Annapolis Royal
After a long drive and a day of flyering, talking to the media and in general having a good time in Halifax, we headed to Annapolis Royal for our first Nova Scotia show, yesterday, November 14th, the 400th anniversary of Lescarbot’s play.
Of course, we had to pay a visit to the “birthplace of drama” (really the birthplace of cultural genocide on Turtle Island), the Port Royal settlement. Neptune wasn’t all that happy to see us and gave a rainy reception to prove it.
Neptune even blew apart the umbrella that was keeping our camera dry. Fortunately, Trickster gave us a way to use this to our advantage. You’ll be able to see it all on video soon enough.
Back in Annapolis, we set up at the King’s Theatre, a wonderful space run by truly kind people who really care about the arts and what they mean.
Our show went well and the talkback was, um, heated….
It started off as a discussion about whether or not we could look at a 1606 play through 2006 eyes and degenerated into an argument where members of Musique 400, clearly not getting the distunction between cultural genocide (appropriating elements of native culture, re-shaping them to serve a colonialist purpose, then widely distributing them to effectively re-create perception of natives) and actual, physical genocide (killing people), decided to call our play “bullshit”.
While they seemed very dedicated to their arguments, they didn’t want to have their images associated with them in our documentary and demanded we stop filming, claiming that other people in the audience felt the same, which, we found out later, wasn’t the case.
In fact, the rest of the audience, and Annapolis Royal in general, seemed ready to take a closer look at the role that Lescarbot’s play has really played in history.
(this post has been expanded since it originally appeared)
