Tanya Lukin-Linklater as Bird Spirit in WOMAN AND WATER
Part A: CHAT with TANYA LUKIN-LINKLATER and
My Reading of WOMAN AND WATER
8:00AM-GYM: 25 min. bike, 10 min. elyptical trainer,
10 min. row machine; 15 min. cable cage; 15 min physioball;
5 min. wobbleboard; 15 min. yoga; shower & steam. YUM!
I meet with Tanya and son Toby for breakfast on rooftop
of Latitude 53: coffee, toasted bagels, juice.
We breastfeed (well, for me, memories of...),
prevent Toby from jumping off the roof,
yak and laugh before the rest of the artists arrive.
Tanya has some serious academic cred!
From Kodiak Island, Alaska, she graduated in English
from Sandford University then got
her Masters in First Nations Education
at Univ. of Alberta . In 1998, she started to work
in dance-theatre. She researched opportunities
to study Native Theatre and discovered there were
more opportunities in Canada than USA
so she came to Toronto's Centre for Indian Theatre.
She also studied 3 summers at Banff School of Fine
Arts with Muriel Miguel who founded
Spiderwoman Theatre in USA.
Tanya has been working with IMAN SUA who is
the Spirit of Ocean and UNNAM SUA who is the Spirit of Land.
Visualeyez's DOMESTICITY call appealed to her parallel exploration
of women's work: constant and often invisible. Her work is often
performed to remember and honour her grandmother
whom she vividly recalls carrying all the water for her family.
Tanya says she could develop a series of performances
just with the carrying of water in many ways. I like her impulse
to combine aktion-based performance gestures (with weight/burden)
with her evolving sense of story-telling/spoken word.
WOMAN AND WATER is both performance and dance
and executed but in a way that blurs both boundaries.
Tanya blurred dance and performance very successfully in her blanket circle;
she did Inuit-style throat singing then employed traditional Aleut dance
to embody Bird Spirit. Less successful, was the dance she did at the edge
of the pool. It was modern dance and felt like we were idling our motor
and waiting until the performance could resume.
In fact, Tanya says her new challenge is to look for and develop
performance gestures/aktions so she can cross water
(ie go from Spirit of Land to Spirit of Water).
She agreed that this first attempt (dancing at the edge of the pool
in an attempt to cross from land to water) was not quite what she
wanted. So, she is going to continue to work on this challenge.
When she came out of the pool, her brief story-telling
about her grandmother was moving. It felt true
(ie. not sentimental, manipulative or mawkish as it could be done
with acting for theatre or film/tv). Then she entered "real time"
in the giving of food and blankets.
Many First Nations performance artists started in theatre
and evolved into performance artists and/or visual artists.
They often bring actual or subverted traditions of story-telling
and ritual (old & new) making it a constantly evolving practice.
Tanya Lukin-Linklater is a performance artist.
She also makes dance-theatre and teaches within various communities.
Certainly, hard-core throw-it-down-old-school-aktion-based-only
performance art traditionalists would not and will never accept her
as a performance artist. But then, they have never accepted me either.
I have been battling THEM for 35 years. Fuck the Patriarchy!
Love,
La Dragu the Scribe
photo: Panel Latitude 53
