“A Pueblo Elder told me, the purpose of your life is to find your face.” So says Daystar, also known as Rosalie Jones, a professor in Trent’s Indigenous Studies Department, and renowned pioneer in merging Indigenous and modern dance.
Daystar and Friends: The Dreamed Imagination, A Celebration of the 70-year Marker of Life was presented last Thursday to Saturday at Nozhem, the First People’s Performance Space. The presentation was, as the title suggests, a celebration of Daystar’s 70 years of life. Fellow dancers and choreographers Norma Araiza and Sandra Lamouche, as well as students in Daystar’s Indigenous masked dance and storytelling course came together to celebrate the occasion in dance.
The evening began with a short piece presented by several of the student dancers. They emerged onto the stage which, through their movements, was immediately transformed into the natural world of birds, rocks, and earth.
The second piece was a solo presented by Araiza, a Yaqui/Mexican artist now based in Toronto, and who will be teaching in the department next term. For this show, Araiza was brought to Trent by Indigenous Performance Initiatives (IPI), an initiative led by Marrie Mumford, Trent Faculty and Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Arts and Literature. Through the IPI Mumford is able to bring professional Indigenous artists to Trent, something that Daystar says is “a key part of the learning process,” for students at Trent.
Araiza’s first piece delved into a common theme of the night: change and aging. Specifically, the highly dramatic piece explores an Indigenous woman’s encounter with menopause, and the process of transforming from a maiden and mother to a Namuli (grandmother in Yaqui). In this powerful piece, Araiza’s expressive movements and captivating facial expressions burned with the power of the transformation, leading to the eventual acceptance to join the women that had come before her.
Pukawiss, The Disowned One, a work by Trent MA student Sandra Lamouche, featured a touching and joyous performance by Kelly King as the lead role. The audience smiled, laughed, cried, and was generally captivated as Pukawiss discovered the natural world in all its struggles and triumphs. King’s five hoop dance at the end of the piece, the rings extended several feet on either side of her body, was definitely a highlight of the night.
The centerpiece of the evening was Daystar’s Allegory of the Cranes, another piece focused on change and aging. More than this, Daystar explains that “the theme of the piece is a woman who is looking for her own self.” Here the Pueblo saying about finding your face is played out. Led through the aging process by an oft-masked trickster figure, Ksiistsikomm, performed by the talented Keith MacFarlane, Nitsitapiw Aakii (Alone Women), performed by Daystar, is at first daunted by her aging and propped up with crutches. When Ksiistsikomm takes her crutches away, she must learn to stand on her own, finding her own true face in the process.
The penultimate piece was another stunning performance by Araiza, this time playing La Catrina, a conflicted death character, torn between her duty to usher people into the underworld and her desire to express her sexuality; La Catrina was yet another example on this night of a woman struggling to be true to herself.
The evening concluded with a festive and irreverent group piece featuring dances by students wearing their self-created masks. Alligators, monkeys, peacocks, and all other manner of strange and wonderful creatures emerged from the masked dancers, reminding everyone present of the central purpose of the evening: to celebrate.
For Daystar, at Nozhem “things are created in this space that cannot happen anywhere else.” One of these things is surely the joining of Indigenous dance, modern dance, and teaching into one organic process, as was witnessed in this performance.
As an artist, Daystar’s drive is to “carry modern dance into the Indigenous context.” “Indigenous theatre and dance,” she says, “are in the process of evolving…The people working with this process will take it forward.” This involves finding a balance between teaching and continuing traditions on the one hand and change and creative interpretation on the other. “You choose very carefully the stories you are going to tell.” “We have to be very respectful of the way things are done.”
Daystar has been at Trent since 2005, and the night’s performance was a celebration of this time. For her, Indigenous Studies at Trent “fits like a glove with what I do.”
