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Culture Stage

A taste of Chocolate

CHOCOLATE WOMAN DREAMS THE MILKY WAY by Monique Mojica, directed by José A. Colman, with Mojica and Gloria Miguel. Presented by the Chocolate Woman Collective at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse (79A St George). Previews Tuesday-Wednesday (May 31-June 1), opens June 2 and runs to June 19, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2 pm. $20, stu/srs $10. 647-717-6129. See listing


“Who were we in 1491? That’s what drove me to create this,” says veteran Toronto actor/playwright Monique Mojica about her new interdisciplinary show, Chocolate Woman Dreams The Milky Way.

To help her understand her ancestral roots in Panama’s Kuna culture, she’s visited archives, conducted field research and assembled an international team of artists and scholars.

In the show, Mojica plays a semi-autobiographical character who, on a return to Panama, begins falling – “Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole-style” – through different layers of Kuna history and culture.

Along the way, she encounters important characters in the Kuna world view, some of which are played by her and some by Gloria Miguel, the acclaimed founder of NYC’s Spiderwoman Theatre and Mojica’s real-life mother.

For Mojica, an important part of the creative process was the “embodied” research she conducted in Panama.

“I placed myself on the land, in the ocean, on a river, among relatives, and embodied them by assimilating and integrating myself with their vibrations,” says Mojica. “I listened to what it had to tell me, and listened to how my body responded. I put it all in one big vat until I couldn’t hold it in any more. Then the impulse, the gesture, the sound, the word and the text developed from there.”

Molas, colourful textiles that Kuna women are famous for making and wearing, became a metaphor in the show.

“Women who wear molas are sometimes called walking books. Each mola panel is a narrative, and the front and back of a mola blouse many not be exactly the same design. The front can be a different perspective from the back. That’s what we’ve tried to adapt for the stage to be telling the same story from two different perspectives, or two stories that converge at a certain nodal point.”

To make the show as rich and accurate a representation as possible, and citing a commitment to “work with as many indigenous people as possible,” Mojica assembled a diverse international team that includes visual artists (Oswaldo DeLeón Kantule, Erika Iserhoff), an anthropologist (Brenda Farnell) and a composer (Marden Paniza), among others.

One of the challenges Mojica faced was managing and integrating the creative output of these different experts.

“Along the way there’ve been some jarring moments when one discipline doesn’t understand what the other discipline needs to be able to make the leap from the conceptual to the actual. But it’s a process, and we’ve all learned so much from each other.”

Mojica hopes Chocolate Woman will help reinvigorate larger conversations about native identity.

“I became bored to death with my own work where I was always rehashing a victim narrative. I’m tired of the victim story! It’s not that the stories of our oppression are not important, but everyone knows what happened. Now the question is how do we get back to a place where our identities are not dependent on our relationship to invasion colonialism and rupture? How do we get back to that?”

stage@nowtoronto.com

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