White Noise: my contribution

promo photo for White Noise

Columpa Bobb’s character Tse’kwi catches up on some essential reading.
(Photo: Moonrider Productions)

White Noise is just another pop culture, truth-and-reconciliation comedy: same old, same old … I’m kidding! How many of those have you seen? Taran Kootenhayoo’s White Noise is completely frickin’ original. It has a vision. And it comes with the slap of urgency.

When Microsoft buys an app from an Indigenous teenager named Windwalker — for a breathtaking amount of money — he decides to move with his mom and dad from their community near Edmonton to West Point Grey. (The indoor pool was a big selling point.) Jessika, the teenage daughter of the white settler family next door, is just 10K short of her goal of 100,000 Instagram followers. So we view this story largely through the lens of online culture.

When Jessika’s parents invite Windwalker and his family over for dinner, Indigenous realities bump up against settler assumptions — and the windstorm whipping up outside gets ever more furious. [Read more…]

Little Red Warrior and His Lawyer: Finding the groove

 

publicity photo for Little Red Warrior and His Lawyer

Little Red (Sam Bob) and Desdemona (Luisa Jojic) get to know each other. (Photo by Emily Cooper)

At first, I was not in the groove of Little Red Warrior and His Lawyer — and I was content to think, “Okay, maybe this wasn’t written for me.” Other people were laughing up a storm, including the row of Indigenous folks in front of me — so maybe I just wasn’t getting it. But Little Red Warrior and His Lawyer is so relentlessly irreverent and surprising that it wasn’t long before I succumbed. For the majority of the show, I was grinning my face off. [Read more…]

The Pipeline Project delivers the (complicated) goods

Itsazoo and Savage Society are presenting The Pipeline Project at the Gateway Theatre.

In The Pipeline Project, Kevin Loring calls his truck the Chief: “I get to say that because I’m Indian.”

Probably the best thing about The Pipeline Project is that it’s a sincere invitation to dialogue. In this age of social media, so many are so eager to establish their political bona fides—and superiority—that it’s often impossible to have a vulnerable, complicated conversation in public. It’s good to know that real, human interactions can take still take place in the theatre.

In The Pipeline Project, three writers/actors—Sebastien Archibald, Kevin Loring, and Quelemia Sparrow—explore their relationship to oil. [Read more…]

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