Moshkamo: The Unnatural and Accidental Women : the voices of the disappeared still speak to us in this immersive event.

Moshkamo: The Unnatural and Accidental Women : the voices of the disappeared still speak to us in this immersive event.

 

The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Set by Andy Moro, Photo  Barbara Gray

Let’s be clear from the outset. This performance has absolutely nothing to do with Surrealism, nor is it too long. Rituals go on endlessly and repeat themselves non-stop.   Clearly this particular theatre-ritual deals with one of the most disturbing and shameful situations we have ever experienced on our collective territory:  the  murder of women from First Nations, Métis Nation,  Inuit groups.     In spite of the hearings, investigations  and apparent concerns for these lives,  no guilty party has ever been identified or punished.  These murders are treated as unsolvable mysteries,  and the women themselves are relegated to  “accidental” beings who perhaps never even existed!  But they do exist, and still exist, as Marie Clements shows us in this  powerful encounter  between her theatrical conception of their lives, and, director  Muriel Miguel’s choreography, along with a list of extremely talented  collaborators  and the voices of the disappeared who  still inhabit the natural world and are still speaking to us through these artists.

Andy Moro’s  striking  set greets us as the sky lights up revealing tall,  thin curtains  covering immense  structures suggesting huge redwoods of the BC  coast  in the shadows.   A logger sneaks quietly through this  forest with his chain saw and begins cutting these majestic structures as they scream  in pain.

As the forest collapses, a  half-naked woman  with long grey hair, her legs covered with red growths – blood? flowers?-  crawls out from under a pile of leaves lying  in a circular space on the ground. Bewildered, confused,  this spirit creature, a transformed aunt Shadie,  moves through the maimed forest world calling up her daughters who appear on  the set, rapidly transformed into a structure that resembles an upper horizontal  space suggesting a rooming house, where women occupy a  row  of  tiny bedrooms. All is  enveloped in a sea of changing lights and video designs.

On the  ground floor, a public space  morphs into a bar, or a dance hall, or a street area or even a barber shop where one young woman at a bar table, seems to be writing, or thinking or observing all that is happening.  This is Rebecca (PJ Prudent)!  She tells us she is still searching for her mother who suddenly disappeared 20 years ago and has never come home.

Photo Credit: Justin Tang   The Unnatural and Accidental Women Rebecca played by PJ Prudat

Then again, Moro’s   powerful video effects  highlight a constantly transforming space that appears to be alive behind and above the structure in the foreground which incorporates the coastline, the interior of the city and even a run-down area where the  Vancouver rooming house is planted .The site is split into various moving surfaces that reveal a living place  trying to tell us something excruciatingly  painful.

This is a beautiful incarnation of a  First nations space of story telling which progresses  neither  forward, nor backward nor sideways nor anywhere in linear time.  The background is constantly jolted by  melting water, by burning  growth, by angry spitting fire or by the sudden appearance of  dark rolling clouds that rise threateningly over this whole world. These suggest  projections of the pain that gripped the female figure who emerged from the ground in the first minutes of performance and  continues to observe the whole event taking place before us.

Then the lives of the women  living in these miserable conditions, who automatically respond to the male mantra “can I buy you a drink?”,  begin to  define themselves. Troubled, forced to leave home, they enter a spiral of alcoholic relief from the horrors of their life against which they have no defence, such as the local barber, a  male archetype who preys on their situation.   Pierre Brault becomes a terrifying creature giving  vent to his sadistic attraction to young native women, showing us a possible scenario of drinking and killing that is at the origin of all the deaths.

There is a rush of bitter street talk, a world of  pleading chatter on the phone in search of a relative, tense chatter about marriage and dating , and children;  there is  angry vulgarity, trembling fear and helplessness, violence  and cruelty ,  It all  suggests a magnificent poetry on the part of the author Marie Clements and director Muriel Miguel who coordinates the group of women, caught in this  pornographic nightmare that splashes  their lives across the burning sky, announcing their fate in  news broadcast style:   how they died of a high level of alcohol in their  blood.  The coroners inevitably decided that these deaths were  all “unnatural and accidental”. No one  was to blame because the European-based  system of justice is incapable of  ‘seeing’  what really happened. This event at the NAC shows us quite the contrary.

As the first part of the evening  unfolds,  the misery,  the sordid state of these dying women seeps into our minds. Their grieving is echoed by a hardy  beating of the drums, a loud high pitched chanting,  as each of the women reacts  defiantly making a fist, twisting  arms in a fighting stance, expressing  some strong  emotion as they call out to the spirits to come down to help them reclaim their lives.  Participating  in this event  we become annoyed, then angry, wondering why  this state of affairs has not been solved and why it has been allowed to fester  and we want to get out into foyer of the theatre ,  breathe fresh air  and  yell at someone.

This  visual and  verbal performance   was never conceived as an imitation of reality, but rather as a  transformative ritual event that has left its suffocating mark on the spectator and we need a bit of time to cool off before we go back into the theatre for more of it after the intermission.  However, is cooling off the answer?  Have  we become  so  immersed in these  horrific details  that engulf us that  we are no longer thinking clearly?

Act II:

The dead women have returned from the other world where they meet again in that sordid rooming house which appears to be  less sordid now because of brighter lighting, and the determined presence of Rebecca who wants to solve the mystery of her mother.  Rebecca is now plotting something daring  and they watch her manipulate the dangerous barber, setting him up for the kill, making sure he cannot escape.  Rebecca greets these spirit women  where they all submit to  intimate confessions about their needs, their desire to have a man, to no longer be alone. They confess how their lives have been stolen from them and are very curious about this handsome new younger  male who appears friendly , beautiful and they look him over as though he were a foreign animal.

The excitement mounts, there is  playful collaboration  which becomes a  most satisfying act of vengeance that brings Rebecca back into contact with her mother while Aunt Shadie, incarnated by the  inimitable Monique Mojica, prepares a celebratory  tea party  as soon as the sacrifice  is over. As the wind echoes their feelings, they lock arms, move in a circle that reorganizes itself in various  corporeal  relations. Reclaiming their solidarity,  chanting, dancing, they  find their way back to the other world,  no longer victims of an accident. They have found their own path back to the ancestors and will be received at home with great ceremony identifying their own personal origins such as the Salish girls, and so many women of other the west coast families.  And the spectators suddenly find themselves in a terrible vacuum.

The Unnatural and Accidental Women  continues until September 21 in the Babs Asper Theatre. It begins at 7h30

Written by Marie Clements, directed by Muriel Miguel, set designed by Andy Moro, costumes by Sage Paul, lighting by Jeff Harrison, sound designed by Troy Slocum, choral director and Composer Soni Moreno.

This is a co-production by the NAC Indigenous Theatre and the NAC English Theatre.

We gave already seen Marie Clements’  work in Ottawa  at the National Arts Centre    (Copper Thunderbird, directed by Peter Hinton, 2007) as well as The Edward Curtis Project (Co-produced in 2013 with the Great Canadian Theatre Company . Her play Burning Vision, will open at the National Theatre School in Montreal this winter.

 

Comments are closed.