A SOLDIER’S TALE directed and choreographed by Michael Greyeyes, written by Tara Beagan, with Louis Laberge-Côté, Keith Barker, Michael Caldwell, Kate Holden, Tamara Podemski, Nancy Latoszewski, PJ Prudat, Jamie Maczko, Daniel McArthur and Ana Groppler. Presented by Signal Theatre and DanceWorks at the Fleck Dance Theatre (207 Queens Quay West). February 20 to 22, 8 pm, matinee Thursday 3 pm. $18.75-$37.25. 416-973-4000, danceworks.ca. See listing.
The recent rash of suicides among Canadian armed forces veterans has raised public awareness of the cost of war on military personnel returning from combat. So Michael Greyeyes’s new full-length show, A Soldier’s Tale, is certainly timely.
Greyeyes’s awareness of military culture goes back to his early years growing up in Saskatchewan as the son of a native armed forces veteran.
“Within my culture veterans are very much recognized for their service,” says Greyeyes, who is Plains Cree. “At our gatherings and powwows and round dances they are always honoured with songs.”
His latent interest in military matters intensified when he was cast in Paul Gross’s 2008 World War I film, Passchendaele.
“The experience was absolutely unforgettable,” he recalls. “It involved a great deal of research. Paul gave us books and asked us to immerse ourselves in the lives of soldiers, so I became really empathetic about what they went through and interested in what happened to them afterwards.”
Greyeyes, who has a long history in dance and theatre as a performer and is currently also a professor of devised theatre and movement practice at York University, started Signal Theatre in 2010 to create hybrid, intercultural works.
With A Soldier’s Tale he hopes to challenge the often stilted paradigm of separate episodic text and movement seen in many dance-theatre productions. In the new work both disciplines are continuously in play: song, text, folk dance and contemporary movement vocabularies blend seamlessly. (Before the production opens, you can see an excerpt February 6 at the COC’s free noon-hour performance series at the Four Seasons Centre.)
The work explores in two distinct acts the fallout of battle on individual warriors. The first is very much from an indigenous perspective, says Greyeyes.
“It’s called Soldier Boy, and it tells the story of a WWII soldier who brings the war home with him, and the destruction that is wreaked on his life and that of his family.”
Greyeyes and his collaborator, playwright Tara Beagan, have placed the second act in 21st century Iraq it’s loosely based on the story of Private Lori Piestewa, a Hopi American soldier who was the first female casualty of the recent conflict.
“I wanted act two to be set in the contemporary era,” he says, “so we could examine the idea that, for soldiers, time periods don’t matter, the locale doesn’t matter, the reasons that we’re fighting don’t matter. For them, the horrors of war remain the same.”
Interview Clips
Michael Greyeyes on devised theatre:
On juggling academia and artistic creation:
On filming Passchendale:
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