Unclassified and Controvertible: The Edward Curtis Project and Beyond Eden in Vancouver, 2010 Beverly Yhap (bio) Odd, unintended refractions can happen when cultural events are staged against high-profile international sports extravaganzas. It's tempting to find tenuous links between the dramas of competitive ranking in wintry settings with parallel cultural efforts to challenge artistic hierarchies. Such was the case around the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver when Beyond Eden, co-produced by the Vancouver Playhouse and Theatre Calgary, and The Edward Curtis Project, produced by Presentation House Theatre, examined the uneasy legacy of two would-be apologists for Aboriginal culture. In Bruce Ruddell's Beyond Eden, a conflicted anthropologist journeys to the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1957 to rescue priceless Aboriginal artifacts. In Marie Clements' The Edward Curtis Project, a contemporary Aboriginal woman's journey morphs into a river of parallel inquiries. One of these is Rita Leistner's photo exhibit of contemporary First Nations individuals and communities. The images of the exhibition form a contemporary record of resistance to Curtis' historic monument to "vanishing peoples." At the outset of the project's inception—taking on the work and influence of a prodigious image-maker like Curtis—Clements involved a like-minded artist with a contemporary lens. The results of each form of enquiry—Clements' drama and Leistner's photographic exhibit—bear the title of The Edward Curtis Project, which in turn also enfolds both shows within one named experience. 1 Complementary exchange and overlap occurred between the creators of both stage productions: Bruce Ruddell composed The Edward Curtis Project's score, 2 while Marie Clements developed the Watchman role eventually performed by Tom Jackson in Beyond Eden. (During the final week of January—with productions running concurrently—it was possible to compare shared and divergent approaches.) Each company acknowledged the stagings on traditional First Nations territory: explicitly as welcome ceremony at the opening of The Edward Curtis Project, implicitly in Beyond Eden's staging of floating Haida war canoes among the audience. Moreover, each show tackled preservationist strategies: in Beyond Eden, the museum's right to plunder tribal cultures in the name of [End Page 105] conservation formed the crux of Lewis Wilson's dilemma. In The Edward Curtis Project, the calcifying gaze of Curtis' monumental photographic project was set against a contemporary Aboriginal woman's trauma. To some extent, each show enacted a kind of exhumation: received ideas of culture and privilege—of who occupies and creates any given artistic "canon"—were brought to light and held up to account. Click for larger view View full resolution Prelude, The Edward Curtis Project: the modern picture story unfolds in snapshot introductions. Tamara Podemski (Angeline) standing. Photo by Tim Matheson Set in 1957, Beyond Eden takes a critical yet not unsympathetic view of white preservationist rationale. The show's germination began with composer Bruce Ruddell's friendship with Haida legend Bill Reid. Through Reid, Ruddell learned of anthropologist Wilson Duff and the two friends' life-altering journey to Haida Gwaii in 1957. His attempts to dramatize their momentous voyage consumed the better part of two decades. Originally conceived and performed as an opera at UBC's Museum of Anthropology in the late 1990s, Beyond Eden's present form as music theatre portrays its fact-based story in broadly fictionalized, schematic strokes. Lewis Wilson, Duff's stand-in (played by Spirit of the West's John Mann), leads an expedition up the West Coast to remove the last extant totem poles from the deserted Haida village of Ninstints. Predictably, he faces not inconsiderable odds. The challenges of the voyage—treacherous seafaring conditions no less than the reluctant cooperation of Aboriginal guides—are bluntly conveyed largely in song. Having been "adopted" by the Haida during a potlach ceremony, Wilson ("Yaatzexaadee") understands the profound cultural tensions aroused by the expedition. By contrast, Wilson's fellow archeologists—self-avowed "grave-robbers"—tout conventional acquisition rationale against the two Aboriginal guides' warnings of supernatural reprisal. Caught in between are Wilson's wife and son and mixed-race photographer Max Tomson, the Bill Reid stand-in. In a prelude to the physical journey, we meet Wilson enacting a ritual dance using a traditional mask whose...