Two-day play festival brings 'Native Joy' to the stage in Minneapolis
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A two-day celebration of contemporary Indigenous storytelling and performance will take place in Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday night.
The Native Joy Play Festival will feature four short plays centered on themes of joy, humor and resilience.
The festival is produced by SAROS field/works and will be directed by White Earth Nation citizen Ernest Briggs. He, alongside other organizers, said they wanted to break away from storylines that center on trauma-driven narratives in Indigenous communities.
“Native joy for me is getting around with community, getting together with family, laughing and joking,” Briggs said. “I think there's an overarching perception that Indigenous life is just trauma. And I was like, ‘No, there's a lot of joy involved in that too.’”
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Writer and White Earth Nation citizen Marcie Rendon's 10-minute play, "Friends," is in the lineup. The comedy follows a multigenerational family while answering the question: Why did the Creator create lice?
Rendon said she first debuted the short play over 15 years ago. Since then, it’s been produced in various theaters and has been performed in the Ojibwe language.
“So much of my work is really serious,” she said. “Sometimes I get these wild ideas. And this 10-minute piece was one of my wild ideas.”
She said Indigenous communities can find humor and jokes in almost everything.
“It's one of the ways that we have survived, is by our sense of humor and by being able to laugh at so many things,” Rendon said. “Humor is a great healer.”
The Native Joy Play Festival is funded in part by the Arts & Cultural Affairs department in the City of Minneapolis through the Cultural Districts Art Fund. The fund awards grants to artists living within seven districts of Minneapolis, including Franklin Avenue East Cultural District, which has a large Indigenous population.
Arts and cultural affairs director Ben Johnson said the festival encourages people to safely come together in community.
“There's just incredible theater-making here,” Johnson said. “It’s a very robust, vibrant part of our community.”
Rendon shared the festival not only highlights playwrights but other Indigenous creatives as well.
“It's an opportunity for people to see Native actors perform. There's sort of this mythology that there aren't any Native actors around town, but there really are, and they're the ones that will be performing these four pieces,” she said.
Other plays in the lineup include:
“Aunty is a Verb” by Lee Cataluna
“Dance” by Jasmine Rochelle Goodspeed
“Slow Your Roll” by P.C. Verrone
“My hope is that people will come together in community and get a chance to see a show like this, laugh for a few, laugh for about an hour or so,” Briggs said.
The festival begins at 7 p.m. each night at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. It’s free and open to the public.
Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
