Writer and Performer
Buzz Festival, Theatre Passe Muraille
2013
This is a piece that I wrote after a particularly meaningful trip to visit my aunt and uncle on a reserve (where they live) in Northern Manitoba. I was meant to work in a classroom while there, and didn’t because of a recent teen suicide on the reserve. While the play centres around issues of identity and aboriginality, it is a play about being “the other”—finding oneself outside of the “norm”—and how one approaches challenging subjects without being too politically correct or too abrasive. It is about how when we celebrate difference, we often lose sight of our similarity. When we aim to live in harmony, we often tend to ignore the dissonance. In order to truly understand one another, we need to understand two sides of our stories. The piece was originally titled Mekwon (or the other) and was presented at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Buzz Festival twice under that title. It has not yet been produced.
Dramaturgy by Samantha Serles