Canadian
theatre 
Sakipitcikan
Ondinnok
 |
| Ondinnok Productions in Manawan |
Beneath you will find information related to the genre of healing theatre practiced by Ondinnok Productions in Manawan, an aboriginal community in Québec. CASP has translated a number of documents it has received from Ondinnok about its various productions, two of which involve Shakespearean adaptation into an Amerindian mythological context.
"In 1992, Délima Niquay stood up in Manawan to denounce violence in all its forms and the sexual abuse that the women and children were victims of. She formed a group that broke the conspiracy of silence by engaging the community in a process of healing that respects Amerindian values … After several meetings, a working group on violence took form and gave birth to MIKISIW––for hope, which is now one of the forces for change in Manawan.
With a base philosophy the betterment of the condition of women, of men, and of the children of Manawan, the objectives of the MIKISIW group are multiple and the dossiers numerous: justice, mental health, finding voice, prevention, communication. To aid them in their goals they retained theatre as one of the ways leading to change and reflection. In 1994, the MIKISIW group approached the Amerindian ONDINNOK Productions to develop a community theatre project in Manawan.
After two years of work and two productions, OPITOWAP in 1995 and SAKIPITCIKAN in 1996, the theatre group took root in the Manawan community and had a major impact on the collective conscience of the Atikamekw."
Note: Manawan is one of the three communities of the Atikamekw nation. The name of the community is an Atikamekw word that means "place where one gathers eggs." The Manawan Band inhabits the Manouane Reserve in Québec, which is located 120 km west of La Tuque and 72 km north of Saint-Michel-des-Saints, on the southern shore of Lake Metabeskega and covers 771.36 hectares. The reserve is home to 1334 aboriginal people who speak Atikamekw and French. The territory was granted reserve status in 1906. Facilities available on the reserve include a school, a fire station, a nursing care station, a church, a community hall, a recreation centre, an outdoor rink, and a community radio station. Economic activities include trapping, handicrafts, logging, a food supplier, construction, video rental, and transportation. For more information on the history of the Atikamekw and Manawan, click here.
Ondinnok Productions
"Ondinnok is a Huron word designating a theatrical ritual of healing that unveils the secret desire of the spirit.
Theatre is at the heart of the development of all societies. Our theatre seeks to reconquer an imaginary, a land of dreams, to repatriate a memory in order to unleash a future." (Ondinnok)
"Founded in 1985 by Yves Sioui Durand and Catherine Joncas, Ondinnok Productions gave itself the mandate of making aboriginal culture known via theatre.
The company is known for the ingeniousness of its theatrical creations that propose a theatre of Amerindian mythology, a theatre of transformation that originates from the sources of aboriginal millenary culture …
In working with the MIKISIW group, Ondinnok realized a new direction in addressing itself to aboriginal communities. The blossoming of Amerindians occurs through the taking on of the imaginary territory bequeathed by their ancestors. This experience pursues itself through a desire for origins and an opening to the world. The mythological theatre of Amerindians in Ondinnok is an essential and unique site for finding voice and for reflection on identity that overturns taboos and stereotypes."
Sakipitcikan
"Sakipitcikan was performed at the Community
Centre in Manawan on the 29th of May (1996). There were five performances
of the work that brought together more than half od the Manawan population.
The presentation of that evening established the artistic quality and
the impact of the show on the collective conscience of Manawan. It was
not a question of an end but of a beginning. This theatre is born of
a desire to give voice, to denounce violence and abuses and to enable
a healing process.
Sakipitcikan is based on a free reading of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, on improvisations, and the dreams that form the frame of this collective story. Two families confront each other, that of Kinuje, the Man-fish, and that of Kokodje, the man-woman cannibal, in the face of chaos, broken promises that result in the loss of roots.
Sakipitcikan is a love story. Love of the characters for each other, but also love of the actors for their community, for the Atikamekw people. Love is always a transgression, an acto fo liberty. This transformative love is it still possible in a fallen world, corrupted by unconscious mythological forces?"
In correspondence with CASP, Catherine Joncas elaborated the following explanation of the plot of Sakipitcikan:
"[With Sakitpitcikan] we chose to adapt Romeo and
Juliet because it is a myth about tragic love and of adolescent
passion and these two themes were the concern of the group with whom
we were working at the time. From the original play we kept the two
feuding families. The father of the first family is a Man-fish, a giant
pike who is a familiar character in the Atikamekw legends. He's poor,
he drinks a lot, he neglects his wife and his children. He's lazy and
funny. He's the father of Shupshac and of Frog.
The father of the second family is a Windigo, a cannibal spirit. He's
rich and always wants more. He drinks also and has an attraction to
very young girls. He became a cannibal spirit because he was abused
as a child by the priests at the boarding school. He's the father of
Romeo. And these two men have detested each other since their youth.
Effectively, at the moment of their marriage––a collective
marriage as the priests celebrated them in aboriginal communities––at
the moment of their marriage, they were both drunk and each married
the woman destined for the other.
Romeo is in love with Frog, the daughter of Man-fish. But she rejects
him. He then discovers his true Juliet in a young girl who lives with
her grandmother in the forest. They fall in love.
After this, the story gets more complicated.
The character of the Nurse becomes that of the grandmother of Juliet.
Neither Romeo nor Juliet commit suicide. The one who kills himself is
Shupshac, the brother of Frog, because he's unhappy and rejected by
everyone. Frog meanwhile is abused by Windigo and impregnated by him.
Grandmother will give her life for Shupshac and will go to take his
place in the country of the dead. All the characters in the play meet
at the bedside of the grandmother who dies. They all promise to change
and to follow the traditional ways.
All of these adaptive changes came about as a result of improvisations
and work with the actors."
Sakipitcikan, as Roger Echaquan explains in the text we have PDF'd here, is when "one takes the interior path accompanied by hot rocks, when we call on our grandfathers, and in that moment we must remember the time when we lived in the belly of our mother. We remake this voyage from that source. There is great respect in this undertaking. We venerate the mother who bore us and who nourished us at her bosom."
In this light, Sakipitcikan is a unique Shakespearean adaptation
that brings together deeply held aboriginal belief systems with direct
action on communities in need of healing and a profound sense of memorializing
and re-enacting past practices as a mode of theatrical intervention
in the life of a community in distress.
Ondinnok Brochure
Link
to Database
