New York Police Foundation $4.6 million. Have a look:

What do I want this morning in regards to the events of yesterday afternoon and evening? Well, first, I want the cops to stop acting like little piggies protecting the big fat hogs, but I always want that. What I want that’s probably a more realizable goal is to see a bigger Indian presence! I saw on Facebook that my Mohawk colleague Maxton Scott was representing in LA, and I was out yesterday with my Karuk sign. But nobody there seems to know what to make of Indian activism in the Occupy Movement, let alone what “Karuk” means. In The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the writers compare OWS to other activist movements, but the Indian activism of the ‘60s, 70s, and early 80s is notably absent. There is a lone quote by the New York City General Assembly’s People of Color that has a lone reference to “indigenous people” buried somewhere between black and “diversity.”

If anybody needs this Movement, or one like it, it’s us Indians!

Poor Lessing's Almanack

http://poorlessingsalmanack.wordpress.com/

Last night I went to see a play with my friend Amy Jensen, who got us in for free since she was reviewing it for this new blog. If only I'd known earlier that being a blogger gave me press status! I'm going to have to try to take full financial advantage of this thing in the future.

Anyway, this blog is still in the developmental stage. That means, it's still trying to grow a following, and perhaps decide what it's going to be. My blog is also in this stage, in that I check the Stats bar pretty regularly to see what people are responding to. "Poor Lessing's Almanack" has a key difference from "Kachakâach": while my blog is the musings of just me, "PLA" is a collaborative effort of several professional dramaturgs, many of whom seem to adhere to the traditional American definition of the job: they do research for plays and stuff. It also seems to be tending heavily towards reviews of plays that the contributors see. In that respect, it seems that "PLA" and "Kachakâach" are heading in similar directions. I look forward to seeing what comes of this new blog.

The Continuing Saga of "Coyote Hunts the Sun"

My friend Becky Goldberg has started a playwrighting workshop at SBU where folks who have written stuff get together and hear their work out loud. We've had two sessions, and I've gotten to hear "CHTS" read both times, and the feedback has been tremendously helpful. After our first session, I knew that the several episodes weren't congealing for the listeners. In response, I added back the Storyteller character from earlier drafts, but gave her a definite character. The key scenes for my proto-audiences seem to be the ones with dueling storytelling, and the key theme that of Native people reasserting an autonomous voice. As such, the Storyteller became a clear antagonist in the role of an academic, well-intentioned but speaking out of turn. This second reading made it clear that, as of now, she's troublingly one-sided. What I plan on doing is rewriting her speeches, or "lessons", as lecture notes or lesson plans, as opposed to scripted dialogue. It is also becoming increasingly clear that my play is heavy on visuals, especially towards the top. To really be sure if it works or not, I'm going to have to see it.