Paula-Jean Prudat moves into Moonlodge at the Talking Stick Festival

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      Paula-Jean Prudat is too young to have ever seen Margo Kane perform the iconic one-woman show Moonlodge live. But the play still had an enormous effect on her as an actor.

      She was at the University of Alberta, taking a class on solo theatrical works, when the instructor played a recording of the trailblazing piece about an aboriginal woman’s search for her identity.

      “I was young and I really didn’t know any other indigenous artists at that time,” Prudat explains, sitting in a rehearsal space tucked a floor above the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage lounge. “That was one of the first experiences I had of someone telling a story in a theatrical medium that I could look up to.…It stands as a key piece that showed me what indigenous theatre means.”

      Kane, and Moonlodge, would continue to circle back to find Prudat throughout her early career. After graduating, Prudat came here to work on the Vancouver theatre icon’s Talking Stick Festival, appearing in the show Copper Thunderbird. “Margo’s festival was the first place where I had experienced other indigenous artists—it was my first experience seeing other artists like me,” says Prudat, who is now deeply entrenched in the indigenous-theatre community, working extensively with Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts.

      “Margo and I both have similar ancestry,” adds Prudat, who, like Kane, identifies as Métis-Cree-Saulteaux. “I bet if we looked hard enough we could find neighbouring families.”

      It seems fitting, then, that Kane, the only person who has ever performed Moonlodge until now, would pass it on to Prudat. At this year’s Talking Stick, the multigenre celebration of aboriginal arts, Prudat will play Agnes and multiple other characters the woman comes into contact with, under the guidance of a new director, Corey Payette.

      In the play, which Kane debuted at the long-gone Women in View Festival here in 1990, Agnes is taken away from her family by child-welfare workers and raised in a series of foster homes. It’s not until a decade later, in the 1960s, when she hitchhikes across America, that she finds herself and attends her first powwow. Kane has called it a “solo-voice” drama, one that derives in part from First Nations storytelling and often finds the performer shifting from one character to another.

      It’s clear the play still resonates with a new generation of artists. Kane wrote the work before Truth and Reconciliation and before curriculum changes in Canadian schools, illuminating an issue that was rarely spoken about. We talk now about residential schools and the “scoops” of indigenous children, but the effects are still deeply felt.

      “There’s historical relevance, but this is something that is still a reality. Children are still being taken, ‘scooped’ up, and taken out of their homes for adoption. We’re still trying to make sense of things. And these are all reasons why we need to share these stories,” Prudat says thoughtfully. “I think, unfortunately, that the effects of the loss of language and the loss of culture and the loss of pride through colonization has impacted us on a massive scale.”

      Prudat’s own background differs from that of Kane, who was adopted by a white family. But she can relate to many of the issues of identity and prejudice raised in the play.

      “I come from northern Saskatchewan, where there’s a huge population of First Nations and Métis, and I think it’s a difficult place to live,” she says. Prudat’s family likes to tell the story about how the road had to be plowed out 20 kilometres for her mother to get to the hospital to give birth to her one stormy night. But sadly, that’s not the kind of hardship she’s referring to. “There’s a real racism in that region, pockets there where racism is rife,” she reveals.

      “There was so much breakage,” she continues. “I think we are still feeling the impact of those things. It’s really how we got here. I know my parents, so I’m not Agnes in that sense. But that’s why I do indigenous theatre: these stories are deeply impacting for us.…It’s about ‘How did we get here, all of us together?’ And the beauty of the piece is that it looks at that and it comes from a place of hope. Because I wouldn’t be able to do this without hope.”

      Moonlodge, it should be noted, is full of laughter, too. And in the end, Prudat adds with a smile, comedy may be the best way to build bridges and face hard histories. “There’ll be a real clown moment where something catches you and you’re laughing about something, and then you realize the pain of it,” she explains. “I call it the ‘laugh-cry’ moment: that’s what makes it real.”

      Urban Ink presents Moonlodge from February 17 to 22 at the BMO Theatre Centre in association with Arts Club Theatre and the Talking Stick Festival.

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