Laughing at the Edge: Thoughts on WagonBurner Theater Troop

The speakers in these materials about and by WagonBurner Theater Troop are satirists, historians, writers and storytellers. They have no single location, no building and no set organizational structure. They are very aware, with W. E. B. Dubois’ "double consciousness," of Native American identities within the white man’s world. They can perceive and make visible in their theater the "edge" where the difference of given and chosen native historical communities meets the dominant system. They make work with

brass-tacks humor, visionary and shared leadership, and a very deep sense of what theater is and does for Indian communities. Robert Leonard did interviews in at least four locations, from Washington, D.C., to Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. In these interviews, company artists fashion an astute and particular portrait of this company in much the same fashion that they create performance work: They talk around and through issues and ideas, they echo and reinforce each other, they use complex cultural analyses, stories and humor. Like the implicit and edgy joke in their name, they play off and with culturally defined stereotypes and ignorance about Indians and Indian culture.

Liz Hopkins, a playwright from the Rosebud project, says, "What I try to show people is that this is what happened to us." Their methods involve ‘talking story, ‘collective writing, editing and performing; they collect gags and antics that reveal and mock the absurdity and horror of history; and they provide a writing/letting that helps individuals cope with difficult situations and connect to memories and cultural histories that are sustaining. And what flashes off virtually every page is the pleasure, the fun of the process. They say that Indians need laughter, and they set out, intellectually and habitually, to create it.

One Size Does Not Fit All

The results of WagonBurner’s relatively short life span and the nature of their work do not register well in a "one size fits all" kind of survey, according to LeAnne Howe’s frustrated reaction to "Performing Community’s survey." There is a small body of work, a limited audience – if you start counting, not much adds up. There is a subtraction process that takes place in the very act of accounting and quantifying, a process reflective of white culture.

This sense of speaking and writing in tension with a culture and language that doesn’t fit comes up frequently, as interviewees critique the process they are engaged in, even the interview itself. Debbie Hicks offers an eloquent analysis of the problematic term "effective" in response to interviewer Leonard’s question about a Project Hoop workshop with LeAnne Howe.

Are you saying "effective ways" in terms of if we had a deadline and we need to efficiently use our human resources to meet that deadline? Say we are putting a proposal forward for a reviewer or a funder – no, that would not be effective. But if you are saying "effective" in terms of retaining that authentic voice – yes.

The question of effect or impact often assumes that a broad, mainstream, "white" audience is assumed to be the audience, presumably a single body whose values, tastes and needs can be predicted and satisfied or challenged. There is not necessarily a single audience of any kind assumed in WagonBurner’s work, and Hicks uses the term "authentic voice" to characterize the specific "Indianness" of the project, its variation, its difference. Her sense of what that means is specific and complicated.

Understand too, there we were this handful of southern and eastern Native persons in a small Native community that was primarily western peoples or northern peoples, who again didn’t always interact harmoniously. Within the little Indian community there within Iowa City we were trying to create our own niche. We were trying to create for ourselves a sense of belonging or continuity. Those were ironies that would play back into the stage. LeAnne and Scotty had their own sense of what it meant to be Choctaw in a Choctaw language community. We had other cast members who had a strong sense of what it meant to be Indian, but it was rooted in that intertribal pow-wow community that develops in urban communities but has now spread as an archetype of Indian-ness, especially in the south and the east where you have so many deculturated rural communities.

Tribalography

Leonard writes in his field notes that this company has found a way to be independent and function outside many theater structures. Indeed their feistiness, independence and energy flies off the page. I see them, additionally, as using the very oppositional structures they work against to foreground cultural identity. Director Leanne Howe says:

This is what I like to think of as "Tribalography." American Indian playwrights, actors, storytellers create stories form the experiences of our people, and ourselves. In that sense, our work belongs to the ancestors, ourselves and the next seven generations. WagonBurner Theater was, and continues to be a community of Indian artists and Indian activists who enjoy working together, mentoring younger Indians, and, who merge art and activism as a teaching tool for Indians and non-Indians.

The discussions of the specific playwrighting process always connects identity to the specifics of story telling and the remarkable group editing that a number of participants cite. Here is Hicks’ description:

Over hours of meandering discussions, returning back to the thread. Sometimes heated discussions. Offering, drafting characters and plots on a yellow note pad as we were speaking and then playing them back, acting them out, discarding, offering suggestions and moving on and agreeing to come back and meet again another time. Maybe having a really exciting meeting and then coming back the next day, sleep-weary and bleary and coming back with revisions to offer.

WagonBurner’s playwrighting processes are utterly stunning in simplicity and success. There is a joking relationship between LeAnne Howe and Jeff Kellogg where Howe, in a telling passage, describes how she gets folks to come and write. She has been talking about the difficulty some teachers have in getting students:

So, the way I work is with the collective. We just get everybody. Go out in the yard and get people and say that we are going to write a show. This was with one class. Get that old man sitting out front and come in. So, we start talking, and we write collectively together line for line. Just start talking. And then they’ll say, "Oh we are writing a play. What does she say now?" So, he typed, I typed so that we would have two different records into our laptops. They wrote the play. It got real big and we had to bring it back down, which they figured out for themselves.

Liz Hopkins, a playwright, comments on the integration of the act of "playwrighting" and community life:

LeAnne talks about that all the time. Indian people will sit there and talk a subject to death. That is what happens in the play. They talk, they discuss it, they throw out a theory. They might eat in between. They’ll have this meeting of the minds. Then, when everyone has had their say, they will come to a conclusion and everyone seems to accept that. That is how it is. No one says, "Okay, that is it." But in our hearts, that is it. There is nothing more to say. That is how that play came about. That is true. Native Americans, we do sit there, we talk, we eat, we laugh. Maybe somebody might get mad. Maybe somebody might cry. There is a lot of therapy in Native American talking circles, they used to call them. I think there is a lot of therapy in that. People work out their frustrations, or express their thoughts.

Howe, the company’s director, offers the metaphor of the "amoeba" to relate the fluidity and sustainability of the creative process:

So, in some ways, what we offer as an alternative model is sustainable – you know, things don’t have to be in stone for them to be together. I think of it like an amoeba. It comes together, it expands, it grows, it explodes. We expect it to be very difficult. Our expectations are already very bad, so we will manage somehow. We will come back together and it will be very fluid, elastic.

WagonBurner artists consistently see their creative work deeply entwined in the fabric of their daily lives, whether its immediate manifestation is a production or not. The way performance is defined here structurally resembles the performance-studies distinction Richard Schechner makes between traditional stage drama, based on one solo authored text, and "social drama," much broader in its contexts and relevance. Interestingly, the performances of "Indian Radio Days" and others incorporate this idea in their creation, but are not ethnographic in the forms they take.

The fluidity and elasticity allows a pastiche of improvised and set materials to take form within a basic set-up like the Bingo Game, a known and practiced form in Indian communities. These known forms, often imposed by the mainstream culture and adopted by Native Americans, lend themselves to satire and parody. The most provocative and powerful theme in the interviews, is, I believe, this understanding and constant presence of humor, laughter and critique in the collaboratively created performance work.

The Best Medicine

WagonBurner participants speak frequently and at length about the value and impact the various theater projects have had in their lives. The word ‘therapy" comes up – most talk about the freedom and pleasure of self-expression. And the stories connect to ancestry and history, helping with reclamation and the laborious reconstruction most Native people face after centuries of deculturation, relocation and disenfranchisement.

Satire traditionally employs exaggeration and irony in a framework offering serious social criticism. Parody is a related form that copies the form of a genre or style to reveal its absurdity. Both occur in WagonBurner’s stories, where laughter may expose social ills or provide a survival mechanism. Performer Dee Antoine comments:

Laughter is the best medicine. I think that is how a lot of people deal with it. For some of them it is hard for them to talk about it, but if they do it is in a joking manner. It is not too personal. I think the feeling right now is that people want to get them out there and deal with them. The Uncle Wannabuck and the Uncle Prayalot is referring to medicine men, some of whom are dipping into other people’s pocket to pay for sun dances. That is wrong in our tradition. People are bothered by that. The Mormons coming and taking the children away, they are bothered by that and they want some way to express it

Antoine’s term "medicine" invokes healing, and others use stories to face hard truths and challenges. Nancy Whitehorse tells a story about going to the "Megadrop" to challenge herself, and the dialog between Antoine and her is itself an example of the process of generating story and commentary with embedded irony and edgy humor:

NW I went to Minnesota at the beginning of the month. I always like to challenge myself because everything is always a challenge. For example, my marriage, it is totally nonexistent. I knew it was going to bottom out. It was going to be something scary, something brand new for me. So, I rode this ride called the Megadrop.

DA: I rode that before.

NW: About 12 stories. You sit on these chairs, your feet are dangling and it goes up. I would watch and it would hang there for 15 seconds and just drop.

DA: Quickly.

NW: For me it was a challenge to myself. If I can get on that at 40 years old, when my life feels like it is unraveling, get on there and drop. Well, it went up. It went up faster than I thought, and when it got up there I thought, "Oh shit I’ve got five seconds."

DA: Can’t change your mind.

RL: Can you bail out?

NW: No. You are up in the sky. And I didn’t want it to drop. I thought, no, no, no. And then I heard that click. I counted to five and that was it. whooooooooooshhhhhh.

DA: That is life, too.

NW: Yeah. That is how I looked at it. When I come home that is how the bottom of my life is going to drop out, to say, well I survived that drop. It was sickening. It was fast, it was sickening, I had no control over it. And then to come back here with that experience and everything does drop out. Hmm. How come I am not crying? How come I am handling it a lot better than I thought I would?

DA: Gaining confidence.

NW: When my feet touched the ground after riding that ride I felt like a peppermint patty, you know? It was like a pull all the way down inside. Whoa. So, I went and tried a couple of more rides. I’m scared of heights. That is how I was able to take care of a lot of stuff without someone telling me, you need to go to codependency. "You are an abused woman, you need to go to codependency to try and understand why this person is doing what he is doing and why you are feeling what you are feeling." Not everybody needs that. People, for me, this person just needed to write something down. Take all these thoughts and put them down on paper. Not touch it, not revise it. Get up walk away from it, do it again and then go back maybe in a few days and read and say, "Oh God, you are pitiful." Writing this kind of theater for me was damn good therapy. I think I am funny. I can’t help that. I’ve got this mother and father the same way, and all these brothers and sisters. To have someone like LeAnne say, "That is great! I never heard that before!" It was great. It made you feel like you did matter. You know? If you know what the life on the rez is like, even though you struggle real hard to keep the bad things out of your life, this is the rez. It swamps you like a big wave. It just takes you and you have to crawl out again.

Whitehorse not only adroitly analyzes how this kind of courageous and dangerous self-challenge constitutes a therapy (to her) more valuable than the lame talking therapies of the omnipresent AA meetings, but she casts the whole into a perfectly shaped and mythic story. The mythic is decidedly not the romantic, but is about contending with "the rez." In the comedy is also the tragic; in fact, it would be hard to find a better definition of tragedy that Whitehorse’s remark, "It swamps you like a big wave. It just takes you and you have to crawl out again." This relationship of the funny as it relates to and is the tragic, is described by Howe:

It is just like, the world could be falling apart and something could happen. We might not laugh about it then, but we will later when we tell it. It might be something inappropriate. It might be something that was really sad, but Indian people need to laugh. We need to have something to tie us down when we are really low. And we are ready, we are always ready for a laugh. That is a really important part of our society and our culture. Anywhere you go, Indians want to laugh.

Satire, of course, evokes social critique through laughter and the outrageous, and the efficacy of satire is discussed in several interviews. Satire depends on using offensive stereotypes as offensive; it therefor requires that the audience members recognize the technique. In a couple of cases, audiences, often non-Indian, have mistaken the constructed image (an absurd "symbolic" icon concocted of gummy bears and chicken feathers) as real Indian spirituality, suggesting how powerful the racialization of the Indian has been, to use Toni Morrison’s term.. Groups of white women, most of whom were fairly politicized over gender issues and who were well educated, were offended that "Indian Radio Days" didn’t offer a "legitimate" workshop in Indian spirituality. Of course, the company performed the workshop satirically, playing the trickster role and calling into question the very assumptions of a workshop designed to "teach" Indianness in a few hours. Implicit in the story is also the realization that "Indian spirituality" was precisely what the white man set out to destroy.

This particular experience, told by performer Debbie Hicks, reveals challenges of performing for white and Indian audiences. There are many different tribes represented in the company, though most of them are from Southeastern tribes. They recognize and analyze the many differences of the Indian people in their audiences, and they also try to face pressing problems internal to the Indian communities, such as sexuality and poverty. The use of satire doesn’t work predictably. Some native groups take offense at the stereotypes, asserting that the performances reinforce negative images in an offensive way, portraying n\Native people as buffoons or giving insult to some notions of sexual identity.

They do court the edge, deliberately. As hilarious as the image of the Bingo Lady handing out Salvation Army clothes as "prizes" actually is, it is a painful reiteration of experience for reservation audiences. White audiences may recognize the insult in their own "charity." Indians may laugh in recognition of a behavior that has demeaned them. The hilarity of satire, in time-honored fashion, exposes, in an ostensibly "palatable" way (thinking of Jonathan Swift) the viciousness of human behavior. Laughter, in this case, at Princess Wannabuck or the Bingo Lady, involves an acknowledgement of what the satire reveals. Such edgy comedy has a feeling of payback and analysis. The act of acknowledgement, of saying, or feeling "Yes, I understand," while splitting a gut laughing, seems like an incredible balancing act, or, a trickster’s magic that has power to sustain curiosity and satisfy anger.

Liz Hopkins reflects:

What I try to show people is that this is what happened to us. And now you are going to see it from a different perspective. We tried to have ceremonies like Lakota people and that is exactly what the Father would do. He would come in and set up a table and serve a Mass during our ceremonies. They do things like this, totally inappropriate, and have no respect for what they are trying to do. Yet, I wanted to show it so that everything is turned around. See that is what I amtrying to show people. It is not anger, but I want them to have a different thought: "This is what we did."

What Happens Next?

Those interviewed do not see staying together as a challenge — they want more theater, they are split apart in time and space, taking care of their lives, earning livings — but they believe that WagonBurner will come together in its own time when there is a project that must be done. And the interviews themselves are evidence that the stories continue to evolve and change.

At one point, Director Leanne Howe says, "And you just have to think. If I did that, how come I’m not running this country now?" Although she is referring to the absurd mythologizing of Indian power, I am convinced that she could, and probably should, be running things. For the ability to see time in relation to growth and cooperation, just as in the playwrighting process, is, in itself, a requisite for change.

Ann Kilkelly is a professor of theater arts and women's studies at Virginia Tech. She is recognized nationally as a scholar and performer of jazz-tap dancing and history, performance studies and interactive performance techniques. She has received Smithsonian Senior Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and performs and gives master classes in jazz tap around the country. At Virginia Tech she served as the director of Women's Studies for six years, she teaches and directs multimedia performance concerts, and she recently created the Diversity Training Laboratory to help students and faculty use performance techniques to examine diversity issues. Kilkelly also served as a site visitor for Roadside Theater for "Performing Communities."

References

[Note: All unattributed citations are from this research project and can be found in the online interviews of "Performing Communities: The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project."]

Du Bois, W. E. B. "The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches." Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.; Cambridge: University Press, John Wilson and Son, 1903.

"Double Consciousness" was a term used by Dubois to describe the experience of the black psyche, "a peculiar sensation. … One ever feels this twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

Schechner, Richard. "Between Theater and Anthropology." University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Morrision, Toni. "Playing in the Dark-Whiteness and the Literary Imagination." Cambridge, Mass., London, England: Harvard University Press, 1992. "Racialization" is a term used by Morrison to describe images in literary representation that are constructed for African-American people.

Swift, Jonathan. "A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents or Country and for making them Beneficial to the Publick." Self-published pamphlet. 1729.

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
Commentaries

Original CAN/API publication: November 2002