Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage is a love letter to diverse Indigenous performance compiled and edited by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Kathleen Irwin, and Moira J. Day. They eschew a pan-Indigenous understanding, instead emphasizing the variety of methods, practices, and forms of production in Indigenous performance. Each selected essay “places Indigenous performance in dialogue with Western perspectives,” working out of and within what is now Canada (xxix).
A performance event, Performing Turtle Island, took place in Saskatchewan in 2015. That cultural event brought together a multiplicity of Indigenous performers and performance modalities. The essays in this 2019 compilation expand upon these modalities, using language and embodiment as the primary influences on cultural meaning-making in performance for each practitioner. The editors curated the selections to demonstrate the breadth of Indigenous performance as “a space of creativity, knowledge practice, criticality, and unknowing—a space shared if only partially with...
