November 11 & 18, 2016
Ashamu Dance Studio & Granoff Center
Renowned Toronto-based theatre artist and playwright Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) was at Brown as a Lawton Wehle Fitt ’74 Artist-in-Residence across November 2016. Mojica facilitated a three-week workshop in Professor Patricia Ybarra’s Embodied Stories class, and worked with her artistic collaborators: poet—novelist and playwright LeAnne Howe, and director/choreographer and dance artist Jorge Luis Morejón—on their most recent work-in-progress, Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns.
The collaborators’ embodied research into mounds and earthworks and their literary structure as a dramaturgical framework ignites new growth in a long-term artistic pursuit of developing Indigenous dramaturgies. This also solidifies the location of Indigenous performance principles at the centre of the creative process and privileges their activation.Through these investigations, we practice the embodiment of place. The land is our archive and our embodied relationship to the land defines Indigenous identities, history, science, cosmology, literature—and our performance.We seek to transpose story narratives and literary structures of these ancient earthworks and apply them to scriptwriting and performance in order to reanimate Indigenous ways of knowing and make visible that which has been made invisible. It compels us to remember things we never knew and restore them to consciousness. In Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns we do this towards creating a theatrical performance that dislodges the colonizer’s gaze—the garish pornographic gaze of the side show—from the Indigenous body, and in doing so, reverses that gaze. We are mound-building with our theatre.
—Monique Mojica
As part of the residency, students in Prof. Ybarra’s class visited indigenous sovereign land near Narragansett, Rhode Island. They met with local artist Dawn Spears (Narragansett/Chocktaw), Tribal Food Sovereignty Initiative leader Cassius Spears (Narragansett), and Wampanoag and Mashantucket Pequot elder Tall Oak Weeden, who conducted workshops with students that explored indigenous histories of Rhode Island and food sovereignty practices
Thanks to this residency, Mojica had the rare opportunity to work intensely with her creative collaborators, Howe and Morejón. This was the first time that the three artists had worked in the same room together for a sustained period of time. They presented an offering of work in progress (in a lecture /demonstration format) discussing their process on November 18th, hosted by CSREA.
There were two public events at Brown as part of the residency:
November 11, Ashamu Dance Studio, Lyman Hall
Jorge Luis Morejón offered a Dance Workshop focusing on a unique, expressive movement approach to creative ritual-making and restoration of Areito, the indigenous Caribbean dance. This workshop was partially sponsored by the Fund for Dance @ Brown.
November 18, Granoff Creative Arts Center, Studio One
Monique Mojica, LeAnne Howe, and Jorge Morejón presented a public offering of work in progress of Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns presenting excerpts of the play in process with a discussion moderated by Dr. Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University. The lecture demonstration was sponsored by CSREA.
Biographies of Artists
Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) is a playwright and actor based in Toronto. She was born in New York City, but came to Canada as former Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. She was a founding member of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. She is perhaps most notable for her roles in Smoke Signals in 1998 and her stage play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots. Mojica is co-editor of Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English with Ric Knowles. In 2007 she founded Chocolate Woman Collective with whom she created Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way whose structure is drawn from The Guna mola (textile) art and the pictographic writing that note Guna healing chants.
LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian and Native American experiences. Her first novel Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001) received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The novel was a finalist for the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award, and awarded Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year, 2002. Equinoxes Rouge, the French translation, was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger, one of France’s top literary awards. Evidence of Red (Salt Publishing, UK, 2005) won the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry in 2006, and the Wordcraft Circle Award for 2006. Her most recent novel is Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (Aunt Lute Books, 2007). Her latest two books Choctalking On Other Realities (Aunt Lute Books), a memoir, and Seeing Red Pixeled Skins, American Indians and Film (Michigan State University Press), a co-edited anthology of film reviews were both published in 2013. She is the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the English Department at the University of Georgia, Athens.
Jorge Luis Morejón’s artistic versatility has been nourished by two decades of theatre, opera, dance and performance-art experiences. He has participated in over forty productions with Prometeo Theatre, Telemundo, Creation Ballet, Ballet Theatre of Miami, The Greater Miami Opera, Brazarte and his own company Thelos Theatre. Most notably, he has appeared in THE MAIDS and SLEEPLESS CITY. In Toronto Canada he performed MIRRORED SPACES in 2008. In California he performed in DIVIDE LIGHT: A New Opera, at the Montalvo Arts Center, THE TEN PM DREAM and THE ELEPHANT’S GRAVEYARD with Sideshow Physical Theatre at The Sacramento Theater Company, and THE WINTER’S TALE and HINTERLAND with UC Davis Theatre and Dance Department at the Mondavi Center. He has a PhD in Performance Studies, with a designated emphasis in Practice as Research, from the University of California, Davis. Currently, he is a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Department of Creative and Festival Arts, Trinidad and Tobago.
The entire residency was sponsored by the Brown Arts Initiative, the Office of the Provost, the Indigenous Studies Initiative, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and TAPS.
