The 40-year career of Alanis King began much the same way that so many careers in theatre do: in front of very small audiences.
“The show must go on if you have the same amount of audience members as in the cast,” was King’s motto in the early days.
Today, the multihyphenate Odawa artist has no difficulty finding people interested in her work. She keeps busy as a director and playwright, and her artistic practice is infused with a vast cultural memory of Indigenous theatre in the land currently called Canada that can be traced all the way back to the 1980s.
When I spoke with King on Zoom in late March, she had her directing cap on, working on the world premiere of Sable Sweetgrass’ Awoowaakii at Theatre Calgary. “I was so delighted to have the call to come back out to Calgary,” she said.
King had previously worked in the city in 2018, directing Kiistsistinonniks (Our Mothers), a collaboratively created work with the arts collective Making Treaty 7. It was here that King and Sweetgrass first met.
When asked by the company if there were any Indigenous directors she wanted to work with, Sweetgrass said King immediately came to mind.
“I loved working with her the first time,” Sweetgrass told me. “I’ve worked with other directors before who are very passionate and have, I think, a very forceful way of trying to create their vision. What I found with Alanis, and why I love working with her, is that she still achieves the vision and emotion of a story in a very thoughtful, kind, and gentle way.”
“It’s kind of like a kitchen-sink drama,” King said of Awoowaakii. “It’s very gritty, very inner-city. I think it’s gonna be really special for the community.”
Originally from the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, King now resides in Ottawa, but she’s moved across the country many times over.
When King was in high school, she relocated to Saskatoon with her father and stepmother, who both worked at the University of Saskatchewan, where they would take her to see student productions of plays and musicals.
One day, King saw a poster for a six-week summer training program at the Native Theatre School — now the Centre for Indigenous Theatre — in Toronto.
She eagerly applied but wasn’t confident in her application due to her lack of a formal theatre education. “They wanted you to make a list of all of your experience and current training to date,” she said. “I just basically told them, ‘well, I’ve seen a lot of plays and some musicals.’ Turned out that they accepted everyone.”
She moved to Toronto in 1986 to participate in the program. That’s where her interest in ritual and ceremony was piqued.
“It was like seeing spirits on stage,” said King of Indigenous theatre during that time. “It really fascinated me.”
That fascination continued to grow when King watched someone enter a Midewiwin lodge — an Anishinaabe spiritual and ceremonial space — wearing a buffalo head. “He was dancing, and then he’d come close to the younger people, and then the elders,” she recalls. “He was trying to be like a buffalo charging at them and scaring them. But also then he’d be playful, and he’d dance, and it was at that moment, right then and there, that I really knew that native theatre came from the sacred lodge.”
It was experiences like these that inspired King to continue to pursue an education in theatre at the National Theatre School (NTS) in Montreal. “Before that, I felt like I was just surviving on raw talent,” she said. “I thought, ‘you know what, I should really figure out what the craft of acting is.’”
At NTS, King also took classes in directing and writing, which led to the creation of her first play, If Jesus Met Nanabush. She entered the script into a contest for emerging playwrights at Playwrights Workshop Montreal and won.
“That was my first experience with professional actors reading my text,” she recalls. “And it was very exciting. Yeah, it was very exhilarating.”
After graduating from NTS in 1992 — King was the first female Indigenous graduate — she found herself back on Manitoulin Island as artistic director of the Debajehmujig Theatre Group, where If Jesus Met Nanabush premiered in 1993.
She went on to serve as artistic director at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto from 2000 to 2001 and at the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company — now called the Gordon Tootoosis Nikaniwin Theatre (GTNT) — from 2007 to 2009.
“I really admired her because she was the first female artistic director at the company,” said Jennifer Dawn Bishop, outgoing artistic director of GTNT, who invited King back to Saskatoon as director of April Rogers’ Powwow: A Theatrical Production, which will run from May 22 to June 1.
“Seeing her process on directing and how she sees stories unfold, she’s got a generous heart and has a unique look at things,” said Bishop. “Just seeing her relationship with her culture, and what it means, and sharing that with all of us… she is a champion of the work.”
King first cut her teeth as an assistant director on a production of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters directed by Larry Lewis, which opened in Wikwemikong on August 3, 1989. While continuing to direct, her interest in playwriting also grew, and she next wrote The Tommy Prince Story, which premiered in Wikwemikong in 1995, to ensure Indigenous people had positive role models to look up to on stage.
“I chose to write a play about Tommy Prince because I wanted to honor his legacy and the impact of his contributions to Canada, the entire Allied Forces, and to the Saulteaux people,” writes King in the production notes of the play, published in the 2015 anthology Alanis King: 3 Plays. “Positive media regarding Aboriginal people is scarce, so much of my playwriting attempts to correct this.”
King said she hopes to continue to see more Indigenous representation on stage. “Our native theatre world is quite small, and there’s never enough happening,” she said. “But at the same time, there’s a body of work now, and it’s growing.”
She cites the founding of the National Arts Centre’s Indigenous Theatre in 2016 as a turning point. “That is a long time coming. That is a real feather in everyone’s cap.”
Such recognition of Indigenous theatre at a national level today is a far cry from King’s early years in the industry. These days, audiences vastly outnumber the actors on stage.
In fact, King is poised to reach a wider audience than ever before as producer of the forthcoming podcast 365 Jingles. Created by Wikwemikong First Nation’s Nawewin Gamik (Language House), it will feature a variety of stories told entirely in Anishnaabemowin. “These podcasts are creative ways to hear our language,” she said. “And they’re just amazing stories. I can’t even tell you… the language is just so powerful.”
That’s something that has always been important to King. Her plays frequently feature characters speaking Anishnaabemowin, and she describes herself as having a “profound understanding” of the language.
And she’s not at all concerned if audiences don’t understand the language. She shares an experience she had at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995, where she was directing Lupi, the Great White Wolf, a play for young audiences written by Larry Lewis and Esther Jacko.
A week before the show was set to open, a festival organizer called her, saying they were nervous the children in the audience wouldn’t understand the language. They asked if it’d be possible to have the actors repeat their lines in English after saying them in Anishnaabemowin.
“I didn’t know how we could adapt and change it with so little time,” remembers King. “I said, ‘well, what if Esther walked out first in front of all of the children, all the audience, and she could talk about what they’re about to see and give an introduction of what they’re going to see in English.’”
The festival organizers agreed, and the performance was a success. “They were so engaged,” she said. “The children understood every bit of it. It was just a really triumphant moment.
“That’s what theatre is meant to be.”
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WRITTEN BY
Frances Koncan
Frances Koncan (she/they) is an Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Originally from Couchiching First Nation, they grew up on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba and attended the University of Manitoba (BA Psychology) and the City University of New York Brooklyn College (MFA Playwriting). They are currently Assistant Professor of Playwriting at the University of British Columbia. Hobbies and interests include: going to sleep by 9 p.m., watching the same TV shows over and over again, and worrying. Select plays include: Women of the Fur Trade, Space Girl, and zahgidiwin/love.
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WRITTEN BY
Blaire Russell
Piiaikspiitowa (Blaire Russell) is an artist, filmmaker, and photographer from the Lone Fighters clan of the Kainaiwa tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Blaire’s focus is on Indigenous resilience and resurgence of the arts in the Blackfoot community.
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