STEP FORWARD
BY TY DEFOE
Art revolves around the ever-changing construction and reconstruction of culture, through an astonishing ensemble of connections among people, land, and spiritual worlds. If I were to ask my father, who recently passed, what art means, he would laugh and say, “You mean what our ancestors have been making?” Cultural memories course through my being, influencing my worldview in ways I might never stop to consider if I didn’t conjure and transform what I refer to as “blood memory.” Blood memory brings forward the past to the present moment during interactions or gestures in such a way that the formulation of elements in a movement’s collective identity appears to mirror past formulations. Recently, I have been incorporating blood memory into the ways I have been creating work across Turtle Island, from a small Yup’ik village in rural Alaska relocating due to climate change and flooding to working as collaborator on Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play, Manahatta, directed by Laurie Woolery. There is a spectrum of unapologetic risk and resilience in artmaking that invokes liberation; it takes extra time, extra care, and extra questioning. It is a way to decolonize and at the same time indigenize the “American” theatre.
Currently, I’m movement director for Manahatta, developed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Yale Rep. In Manahatta, the play collides the past and the present and illustrates the consequences brought on by settler colonists’ commercial exploits, including the removal of the Lenape people from their ancestral territory in the 16th century. Blood memory embodies horrific miscommunication on stage. In exploring a scene that exposes Dutch settlers’ desire to purchase Manahatta for a few knives, kettles, guns, and axes by the use of a simple handshake, Laurie and I spoke collaboratively about the misinterpretation of what “trade” and “ownership” is. And how we can create a room that is safe, working with Native-identified actors who reenact moments that can trigger their own passed-down trauma. As we were “jamming on ideas,” as Laurie says, we asked ourselves: how can we communicate to an audience the complications caused by vastly different cultures with inherently different values, speaking very different languages? And show why the land that is now New York City was perceived to be bought, but was actually stolen through a series of unfortunate, quick complications of languages? We decided to explore gestures called “Indigenous Hand Speak.”
Indigenous Hand Speak is a form of communication that decentralizes the English language. It is a simple yet complex language that a multitude of Indigenous/First Nations people and settler colonists used to connect. It predates, but still is in conversation with, contemporary American Sign Language on Turtle Island/North America. Using hand speak theatrically in this play indicates to an audience who knows the Lenape language and who doesn’t.
In the rehearsal room, the use of hand speak allows the words that have symbols to live organically in the hands of the actors, especially those English words that do not have words to describe their meanings in the Lenape worldview. Jane Snake, the main character, ends up returning to Manahatta, translating to “Island of Many Hills.” A simple gesture is created: she uses two hands moving away from the body to form an island coming together with rounded palms rushing over two hills outward. It is simple and yet feels dangerous in all that it embodies.
To tap into blood memory is also a way to find empathy to tell the narratives that aren’t often heard in the “American” theatre. This past year and next year, I am working in a small Yu’pik community called Newtok, Alaska, soon to be newly named Mertarvik. The village’s need to relocate is urgent and complicated. There is both vocalized and silent fear around the loss of land and cultural lifeways. The crisis around lack of water and clean water is critical. So the conjuring of blood memory and keeping it alive and vibrant is a call to action. It is a call to preserve memories and provide inspiration to this small village that is physically eroding into the ocean on one side and, on the other, flooding with unsanitary excretion.
Before the Land Eroded, written by myself, X’unei Lance Twitchell, Marleah Makpiaq LaBelle (also creative producer), and Martha Kasiauli, is set out to restore and preserve blood memory. The first step of the process was a visioning meeting where the act of listening was held with the highest regard. Marleah, who identifies as Sugpiaq and Iñupiaq, became our bridge builder to maintain relationships, especially with Martha (an aspiring teenage theatremaker), our main point of contact. Martha is a poet and currently hosts the after-school Yu’pik dance rehearsals.
A week of activities led up to the witnessing of the play performed by community members. The story that is a central part of their lived experience became healing. Assigning roles and responsibilities became a teaching tool and provided accountability of community building with youth and a sense of purpose. The spectrum of participation gave the more tentative community members a way to build trust with our team of outsiders made up of scientists, artists, engineers, and theatremakers (identifying both as Native and non-Native), all wanting to help and dedicated to this deeply humanitarian need of simply connecting. I experienced firsthand the commonalities between science and sacred knowledge, as Before the Land Eroded became a historical milestone. The sharing of the play was not in a Eurocentric theatre setting, but it became a symbol of hope and celebration in the only place to make theatre and where there was running water, the school gym.
During the sharing, elders watched teenagers embodying various scenes about fear of the unknown while at the same time celebrating the rich cultural language and songs that have existed since before anyone in the village could remember. Highlights included the King Salmon character as a comedic relief and interstitial Yu’pik song and dance to ritualize hunting or traveling on the nearby river when it was once clean. At times, my director role turned into that of listener, facilitator, coach, even doctor. Themes of the play and activities around the play proper amplified education about water, both scientific and cultural, while providing healing arts to a community that could ultimately just give up due to the inability to have basic needs to live addressed. But no! The culture, the stories, the perseverance, and the remembrance of ancestors past looms with their attitude of We. Must. Do. Our. Best.— the Yu’pik cultural value of taking action rather than describing states of being. The power of creating new stories, as well as hearing their traditional stories, shifts despair into hope and builds aspirations for the future yet to come.
I hold with me blood memory, just as Newtok, and the people there in the village, will carry this experience to their new location, just as the creative collaborators in Manahatta conjure the past into the present, for the future generations yet to come. If we are interested in enhancing our intuitive skills and abilities, it might be wise to examine our own ancestral connections, no matter how removed we might feel from them. For some, this involves risk, and for others, resilience. For me, making art at this moment, in this way, is transformational. My father would say, be yourself. Remember that great circle of life, how everything is connected.
TY DEFOE (Giizhig), Oneida and Ojibwe Nations, is an interdisciplinary artist-writer-shapeshifter, and Grammy Award winner. Ty aspires to interweave artistic projects with social justice, indigeneity, indiqueering, and environmentalism. Global cultural arts highlights: the Millennium celebration in Cairo, Egypt; Ankara, Turkey, International Music Festival; and Festival of World Cultures in Dubai. Awards: First American in the Arts, Global Indigenous Heritage Festival Award, a Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence, Jonathan Larson Award. Works created: River of Stone, Red Pine, The Way They Lived, Ajijaak on Turtle Island, Hear Me Say My Name. Ty is co-founder of Indigenous Direction (with Larissa FastHorse), core member of All My Relations Collective, and artEquity. Publications: Casting a Movement, Pitkin Review, Thorny Locust magazine, HowlRound, and Routledge Press. Movement direction: Mother Road, dir. Bill Rauch (OSF); Manahatta, dir. Laurie Woolery (OSF + Yale Rep); among others. He appeared on the Netflix show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and made his Broadway debut in Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, dir. Anna Shapiro. tydefoe.com
PHOTO CREDITS: Manahatta by Mary Kathryn Nagle. Directed by Laurie Woolery; movement direction: Ty Defoe; fight direction: Rick Sordelet. Scenic design: Mariana Sanchez; costumes: Stephanie Bahniuk; lighting: Emma Deane; music + sound: Paul James Prendergast; projections: Mark Holthusen.