Vancouver's Heart of the City Festival uses the stage for change

Two theatre works at this year’s Heart of the City Festival draw from First Nations stories to confront tough issues.

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      After a dozen successful years, the annual Heart of the City Festival has done a lot to modify the generally negative image of the Downtown Eastside. But not all the transformations the festival hopes to effect have to do with public perception. Some are deeply internal, like those advanced by two of this year’s flagship productions. Working from First Nations stories—some rooted in everyday heartache and others in ancient cosmology—both Beneath the Surface and Stealing Light: Stories of Transformation offer a compelling blend of warm-hearted hope and cautionary wisdom.

      Jenifer Brousseau’s script Beneath the Surface, which she’ll direct for her Imagi’Nation theatre company, is based on a real-life tragedy: the suicide of her friend and colleague Christine Smith-Parnell’s stepdaughter, Chastity Smith. “It was literally within the day, I believe, that Christine looked at me and said, ‘You need to do something. You need to write a play. Youth need to know that this isn’t the way,’ ” says the playwright, reached at her East Vancouver home. “She was just really adamant that I needed to do something about it—and I agreed on the spot.”

      It has not been an easy task. Writing Beneath the Surface forced Brousseau to examine painful episodes in her own life. And while it’s specifically aimed at helping aboriginal youth stare down the temptation of suicide, it tells larger truths.

      “If you come from abuse or you come from hurt, that pattern has to stop somewhere—and knowledge is power,” Brousseau says.

      In Beneath the Surface, part of that knowledge comes from the realization that those who wound us have been wounded, too. The script, which borrows its framework from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, places its central character in the afterlife, where she learns that the classmate who bullied her was herself being bullied at home. She also comes to realize that no matter how alone she felt, there were people who genuinely cared about her.

      “The centrepiece of the show is a monologue done by a young man who reaches out to the lead character, and Creator reminds her, you know, ‘This gentleman had things that you needed to understand, that you needed to hear,’ ” Brousseau says. “And in this monologue he covers the truth of residential schools, the truth of aboriginal history, and the truth of where that’s brought us—and where we can go from here, in forgiveness, and in love, and in recognizing who we are and who we were meant to be.”

      Similar themes run through Columpa C. Bobb’s solo performance Stealing Light, a suite of four stories that grow out of the well-known tale of how Raven snatched the life-giving sun away from the forces of darkness. Inside that framework, Bobb progresses from offering a kid-friendly parable to discussing adult-sized environmental concerns.

      “The thing about these stories is that we’re supposed to grow with the lessons: as we mature as human beings, the stories deepen,” Bobb explains in a telephone interview from her Winnipeg home. “The kid version is just the beginning of the lessons inside ‘Raven Steals the Light’, and it’s simply ‘Don’t let people steal your light, and if they do you have every right to take it back.’ And then, as we grow, we learn that there is a light inside of us: there’s a spirit light, but if it’s dampened then we can do great wrong to ourselves and to others.

      “That light you have inside you, for all of eternity, belongs to you—and don’t let anybody take it,” she adds.

      That’s very much the message of Beneath the Surface as well. Brousseau admits that she was initially nervous about presenting her work
      before Smith’s relatives in Haida Gwaii and the Nass Valley, but apparently it’s met with the best possible reception.

      “Since the show went there, there haven’t been any suicides in these communities,” she notes. “So this is a play, yes, but it’s not just a play. It’s a message of hope.”

      The Heart of the City Festival presents Beneath the Surface at Templeton Secondary School at 7 p.m. on Friday (October 30). Stealing Light: Stories of Transformation is at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden at 2 p.m. on Sunday (November 1).

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