A Conversation with Director Alanis King

Saskatchewan Native Theater, Youth with Potential,
Busy Bees, and Paris in the 20s:
A Conversation with Director Alanis King
by Tom Pearson

I spoke with Alanis King, Artistic Director of the Saskatchewan Native Theater Company in Saskatoon, while she was at the Public Theater in New York directing a reading of Laura Shamas’s play, Chasing Honey, for the Native Theater Festival. Alanis, a passionate artist and educator, had a lot to say about her work within the Native community in Saskatoon and with the area’s youth, as well as her current and future projects.

Tom: Tell me a little about yourself and the work that you do with your company.

Alanis: I’m from the Odawa Nation. Right now, for about a year now, I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and I’m the Artistic Director of Saskatchewan Native Theater Company. We’re approaching our tenth anniversary next season, and this group was founded by some very high-profile luminaries of the theater and film world, Gordon Tootoosis and Tantoo Cardinal, who were on the set of Big Bear, being made in Saskatchewan. Ten years ago, they suggested the idea of starting a company that could serve the youth of Saskatchewan and get arts going and get the youth involved in something where they could be more creative and use their self-expression for self-confidence, and get out of risk mode and get into potential mode and do something that was valuable to them. There was a lot of suicide and addiction, and all of that inner city lifestyle is really affecting our young people.

So that vision was carried though, and now we have two buildings right in the heart of the inner city in Saskatoon. One is going to be converted into a black box theater, and the other space is all for training. So, we offer quite a bit of activity year round. We have an entry-level program called the Circle of Voices, and we take youth-at-risk through a six-month program and use theater as a tool. But it’s really four components: we teach them culture, so they have a sense of identity; we teach them life skills; and we end it with career management; but right through it all, we have the performing arts and creative play. And, we hire a senior playwright to work with them, and then they actually act in it. Then, we tour throughout the province. It’s been going on since 1999. So, that was a real successful way to keep Saskatchewan Native Theater Company going at that time. There was this whole healing movement. So, I really see this as a major force in the arts in Saskatchewan, all first peoples there. So although we are located in one small city, we actually serve the wider [area].

After that [Circle of Voices program], is the Red Spirit [program]. So, the ones that are talented and want to pursue the arts more, we encourage them to apply to the Red Spirit Performing Arts Training Program. It’s a two-year professional program. They do a lot of engagement with the community. In the past, we have done projects with Legal Aid Saskatchewan, and several other institutions have come forward like SGI, Saskatchewan Government Insurance, to deal with road issues [traffic safety]. And then these young people, in training, are able to be submersed in the community, while at the same time learning the basic techniques of movement, dance, ritual, voice, storytelling, and powwow singing. So, we always have a cultural approach to the program as well as teaching acting, and we also have them build sets and work with carpenters to get carpentry skills, so that their skills are transferable if the role isn’t there for them. Often, they can be in stage management or production and so forth. We also, of course, have the main stage and that’s where we have our seniors and established artists come and do two shows a year. Basically, other companies that are touring, we are trying to book them and present them to Saskatchewan audiences that may have never seen them before. I’m always feeling that Native theater in Saskatoon, in Saskatchewan has a core audience of our own people and our own community, but I know there’s a lot of room for non-Natives to really embrace the theater, and that’s happening, but its not happening in droves like the mainstream theater a couple of blocks away. You know, so it’s, I think, it’s an ongoing kind work that we’re doing to get that, and with higher numbers you get increased support and subscriptions which gives you a grounded comfort zone, that you can operate next year. So, you know, there are a lot of places for it to go and for us to celebrate our tenth anniversary for sure.

I really feel that it’s been a great time in my life to be able to use all my experience to-date, and for the past year, hit the ground running at such an intense place, and to create virtually a professional arts training program modeled after the national theater school that I attended, but actually Indianize it now and put in cultural components, which is just as skillful, so that our classics become our creation stories or myth. We have a lot of writing to do and a lot of plays to do that haven’t been out there. I’m not really one for teaching young people Shakespeare and Molière and all of the other sort of European forms or classic stuff because I really feel we have our own, and we have to explore them and write them and, you know, that’s there in the oral tradition, so it’s just a matter of working with elders and bringing those forward so that they become stand-up pieces. So that eventually down the road, other people can study, can pass that along.

Tom: So, there’s an effort to sort of canonize that material for your own community?

Alanis: Yes. So that we don’t have to always rely on, say, Greek mythology, and why not explore our own stories of the trickster which are equally as magical? And that’s not the only entity or deity or character that is magical. Actually there are tons, and then there are all the stories of how everything came to be, so those are grand.

Tom: It’s almost its own field of study, just trickster tales within a certain culture.

Alanis: Exactly, for sure, and also the cultural knowledge: color, ceremony, symbols, all of that aspect too. It’s a great wealth of play content for the years to come. I never feel like we run out of anything. We haven’t done enough yet.

Tom: And now with ten years, you’ve certainly put down your roots. It sends a really great message of stability and continuity. And you’re here this week with the Native Theater Festival at the Public to direct Laura Shamas’s play Chasing Honey. Will you tell us about that and the challenges you face as a director with this particular work?

Alanis: Well, I was really moved to be asked. I’m on the Advisory Committee, but that didn’t necessarily mean that I’d be directing. I submitted scripts from what I thought represented [Saskatchewan Native] theater too, but its been going really great. The play is about beekeeper migrant work, and it’s told through a young woman, Sandy, who just meets Len, and he’s the son of a beekeeper. So, at the same time, she’s losing both of her parents, one [her father] to the Shadow Wolves and his tour of duty in Afghanistan and his eventual take down. Her mother is a meth head and so suffers from that addiction. So, in that loss of her parents, she latches on and finds true love with Len, this young man she met through a university student club. I have probably the best cast in Turtle Island [North America], and Gary Farmer and Sheila Tousey are really senior, well-known, well-respected Native actors. So as a director, you really don’t have to do much. As an actor, you always make yourself “director-proof” in the business, right? So, they really make my work really easy. And Laura’s play, I honestly feel that there are some places for it to go. I would love to see it produced sometime, and I think that’s the whole purpose of why we’re here. Its really a script workshop as opposed to sort of getting towards production, so I think what we’re really trying to do is open it up, open up the script, open up the text for her. Let her really hear it. Discuss certain aspects of character journeys, maybe sort of incomplete characters who would, say, be minor, but really, even if a character comes out in one scene, they still have to have a complete story behind them for an actor.

Tom: And there are lots of characters like that within the Native student group that reappears throughout the play.

Alanis: Yeah, right. That’s right.

Tom: After the festival here, what is next for you? Do you have anything in the works?

Alanis: I’m thinking of a few things, but immediately I’m going to be directing The Velvet Devil, and it’s going on a national tour in Canada and to the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary. The Velvet Devil is about a Métis singing sensation from the 40s, Velvet Laurent, and she gets a call that her mother died and she has to go back home. So that show is going to be touring around, and it’s a complete one-woman musical. There are three musicians supporting her, but in the future, in the long-term, I am developing the beginnings of a co-writing project about the women on the right bank in Paris in the '20s. I want to have a Native blues singer who’s part of those salon evenings and becomes quite popular in Paris during that time. And how she got there, is her father served in the war and left her behind, and she grew up to become quite a sensation and meets all those famous women who were performing their poetry and singing their songs and doing their art, their performance art, and [I want to] explore that. I think that would be kind of exciting and have universal flare as well.

Find out more about Alanis King and her work with the Saskatchewan Native Theater Company at http://www.sntc.ca/