Native Voices At The Autry Supports And Inspires Native American Playwrights Thr
By: Reynard Loki May. 04, 2009
Native Voices at the Autry continues its cycle of play development with its annual Playwrights Retreat and Festival of New Plays featuring top theater professionals serving as mentors to established and aspiring Native American Playwrights. The program greatly increases the field of Native writers and brings greater visibility to Native theater.
Held in collaboration with San Diego State University’s School of Theatre, Television, and Film and La Jolla Playhouse, the Playwrights Retreat is an annual event that pairs selected Native playwrights with professional directors, dramaturgs, actors, and designers for an eight-day retreat to develop their work. During their residency, playwrights meet with their respective creative team (director, dramaturg, and cast) as well as a design team who responds to and participates in the workshop phase of the revision process. The plays are presented as staged readings before live audiences. Commentary and feedback are solicited from audiences through post-performance discussions with the playwright, director, dramaturg, and actors and through written audience surveys.
Dawn Dumont (Cree, Métis) has written for television, radio, and the stage. Three of her plays, The Red Moon (Love Medicine) (2007), Visiting Elliot (2006), and The Trickster vs. Jesus Christ (2005), were produced by CBC Radio. In 2008, she was the head comedy writer for Celebrate: A National Aboriginal Day Special that was broadcast on CBC Radio, and her play The Common Experience is scheduled for broadcast this year. She is a frequent contributor for CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera and was recently featured on The Debaters. She is also a writer and script editor for By the Rapids, an animation comedy series produced by Big Soul Productions and broadcast on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). Fancy Dancer was workshopped during Native Voices at the Autry’s 2007 Playwrights Retreat and was featured at the 2007 Indigenous World Theatre Reading Series and the 2008 Two Worlds Native American Theater and Film Festival.
Carolyn Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee) is a poet, playwright, and scholar whose poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been collected in Outfoxing Coyote and the forthcoming Echolocation; she is the editor of two anthologies, Hozho: Walking in Beauty (with Paula Gunn Allen) and Through the Eye of the Deer (with Carol Comfort); and she is the author of a children’s book, Coyote Speaks (with Ari Berk). She is the founding director of the American Indian Theatre Collective, and her play Ghost Dance is currently in development with the Los Angeles Theatre Project. She is also a songwriter and member of the all-women Native drum group The Mankillers, whose fourth CD was released earlier this year. The Frybread Queen was workshopped during Native Voices at the Autry’s 2007 Playwrights Retreat and 2008 First Look Series. www.carolyndunn.com.Terry Gomez (Comanche) is a published and produced playwright, writer, director, actor, educator, and painter. Her play InterTribal has been produced at the Public Theater in New York City. Other produced work includes Tobacco Leaves, Numunu Waiipunu: The Comanche Women, Antigone, A Day at the Nighthawk, Carbon Black, Rain Dance, Melanin, Acedia, and The Woman with a Mustache. She has been a director for the Two Worlds Native Theater Festival and the Cool Side of Hell Theater Troupe, Institute of American Indian Arts. She is also a member of the planning committee for the Native Theater Festival at the Public Theater.
Arigon Starr (Kickapoo, Creek) is a singer, songwriter, musician, actor, artist, and playwright. She has released four award-winning CDs and has appeared in many Native Voices at the Autry workshops and productions. She has toured throughout the U.S. and UK and has performed at many venues including the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Milwaukee Indian Summer Festival, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Her television work includes Showtime’s Barbershop: The Series and ABC’s General Hospital. Her comedy radio series Super Indian, produced by Native Voices at the Autry, was syndicated nationally by Native Voice One, and is now being transformed into a graphic novel. Recently, she joined The Cast of Red Ink, a piece that features her own play, plus new pieces by Diane Glancy and Drew Hayden Taylor, at the Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis. The Red Road was developed and produced by Native Voices at the Autry and is currently being adapted for its radio broadcast in July. Native Voices at the Autry is an Equity theater company devoted to developing and producing new works for the stage by Native American Playwrights under Artistic Director Randy Reinholz, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, along with Executive Director Jean Bruce Scott. Established at the Autry National Center in 1999, Native Voices provides a supportive and collaborative setting for Native American and First Nations playwrights, actors, and theater artists to develop their work and see it fully realized. Native Voices’ 2009–2010 season marks the theater company’s tenth anniversary, having produced twelve festivals of new play, six playwright retreats, and over eighty workshops and public staged readings of new plays. Native Voices has produced fourteen new plays, including Urban Tattoo, The Baby Blues, Jump Kiss, The Buz’Gem Blues, Please Do Not Touch the Indians, Kino & Teresa, Stone Heart, The Red Road, The Berlin Blues, Super Indian, Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders, Salvage, and Wings of Nights Sky, Wings of Morning Light. Native Voices has been instrumental in the success of the Native Radio Theater Project, a collaboration between Native Voices at the Autry and Native American Public Telecommunications. Through its Young Native Voices Theater Education Project, Native Voices provides workshops and residencies for young Native writers and actors resulting in public staged readings of 5- to 10-minute plays and student/community productions of traditional stories performed for community and tribal audiences. Visit Native Voices online at www.nativevoicesattheautry.org and www.myspace.com/nativevoices. The mission of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film is to provide quality education on the undergraduate and graduate levels for students seeking careers in all areas of live theatre and the moving arts; to support the University’s central mission to educate the whole person in the liberal arts tradition; and to foster academic and creative interaction between established and emerging artists on campus and off.The nationally acclaimed, Tony Award-winning La Jolla Playhouse is renowned for its tradition of creating the most exciting and adventurous new work in regional theatre. The Playhouse was founded in 1947 by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer, and is considered one of the most well-respected not-for-profit theatres in the country. Numerous Playhouse productions have moved to Broadway, including Big River, The Who’s Tommy, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, A Walk in the Woods, Dracula, Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays, the Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, Jersey Boys, The Farnsworth Invention and 33 Variations. Located on the UC San Diego campus, La Jolla Playhouse is made up of three primary performance spaces: the Mandell Weiss Theatre, the Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre, and the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for La Jolla Playhouse, a state-of-the-Art Theatre complex which features the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre.
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