When I was first approached by Melanie Dreyer-Lude, the Chair of the University of Alberta Drama Department and the Artistic Director of Studio Theatre, to compile a list of Indigenous plays to be possibly performed on the Studio Theatre stage, I was intrigued. It had been eleven years since an Indigenous play was performed on the Timms stage. In Studio Theatre’s 2009/2010 season, I played Annie Mae in Yvette Nolan’s Annie Mae’s Movement, directed by MFA student Jessica Abdallah. In 2021, I have now become the first Indigenous Director in a Studio Theatre season, with Yvette Nolan’s adaptation of The Birds. This is the third time I have directed Yvette’s work and I have to say, the more I delve into her words, the more I realize just how prolific she really is.

Yvette has brilliantly created characters that recognize and challenge the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds collide. In The Birds, she depicts the apocalyptic erasure of birds in the human world with the birds having fled the cities for their own survival. This play provided a unique opportunity to delve into Indigenous ways of knowing and being with the 4th year BFA Acting company without appropriation. Working with this predominantly non-Indigenous class on this Indigenous work with the support of the Drama Department has brought our worlds together in a self determined way. Creating an Indigenous creative process within an educational institution may not seem transformational but it is. Indigenous process inherently disrupts the hierarchy of creative processes. This is especially relevant with where we are in the times of #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs, #BlackLivesMatter, and #MMIWG.

In The Birds, this is represented through the presence of the Swallow, who is referred to in the play but not seen. In the time of enabling constraints, the Swallow joins the company as the unseen but present bird bringing to light the silence of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman and Girls. The students who are graduating this year have received training that not only prepares them for the performative world but the world we truly live in; one that is changing how Indigenous artists engage with the greater theatre landscape. It humbles me to see that with the experience of The Birds, these students will contribute to the change this country needs. Pandemic times being what they are, the run will be streamed. However, the presence of the story and its tellers may still reach through to hearts and minds of the ones that choose to witness.

​

--Reneltta Arluk