Most recent print edition: Jul 28

– Last updated: Today

• About Us
• |
• Contact Us
• |
• Advertising
• |
• Submissions

Arts

TRU students first in Canada to study new aboriginal play

Rebekah Seagle & Kaleena Loehr

The class of Canadian Studies 312 is the privileged first in Canada to analyze local playwright Kevin Loring’s premier work.

Loring’s play, “Where the Blood Mixes,” incorporates traditional aboriginal storytelling into a modern context.

Developed and taught by longtime TRU professor Ginny Ratsoy, the course examines plays by native Canadians.

Course topics include traditional storytelling and staged works, as well as issues like ethnicity, appropriation, hybridity, historical revisionism, canon formation and cultural stereotyping.

A former student of Ratsoy’s, Loring visited the class earlier this semester to discuss the themes and meanings behind his work. In fact, one of Ratsoy’s classes was where Loring got his start.

“It’s where I discovered aboriginal theatre,” he said.

“It’s really quite an honour to be studied.”

Ratsoy said the author’s class visit was a treat for the students, an opportunity to talk to the author in person about his work. And Loring, by Ratsoy’s account, “is a really swell guy.”

The play is set in Lytton, B.C., in the present, but it deals with the effects and aftermath of residential schools on native families. The play shows the issue remains cuttingly relevant.

“The title of the play does not mean where the rivers meet,” Loring said. “It is about the place inside the heart where the blood mixes … what’s beneath it, where the words come from.”

And even though the story contains tragic elements, it speaks as a triumph of human spirit and perseverance.

Aboriginal playwrights often take an unexpected approach to drama, Ratsoy said. The humour in the play acts as a coping mechanism and relieves stress.

“It is a play with very real characters,” Ratsoy said, “and could make people uncomfortable at the same time as it entertains them.”

That was certainly the case for Ratsoy when she saw the play.

“I was close to tears,” she said. “[I was] impressed by the mixing of ordinariness and spirituality and mythology.”

At the end of the tour, “Where the Blood Mixes” was taken to Loring’s hometown of Lytton.

“It was amazing,” Loring said. “It was beautiful. It was more than theatre, it was family.

“I hope that they take away a little bit of my community, a sense of the people and the place. At the very least they will take away a good fish story that is in fact true and an honest portrait of a community grappling with its past.”

Loring is currently acting in Western Canada Theatre’s production of George Ryga’s “The Ecstasy of Rita Joe”, playing April 9 through 18 at the Sagebrush Theatre.