7 minute read
Matriarchs Uprising’s Ñswe niiminwinan (3 Dances)
‘what is,’ ‘who is,’ ‘how does,’ and ‘why would’ a mother…?
by Tin Gamboa
Grounded through the heels,
aware of the lumbar,
tender in the palms,
powerful and ready spine,
open and grounded hearts.
If Matriarchs Uprising Festival were a living being in itself, the Indigenous matriarchs and artists would be its beating heart, their matriarchal lineages would be the spine, a woman’s everyday labour and life-giving force would be the blood coursing through its veins, and the embodied expressions of movement performance, verbal sharing in circle, and the act of witnessing and holding space are some of the offspring that the festival birth every year.
As an uninvited guest to Turtle Island (North America) who attended Matriarchs Uprising Festival, I am thankful for the space that Matriarchs Uprising provides anyone to engage in the worldviews of the Indigenous female artists, who through their simple acts of being , allow me to witness various ways to simultaneously be brave, firm, welcoming, soft, tender, and powerful.
Matriarchs Uprising Festival manages to take a meaningful turn towards the importance of bodily experience as it merges verbal conversation and movement in such a way that embodiment and lived experience are put at the forefront of compassion, care, and strength in remembering, living in the present, and being mindful for the future.
What is a mother?
A mother is a caregiver who has the power to sustain life. It is through the most subtle interactions between babies and their primary caretakers that the body can have its first experiences of reciprocity and emotional attunement. The attachments formed will hopefully act as a secure base from which one can explore the world as stated by van der Kolk (2015) in his book, The Body Keeps the Score.
Recurring themes of the festival are the womb, Mother Earth’s elements, and what is passed on from generation to generation. Throughout the festival, audiences, and workshop participants were able to explore these themes through improvisational tasks that allowed for a more embodied experience of various Indigenous worldviews, performances, and discussions between people of different international backgrounds.
Within the context of Canada’s colonial history and the colonial structure’s attempts at Indigenous erasure, Indigenous matriarchs, their presence, their labour, their stories, and what they pass on to the next generations hold valuable roles within cultural resurgence and land stewardship. It is exactly these roles and stories of Mother Earth, Indigenous mothers and Indigenous daughters, from diverse Indigenous backgrounds, that
Matriarchs Uprising Festival centres through movement workshops, discussions held in a circle, and performances.
Who is your mother?
For Sophie Dow, this is a question that roots back to the late Margaret Harris, who is Margaret Grenier’s mother, within the lineage of Dancers of Damelahamid. The question found its way to Dow through Starr Muranko, Raven Spirit Dance’s Co-Artistic Director, and Olivia C. Davies, Matriarchs Uprising’s Artistic Director. In her movement workshop, Dow asked this question with a spark of excitement in her eyes at the Matriarchs Uprising Festival to invite others to search through the body for stories and memories that describe one’s mother. This invited the movers in the space to pensively settle into their backspace and begin their embodied queries with stories and memories of their own mothers. Later, Dow had the participants explore the womb space through an improvised score, where they started smaller and more inwards, eventually transitioning to more external and expansive explorations.
It was a well-rounded experience to invoke matriarchal lineages in the space, to discuss the related stories, and even more so to have a chance to carry these thoughts and reflections through the body with movement.
In Ñswe niiminwinan (3 Dances), a split bill between Sophie Dow, Samantha Sutherland, and Santee Smith of Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, Dow explores the question “who is your mother” by sharing her experience of having two mothers— one birth mother and one adoptive mother. With the use of recorded text and a three-chaptered movement performance, Dow so bravely shares her reflections and experience of her birth mother’s diary that was written when Sophie was in her birth mother’s womb.
In Samantha Sutherland’s kaqwiⱡȼI, Sutherland calls upon her matriarchal lineage through her mother tongue. She includes a recording of her grandmothers speaking in their Indigenous dialect, Ktunaxa, as she embodies the language through movement. Sutherland has been learning Ktunaxa herself, and in the piece speaks the language while moving to its cadence, history, and meaning. This performance was her way of deepening her understanding of the language through embodied exploration.
Kaha:wi Dance Theatre presented a solo that was created and performed by Santee Smith. Smith’s work explored regeneration, generational continuance, and one’s umbilical ties to land and water, addressing the cycles of Yethi’nihsténha tsyonhwentsyà:te or Mother Earth.
How does a mother birth and create? Labour.
When watching these works that evoke sensations and reflections around the womb and our umbilical ties to our mothers, our mother tongues, and to our Mother Earth, it is imperative to acknowledge the labour, not just of mothers in labour but also of these Indigenous female artists to birth such honest and striking works.
Why do mothers go through this labour?
One cannot help but reflect on the unremunerated and often unseen labour of mothers. Matriarchs Uprising does an outstanding job of centring the stories that hold this labour. These Indigenous female artists and their artistic expressions are each a testament to their matriarchal lineages and their future generations.
Matriarchs Uprising’s Artistic Director, Olivia C. Davies, has one daughter and another on the way. As a mother and artist, Davies expressed in her opening speech at Ñswe niiminwinan, that the work she does in general and with the festival, is in huge part for the purpose of a better world for future generations.
In her curator note for this 5th year of Matriarchs Uprising, she writes:
As a curator of the platform that supports Indigenous women exploring their choreographic expression through Contemporary Indigenous dance and storytelling, I am continuously growing in my understanding of what it means to hold space for meaningful connection. Our festival seeks to amplify the stories shared by these creators whose work reaches into the past, to better understand the present and tell new narratives of the future.
This year’s theme of Indigenous Futurism is shared through the portals opened by the artists from Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa with a selection of dance and film that consider what it means to reclaim our Indigenous heritage and be a good ancestor. As artists, we find ourselves asking what legacy do I leave behind and how might there be an opening for old teachings to manifest once again?
Conceived in 2019, Matriarchs Uprising is an annual performance festival that celebrates contemporary female Indigenous dance. This year’s Matriarchs Uprising Festival was held from Feb 13-18, 2023. Held on unceded Coast
Salish Territory, this year’s festival offered a program of live performances, a virtual reality dance film, classes, community workshops, circle conversations, and an online film series! The offerings were led by local and international Indigenous artists from across Turtle Island, Australia and Aotearoa. More information about the festival can be found on www.matriarchsuprising.com
Tin Gamboa is a Filipina emerging writer and dance artist who is primarily based in the traditional homelands of the Musqueam,Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, in a place now commonly known as Vancouver, Canada. Her research and arts practice begins with the body as the centre, conduit, and catalyst for self-reflection and change. Intrigued by the reciprocal cycles within and between the self and larger social culture, her personal practice focuses on patterns, habits and behaviours that either change or permeate through multiple generations and how these impact societal common myths and group cooperation. She recently completed a Master of Fine Arts Degree at Simon Fraser University and is now focusing on interdisciplinary practices that would foster a cross-cultural arts practice between Manila and Vancouver.
