CLEARING THE PATH

Abstract

This essay is part of a longer project that examines ways in which Indigenous choreographers are using contemporary dance practices to articulate Indigenous histories and ways of knowing. Here, I focus on Evening in Paris, a dance piece in which Tr'ondek Hwech'in (Han) First Nations choreographer Michelle Olson, from Canada's west coast, investigates the lives and careers of Penobscot cabaret dancer Molly Spotted Elk, of herself, and of her aunt and grandmother. The piece asserts the validity of knowledge accessed in (and through) kinetic impulses followed in a dance studio, using contemporary dance-making practices as part of an Indigenous methodology engaged to admit ways of knowing that have been muted through colonization. The essay argues that Evening in Paris articulates multiple connectivities: between Indigenous dancers over generations and locations, between various dance forms, and between knowing held and accessed in and through bodies and writing. Importantly, writing is expressed not as separate from, but as enfolded within, embodied attunement to connectivity across space and time.

Keywords:

• contemporary dance
• Indigenous epistemology
• Indigenous methodology
• Miguel, Muriel
• Olson, Michelle
• Spotted Elk, Molly

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Marrie Mumford, Michelle Olson and Michelle Raheja for their powerful work and insightful conversations over the years, and to Helen Gilbert, for astute editing advice.

Notes

¹My analysis of Evening in Paris refers to this version. The piece was later presented at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver from 26–29 September 2007.

²Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name of Molliedellis (or Mary Alice) Nelson, born in 1903 on Indian Island, the Penobscot reservation, in what is today Maine (where there are no elk).

³Interviews with Olson in Peterborough, Canada, 3 March 2006, and from the Yukon via Skype, 23 July 2010.

⁴Email correspondence, 1 August 2010.

⁵Premiered at the Chapel Arts Centre in Vancouver on 16 July 2010.