Director's Note

The Birds. A play built on consensus. A process that values the voices as individuals and transforms itself into an ensemble upholding truth through humour, playfulness, and understanding. When I was invited to direct this work at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, I wasn’t sure I was reading the email correctly. Why would this American university want to hire this Indigenous woman from far north Canada as a theatre director? It seemed incongruous to itself but I took the risk because I was curious. Curious to know more about this area of the country, curious to know more about the faculty and students, and from my time here, I am grateful to have been so curious. This experience has been slay.

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When it comes to story, I have an embodied practice that engages land and place through an Indigenous perspective. As someone who has worked in various Indigenous communities across Canada, a country that recognizes its atrocities to Indigenous Peoples, a country that has implemented Indigenous ways and being into its large federal institutions, I did wonder how I would implement these teachings stateside. Away from from my trusted collaborators and institutional groundings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission but, to put it simply, it starts with Yvette Nolan’s, The Birds. 

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Yvette has brilliantly created characters that recognize and challenge the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds collide. In The Birds, she depicts the apocalyptic erasure of birds in the human world with them having fled the cities for their own survival and way of living. This play provides a unique opportunity to delve into Indigenous ways of knowing and being without the appropriation. Working with this non-Indigenous class and predominantly non-Indigenous creative team on this Indigenous work brings our worlds together in a self-determined way. Creating an Indigenous creative process within an educational institution may not seem transformational but it is. Indigenous process inherently disrupts the hierarchy of colonial creative processes but it cannot do that without support. I am grateful for the newfound friendship of Elizabeth Wislar, whose costume design lives the value of repurpose and reclamation of colour and texture. To Toby Twining, whose been there along side me as an ally. He has written the most interesting composition for this cacophony of birds. To Mona Mehta, whose dramaturgical lens has expanded my view of this work. And to Peter Zazzali, who extended the initial invitation to direct stateside. I am humbled by each of you. But, I cannot write these words without mentioning the cast of students who have leapt into this world we built as a community. I am changed but their tenacity, focus, intelligence and heart that have made The Birds theirs. The journey is always more profound. May the presence of their telling reach through to the hearts and minds of the ones that choose to witness.

 

-Reneltta Arluk