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1630 Columbia Street, Eugene, OR

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For the past decade, Theresa May, professor of Theatre Arts, and Marta Lu Clifford (Chinook, Cree, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde), Elder in Residence, have taught an upper-division seminar in Contemporary Native Theatre. This course applies Indigenous methodologies and frameworks to plays and performances by contemporary North American Indigenous dramatists, demonstrating, as one student said recently, “Native theatre is Indigenous methodologies in action.” Join May and Clifford as they share their experience and that of some of their students.

How are contemporary Indigenous playwrights and theorists forwarding the project of decolonization, for themselves, their communities, for North American Indigenous networks, and for settler society? How are these artists exposing, resisting the legacies of colonialism? How is their work creating spaces of cultural revitalization, community healing? How do their plays celebrate survivance through representation of thriving cultures, traditions and languages? Can theatre intervene in systems of oppression (past and present) assert sovereignty, and envision Native futures?

But that’s just half of it. If plays are road maps to lived experience, to study them, even as literature, is to encounter that experience, to come into relation with the stories and events, and to be changed. As students reflect on their own relationship to the plays and articles they read, they learn to reflexively express a relationship to the experiences and events in the literature in light of their own subject positions—sometimes seeing their own experience, histories, families, and education in new ways. Because May and Clifford teach this course as an expression of their own relationship with one another and with the course material, students come into relation with the material and one another, provoking revelations, openings, emotions, and new-found responsibilities for their new knowledge.

In their talk, they would like to walk you through not only the course content, but the moments of realization and transformation that often occur over the term.

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