2009 PROJECT HOOP CONFERENCE: VIDEOCONFERENCE CONNECTS NATIVE THEATER ARTISTS IN SIX LOCATIONS AROUND INDIAN COUNTRY

Conference Program available for download here (PDF).

Sharing encouragement and positive thoughts amid the economic gloom of 2009, an estimated 75 Native American theater and performing artists gathered in six venues across the country on Thursday, June 18 to take part in the first Project HOOP National Native Theater and Performing Arts Videoconference.

The 2009 HOOP conference linked Native theater groups and communities in Los Angeles, at UCLA; in New York City at Columbia University; in Orono, Maine at the University of Maine; in Oklahoma at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah; the Forest County Potawatomi Reservation in Crandon, Wisconsin; and Haskell Indian Nations University and the American Indian Repertory Theater Company at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.

A popular highlight of the gathering featured staged readings and performance excerpts from new short plays written by students as well as a professional production and a script developed by members of a tribal theater project. In place of a keynote address, a national dialogue, Native Theater and Performing Arts in Turbulent 2009, gave the conferees opportunities to speak out on pressing issues and challenges for Native theater and performing arts today.

Dialogue topics included an assessment of the number of viable companies, projects and productions that are currently happening in the national community, and also the status of individual artists, playwrights, actors, directors, designers, producers and organizers. Hanay Geiogamah, Project HOOP principal investigator and professor of theater in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, moderated the dialogue from the videoconference studio in UCLA’s Powell Library.

Attendees in all six venues responded vigorously when asked to share thoughts on specific actions that could be taken now to improve the overall situation for Native theater and performing arts.

The conference also began a dialogue on proposals to establish a National Native Playwrights Guild and a National Native Theater and Performing Arts Alliance. Action on both proposals was continued through the early Fall season, when a second videoconference is planned. The playwrights guild would function for Indian dramatists in much the same way as the New York-based Dramatists Guild, while the Native Theater and Performing Arts Alliance would provide the Native theater community with services and programs similar to those of the Theater Communications Group (TCG), also based in New York.

“It really made me feel good to hear all that that is going on,” said Professor Julie Pearson Little Thunder, who coordinated the session at Northeastern State in Tahlequah. “I thought the students (in Wisconsin) did a wonderful job, and I was really impressed.” Professor Pearson Little Thunder is a playwright and director and co-founder of the Thunder Road Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as a faculty member at Northeastern State.

Margo Lukens, associate professor of English at the University of Maine and coordinator for the Maine venue, said “We in Maine learned a lot, and we are already looking forward to connecting again in the early fall. This was an unprecedented opportunity to exchange thoughts, news and performances with colleagues around the country. We felt it was a privilege for our group to participate in the conversation with so many seasoned and established people in the national Native American theater scene.”

Professor Lukens is co-editor, with the playwright William Yellow Robe Jr., of Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories,” an anthology of Mr. Yellow Robe’s plays published earlier this year in the Native American Theater Series for Project HOOP. She was joined in the Maine venue by members of the Penoboscot tribal theater project that she and Yellow Robe have helped to developed over the past year at the Indian Island Penobscot tribal community.

Other venue coordinators included Murielle Borst of the Spiderwoman Theater Company, at Columbia University in New York City; Diane Reyer, artistic director of the American Indian Repertory Theater Company in Kansas City, MO., coordinating at the University of Kansas in Lawrence; and Mark Anthony Rolo, coordinating at the venue in Wisconsin with the Forest County Potawatomi Band.

A taped excerpt of Diane Reyner’s newest play, Woven Memory, was performed by members of the American Indian Repertory Theater. Students in Mark Anthony Rolo’s playwriting workshop for the Potowatomi Band read from four new playlets they had written just days before the videoconference event. The titles were The Path to Beauty, The Medicine Man, A Night Within A Day, and Young and Pregnant.

Members of the Penobscot tribal theater project performed an except from Pieces of Us, written by Mr. Yellow Robe in workshop collaboration with the group.

Taking place over a five and a half- hour time span, the session marked the first time a large group of Native American artists gathered in a videoconferencing format.