MORE FROM OUR SUMMER SHOWCASE
Welcome to the Jungle Theater and our Artistic Cohort Summer Showcase!
We're so glad you're here to experience these two works which have been brought to us by Artistic Cohort members Katie Ka Vang and Isabella Star LaBlanc, two artists who we are so happy to be connected to and support.
For the past several years, Madeline Sayet's play WHERE WE BELONG has been a tour de force in the American Theater. It has been fully produced at many major regional theater companies across the country and received much critical praise. For this reading, actor Isabella Star LaBlanc and director Sara Pillatzki-Warzeha collaborated to bring us a play that spans broadly and deeply about the impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples, the significance of Language, and the absurdities of borders and the control of them (and much, much more).
Katie Ka Vang's FAST FWD MOTIONS is a new play that will be fully produced in the Jungle's 24-25 season! While Katie has been writing and thinking about the play for a number of years, for the past week the script has been in-development with Katie, director Pirronne Yousefzadeh, and the fantastic cast. Workshopping the script with a team of collaborators gives the playwright a chance to hear the text and see how actors embody the characters and world of the play. For you, the audience, it is a rare opportunity to see a script's journey and gain insight into how plays are made. Currently, there are no plays about Hmong-American women who play volleyball in the American canon. We firmly believe this play will be the first.
Whether you are joining us for one or both pieces, we are honored you're here. We hope these stories provide you with a bit of what you might need - connection, joy, a fresh perspective, or a brief break from reality and the opportunity to access new emotions, dreams and ideas.
Alison Ruth
Associate Director, Artistic Programming & Development
WHERE WE BELONG
By Madeline Sayet
Directed by Sara Pillatzki-Warzeha
Featuring Isabella Star LaBlanc *
Stage Manager Miranda Shunkwiler
Madeline Sayet's WHERE WE BELONG includes an Accountability Rider which has stipulations for theaters who are producing the play. One of these requirements is that a theater acknowledge if there are any past instances of redface at the institution, as well as committing to not present any programming in future seasons that includes redface. This prompted us to look back on 30+ years of Jungle Theater productions and the deep dive into our history has been fascinating and revealing.
We did find a production that included redface. The Jungle's 2006 production of Shipwrecked! by Donald Margulies featured Aboriginal Australian characters portrayed by non-Native actors.
We are disappointed that this was the case. We do not want to shame any of the performers, artists, or craftspeople who worked on the production; However, as an institution we want to acknowledge this as part of the Jungle's past. We are committed to making sure this it not a part of the Jungle's future.
The undertaking of this responsibility prompted some thought on these two works, Where We Belong and Shipwrecked!. If you would like to read more, click here.
SCHOLARSHIP FROM DIRECTOR SARA PILLATZKI-WARZEHA
The below is an excerpt from WHERE WE BELONG's director, Sara Pillatzki-Warzeha (PhD Canidate, Theatre Historiography, UMN) essay on indigenizing theater and relationality.
To read the full essay "On Relationality" please click here.
The best theatre wants to be about community - it is a social and communal activity. It wants to be relational. The shared experience of live theatre is, I would argue, what makes it a unique and distinct art form. Whether through our communal response to a performance, or our active or passive participation, we are engaging in a shared social activity. We laugh, cry, anguish, and revel together; we might even sing, recite, or dance together at the theatre. Because of this want of communal activity, theatre can offer a space in which we decenter the individual and focus on the community (Tynan 601), an opportunity to practice empathy and acknowledge our differences (Justice, 38) as well as be engaged and active in our relationships (3), understand how our specific knowledges exist within the world (Deloria, 228), and observe the process of connection (Dudgeon and Bray). My point here is not to obfuscate relationality as an Indigenous knowledge system and method of being, but rather to point out that, at its best, theatre flourishes under these concepts too.
The concepts spoken of here are older than the West End, Broadway, or the Commedie Francais. I would argue that the earliest theatre - be that ritual, storytelling, dance-dramas (winter counts, Noh, Kathakali, Rabinal Achi, ta’ziyeh, even the City Dionysia, to name a few) - offer a sense of communal, relational experiences just as clearly, if not more so, than the modern theatre. Buried underneath the modern theatre remains this foundation of shared, communal experiences. Theatre wants to embrace our relationality. And the path to an Indigenized theatre must be built on relationality.
It is not only that theatre wants to be social and communal, and thus focused on relationships within it, but a theatre practice built on relationality is also a healthier, kinder theatre. Relationality is not just about knowing another person or being biologically linked to another person. No, relationality is about responsibility to each other and reciprocity with our relatives. This also means it is, crucially, non-extractive. In relational thinking, we must consider what is asked of us in service of being a good relative, of making others lives better. In the words of the brilliant Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter,
"Kinship is the complex, embodied practice of sovereign belonging. It’s not just about our ties to one another, but to the willing, intentional re-creation and reaffirmation of those ties in daily interactions—we choose to be kin, and we’re chosen...Belonging is relational and reciprocal, not unidirectional." (Justice 104)
FAST FWD MOTIONS
By Katie Ka Vang
Directed By Pirronne Yousefzadeh
Stage Manager Amanda Barsness
From the Playwright
The very first draft of FAST FWD MOTIONS was conceived over a decade ago in my first year of grad school, when I was missing my community back home. Between now and then, I've had several workshops and development processes and basically have generated a lot of material.
I had always grown up around volleyball because all my siblings played. They competed in Hmong tournaments, which back then was serious business in our community, because it's a moment of gathering; so as a kid I'd go to volleyball practice with my sisters and throw the ball around with the other Hmong kids. Fast forward and I'm grown and play on my own team. When I moved to Minnesota I started playing with a team who were a bunch of tough, smart, badasses- and helped expand my worldview. And maybe this is also an homage to them/ us.
I learned a few years back that volleyball was a sport introduced to parts of the Hmong community while in the refugee camps, as a pastime activity. So I'm also interested in exploring the idea of how displaced and stateless people like my community, Hmong people, hold on to and practice culture; and not necessarily what volleyball has done for us but what we've been able to do with volleyball. I also want to explore the questions: how can the potential of female leadership grow? How does potential meet opportunity? How do opportunities find potential and how much of either one of these is choice, chance, circumstance, and hard work? As a first generation Hmong girl who also grew up in a Hmong Christian household, I felt like the traditional gender roles were very prominent in some aspects and less so in others- as a teenager, I felt different, I didn't know what I wanted or what was possible but I knew I didn't want what I saw, which was many of my friends getting married when they turned 18 and or running off with boyfriends; not that there was anything wrong with that, but I didn't feel like it was me.
I'm excited to be working on this piece again and see it come to life.