Restaging Indigenous — Settler Relations: Intercultural Theatre as Redress Rehearsal in Marie Clements’s and Rita Leistner’s The Edward Curtis Project

Abstract

Sahtu Dene Metis theatre artist Marie Clements’s and settler photographer Rita Leistner’s intercultural and multi-media collaboration The Edward Curtis Project (TECP) explores the tense negotiations between settler and Indigenous characters who are brought together from different time frames through an Indigenous concept of fluidly intersecting temporalities (McVie). Clements re-appropriates the American photographer Edward Curtis’s strategy of asking his Indigenous subjects to re-enact banned rituals and ceremonies; she thus stages Curtis as a settler avatar re-enacting scenes from his past that often involve confrontations between himself and numerous historical and contemporary Indigenous subjects. In her discussion of the production, Brenda Vellino first establishes the broader theatre studies context for the conflict transformation possibilities presented by TECP. Its intercultural rehearsal of relationship renegotiation may be read as essential for substantive redress between settler and Indigenous subjects. She discusses Clements’s rehearsal of Indigenous confrontation and negotiation with the settler avatar Edward Curtis in light of a recent turn toward rereading the Curtis archive for Indigenous agency and cultural authority. She then explores Clements’s critique of a politics of mediated projection as central to both the stagecraft and questions of TECP. Finally, she considers the significance of Clements’s culminating Windigo exorcism ceremony as painful but necessary medicine for both settler and Indigenous subjects. Clements’s and Leistner’s project thus invites consideration of rehearsal as a process, practice, and trope of multi-layered relationship renegotiation between members of Indigenous and settler communities who seek active redress.