Dramaturg's Note
Looking at Theatre as “one of the few places where we create empathy,” Yvette Nolan weaves her stories to address a daunting past and a possible futurity. Envisioning the Indigenous stage as “a conduit between the past and the future,” Nolan still hopes for “a now” moment where “Indigenous people and the settler communities […] work together to achieve justice, to live together in a good way.”
The “good way” is a term used among The Birds’ community. The “good way” is also a mode of envisioning the world, remembering, and doing theatre.
As the journey of producing The Birds unfolded under the vision of Director Reneltta Arluk, the rehearsal space rerouted toward a broader moral landscape. Theatre becomes nature, land, tobacco, ancestry, human connections beyond the text, a found vulnerability amid the rehearsal room, and a restored strength, all of which was possible through a graceful process. Theatre thus transforms into an embodied practice in the space of Shenandoah Valley, guided by offerings from the past, and informed by the actors’ agency, and their personal perceptions. This process is described by Arluk in an interview with Charlie Peters as a “de-escalation of hierarchy” where we bring our full selves into the room while not disregarding the racial biases that we may unconsciously have.
Everything in The Birds, similarly to the process of directing it with Reneltta Arluk, is intertwined within a larger cosmos. As the plot brings to the fore two men escaping their present world to reach a bare land with promises of “a pure,” “ideal” life while gradually perpetuating the damage they initially escaped, Nolan’s comedy conjures the scholarship of Indigenous writers. The events are carefully woven with the works of First Nation authors Tomson Highway, Daniel David Moses, and Thomas King while equally invoking lines of Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and… Nirvana.
Nolan repurposes Aristophanes’ Attic avian imagery to highlight Native mythology, another worldview that was silenced by the oppressive past of settler colonialism. Hence, the intertextual plethora of layers suggested in the play is unpacked through a kind of laughter that reverberates from a traumatic past. Although Nolan states that The Birds is a decolonizing piece, the subtle ways in which generational trauma is addressed resituates Aristophanes’ politically nuanced and sharp laughter into an Indigenously informed processual laughter where the doings of the past cannot be undone, silenced, or forgotten; yet, while haunting our present moment, they may create a promising seed for healing.
Acknowledging, witnessing, and remembering are important tenets of Indigenous Theatre, which often relies on weaving stories, layering traditional myth with historical events, songs, and dance while aspiring for balance and unity. Of equal importance is the community that the performance solicits. In this play, we hope to offer a communal experience that speaks to the heart yet invites us to listen carefully. It informs and calls for action, in a good way. Most importantly, it aims to communicate with and honor its own people, in a good way.
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-Mona Merhi