For nearly 50 years, the National Arts Centre has been Canada’s only bilingual centre for performing arts, with separate theatre departments devoted to producing English and French theatre.
However, that structure will soon be altered.
In what’s being described as a major development, the NAC has revealed plans to launch a new indigenous theatre department.
The new department will join the English and French theatres, both of which have been in operation since the Elgin Street arts centre opened in 1969.
The indigenous theatre will begin its first full season of programming in 2019, the same year as the NAC’s 50th anniversary.
“We’ve discovered that indigenous theatre has a huge body of work that exists that really isn’t being presented on a national stage and isn’t being shared with Canadians,” says Rosemary Thompson, the NAC’s director of communications.
“So we decided it was time to open an indigenous theatre.”
At the moment, little is known about how the department will look.
“We’re giving this some time. We’re not going to rush. We want this to be a success,” says Thompson.
The NAC says the development of the new department comes partly from a relationship that has been built with indigenous artists over the last decade.
In 2007, Peter Hinton, the former artistic director of English Theatre, began to program at least one indigenous play each year, which included works by indigenous playwrights, a production of the seminal The Ecstacy of Rita Joe and even an all-indigenous production of King Lear.
Three years ago, Sarah Garton Stanley, the NAC’s current associate director of English Theatre, helped to co-curate several gatherings.
At these gatherings, indigenous artists and leaders explored the history and size of the indigenous body of work in Canada.
The group has since compiled a list of more than 350 Indigenous Canadian works, says Cole Alvis, an actor of Métis-Irish heritage and executive director of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance.
Alvis attended the NAC’s first gathering in Banff in 2014.
Alvis says the length of the list shows the true depth of indigenous theatre in Canada.
“For anyone that has had very little access or awareness of indigenous performance, it shows that this isn’t something new and that we’ve been here creating,” says Alvis.
The fresh understanding of this large body of work helped pave the way for the NAC’s development of the new department, says Stanley.
“There was just a sense out of all of that – and all of the cultural shifts that are occurring – that it really was time for this,” says Stanley.
“It suddenly became really evident that this needed to happen.”
In January, the NAC hosted a month-long celebration of indigenous performance in the wake of last year’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The event addressed the history of residential schools in Canada and focused on aspects of healing following the traumatic past.
Much like the month-long event, Alvis says the new department will address the history of indigeneity in Canada, and help generate a new appreciation and interest for indigenous art and storytelling.
“It takes something that’s been on the margins and it puts it in the centre,” says Alvis.
“In the way that now it’s very difficult to say you don’t know what residential schools are,” he says. “I think it will be very difficult soon to not acknowledge that there is more than just French and English performance on this land.”
Stanley agrees.
“I think we have incredible stories that have yet to be told because we haven’t acknowledged what the real stories are on this land,” she says.