In 1885, the North-West Mounted Police carried out a yearlong manhunt for a young Cree who poached a cow that didn’t belong to him. He was eventually killed and became a martyred folk hero, a symbol of resistance to aboriginals.
But to the white population he was just a speck lost in the sands of time, until playwright Daniel Day Moses, with his imaginative poetic imagery, resurrected him in Almighty Voice and His Wife. “It was written in 1992 by one of the four fathers of Aboriginal theatre but hardly anyone knows about it,” says Ryan Cunningham.
The dynamic artistic director of the one-year-old Alberta Aboriginal Arts has partnered with Workshop West to introduce Toronto’s Native Earth touring production, running Oct. 20 to 23 at La CitĂ© Francophone.
In his attempts to reclaim Aboriginal culture, Moses, readily compared to Shakespeare in terms of richness of emotion and invention, has conceived a two-act play that stylistically is like watching two different shows.
The first act — the love story between Almighty Voice (Derek Garza) and White Girl (Paula-Jean Prudat), the birth of their son, and his flight from the law — is a literal retelling of their life together unfolding in naturalistic style.
In the second act both have died and exist as spirits in an abstract, surreal purgatory. Moses takes a leaf from Vaudevillian minstrel shows and turns the play on its head by showing the actors in whiteface singing, dancing and blurting out derogatory jokes about stereotypes. White Girl even morphs into a bizarre British-accented military colonel called Interlocutor.
“It really jars audiences out of their seat. It forces them to ask ‘What the hell is happening? What does this all mean?’”
A tense struggle tense develops between Almighty Voice and his wife as he fights to reclaim her aboriginal spirit lost behind the whiteface. “It shows how the residential school system made aboriginal people lose touch with who they are so even when they die, their spirit has no connection to their culture and traditions.”
Almighty Voice and His Wife, originally produced at the Great Canadian Theatre Company, was remounted last year and taken to London, England where it received rave reviews.
A tour planned for western Canada this year initially did not include Edmonton. However, when Saskatchewan Native Theatre pulled out, the company had a 10-day gap to fill.
“It’s incredible for us as a new theatre company to stage this brilliant play,” says Cunningham, adding, “Louis Riel said that our people would sleep for 100 years and it will be the artists who give us our spirit back.”
