GOING HOME STAR – TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION choreography by Mark Godden, based on a story by Joseph Boyden. Presented by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet at the Sony Centre (1 Front East). Friday and Saturday (February 5 and 6) at 7:30 pm. $54-$115. 1-855-872-7669, ticketmaster.ca.
Going Home Star is a story ballet like no other.
Rather than fussing with swans, mythical creatures or classic tales from European literature, the full-length Royal Winnipeg Ballet work looks to generate beauty from the ugliness of Canada’s residential school system and the intergenerational reverberations of that disastrous policy on indigenous families.
Produced by the RWB to mark the company’s 75th anniversary season, its creation was supported by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a travelling government panel established to collect and share testimonies about residential schools and guide a process of reconciliation for families and communities, churches, governments and Canadians.
The participation of the TRC, as well as that of ballet supporter Elder Mary Richard (Ah Kha Ko cheesh) – the ballet is dedicated to her – and RWB board member, actor/producer Tina Keeper (Cree), kept a culturally diverse creative team vigilant about working with a story that wasn’t necessarily their own.
“There was a feeling among the creators, a sense of personal responsibility and humbleness and, for some of us, also feeling like you’re an outsider, like it’s not your story to tell,” says choreographer Mark Godden on the phone from Montreal.
“And yet it is – it’s something we’ve inherited. It was incumbent upon us to always be aware that this is a story that is still working itself out.”
The creative team honoured those cross-cultural sensitivities with smudging ceremonies and soundings with elders and community members, and, says Godden, “significant amounts of time spent working things out in conversation.”
For all the care taken, this ballet was still developed on a tight 11-month timeline, original music (by Christos Hatzis) and all.
“Creativity is an aggressive act,” says Godden. “You have to ignore a whole bunch of stuff in order to get some kind of movement forward. There’s a time for talking and a time for creating.”
Yet when Godden finally started working on the piece after listening to the stories of survivors and families streamed online by the Commission, he was at a loss how to begin amalgamating the material into a classical ballet framework.
“Those testimonies are so raw, and they incised me in such a strong way – it seemed like such an open wound. I didn’t know how really to pick it up, let alone make a work with it.”
Eventually, he found a way in.
“It became apparent to me that we could still work within the ballet idiom and that it was a matter of fictionalizing.”
That’s when writer Joseph Boyden joined the team. The author of award-winning novels The Orenda and Three Day Road wrote a synopsis to serve as a spine, a narrative lifeline to anchor Godden’s movement.
“Many of his characters were saying things that I felt needed to be said in the ballet,” says Godden. “They were fiction but spoke of a truth of the past. And a potential way of moving forward.”
Literally. Where Boyden writes of the burden of the past, Godden and the dancers make that burden physically legible where Boyden writes of torching a residential school, Godden renders that incendiary act in theatrical terms using a scale model.
Godden still sounds awestruck as he speaks of the deep respect for each other’s practices that all the participants brought with them to the project.
“Many of our ideas were on parallel paths, but the way in which we craft their expression is really different.”
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