Monthly Archives: October 2024

“Still Our Own Indian Selves”

On November 8, Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa will share her research findings through her talk: “Still Our Own Indian Selves: The Decolonial Possibilites of Student Theatrical Productions at a Former Indian Boarding School.” This program begins at Noon and ends at 1:00. PACIFIC TIME. The presentation is only on Zoom in order to make it available to everyone regardless of time zone. IF you want to attend, please send a message to livelyfoundation@sbcglobal.net  so that we can send you the Zoom codes. The event is presented by The Lively Foundation. It is FREE. IF YOU ARE ABLE, please consider making a donation of $10 – or any other amount – to support Lively’s programs. The following information is Dr.Tria Blu Wakpa’s Abstract and Biography in full.

Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa, Assist. Professor, UCLA’s Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance

Abstract:

In this presentation and workshop, I will first share research that examines student performances that occurred at St. Francis Mission School between the 1930s and 1950s and then offer a workshop that incorporates movement and mindfulness practices based on these findings. Founded by Jesuit officials in 1886, St. Francis operated as an Indian boarding school until 1972 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, located in South Dakota on the lands of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, who are Sicangu Lakota. I posit that officials invested an immense amount of time and resources into staging these productions, because they fulfilled institutional aims by attempting to assimilate and convert Lakota people while shaping and disseminating discourses related to the purported legitimacy, sanctity, and benevolence of St. Francis and its alleged contributions to Lakota people and futurities. I term these methods settler colonial choreographies. Meanwhile, working within material and structural confines, Lakota people found ways to sustain their practices and identities, navigate settler colonial stereotypes and institutional policies, document their experiences and contributions, and otherwise nurture their wellbeing, freedom, and futurities. I refer to these actions as decolonial choreographies. Ultimately, I show that the productions simultaneously supported the self-determination of St. Francis—and by extension the U.S.—and Lakota people. To conclude the session, I will guide attendees in movement and mindfulness practices that are in conversation with the tactics that Native people used to reinterpret student theatrical performances at St. Francis and support their holistic health.

Bio:

Tria Blu Wakpa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She received a Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching center community-engaged, decolonizing, and movement analysis methodologies to examine the history and politics of dance and other holistic practices—such as theatrical productions, athletics, and yoga—for Indigenous peoples in and beyond structures and institutions of confinement. She is a mother, scholar, poet, and practitioner of Indigenous dance, Indigenous Hand Talk (sign language), martial arts, and yoga. In addition, she is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief for Race and Yoga, the first peer-reviewed and open-access journal in the emerging field of critical yoga studies. Her first book project, Choreographies in Confinement, contextualizes dance, theatrical productions, basketball, and/or yoga at two sites for Native children on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota: a former Indian boarding school and a tribal juvenile hall. Her writings have been translated into French and Portuguese and appeared in academic journals and books. In 2023, Professor Blu Wakpa’s article, “From Buffalo Dance to Tatanka Kcizapi Wakpala, 1894-2020: Indigenous Human and More-than-Human Choreographies of Sovereignty and Survival,” won the American Society for Theatre Research’s Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize “for the best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal or edited collection.” This same year, she was named the Fulbright Association’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Dance Lecture Awardee. She has held major fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Program.

 

Shostakovich & Brahms: Amazing Performance

The San Francisco Symphony performed the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1, in A minor, Opus 77(99) and the Brahms Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Opus 98, October 5, at the Davies Symphony Hall. This listener is still standing to applaud it was such great music performed majestically. Music Director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conducted with strength and understanding of masterpieces of two great composers

Dmitri Shostakovich, composer (1906 – 1975)
From the very first sound from the violin, my whole being straightened up in attention to the exquisite music made by one draw of bow across instrument. Sayaka Shoji, the soloist, plays the “Recamier” Stradivarius violin, ca. 1729, loaned to her by Ueno Fine Chemicals Industry, Ltd. The violin may have been played by other outstanding musicians, but I believe it had been waiting four centuries for its ideal partner, Ms Shoji. Shostakovich made this concerto a marathon challenge for the violinist. She performs continuously. She must run a rocky path and up a steep mountain, something like climbing Half Dome. There is a small sign requiring the violinist to meditate; she climbs high enough to bring the music to stillness but never to a stop. There are moments she shares with a flute and a clarinet both supporting her pilgrimage. If you love Shostakovich’s music, and I do, this is a profound message. It is alive with the philosophical melody of the first movement, Nocturne. The Scherzo contains the composer’s laughs at a dictator’s cruelty. Folk dance is suggested, but it is not for jolly folk. It is rough and creepy. The third movement, Passacaglia, blossoms into nine variations led by the horns and more wind instruments. Their wind blows through each variation turning into a funeral call. Ms Shoji’s cadenza has a wild sadness and brings more of the folk dance back onto the stage as though the energetic dancers are crazed by loss. From the cadenza the music pours into rousing bagpipe sounds and a non-stop party of all the musicians, folks, and roaming strangers, a revel of jumping, running, and celebrating joy in this moment.

Johannes Brahms, composer, (1833 – 1897)

Brahms. The long wait for him to produce his first symphony is a familiar story. He terrorized himself thinking of Beethoven following him, intimidating his writing. He began making notes and sketches in 1850, but the tremendous, glorious Symphony No. 1 debuted in 1876. His Symphony No. 4 was a triumph and the last of his symphonies. The performance by SF Symphony, October 5, led by Esa-Pekka Salonen, affected the listener’s heart while emotion was spoken by beautiful, quiet, lyrical passages, Allegro non troppo. Behind the first movement, and behind each movement, there is always something that cannot be named: a texture, interactions of instruments, a thought for the world. Brahms was a great intellect as well as a great musician. His writing found ways to allow us to hear the music with all our attention and yet be aware that there is something we will never see. In his writing, he broke some classical ways. In the program’s essay,, the late, wonderful writer Michael Steinberg explains how a seemingly small step changed every thing. “Almost everyone was upset over what appears now one of the most wonderful strokes in the work, the place where Brahms seems to make the conventional, classical repeat of the exposition but changes one chord after eight measures, thereby opening undreamed-of harmonic horizons….” This must be what a master of the technique as well as of the sound can do. “One small step” could change everything. Then, it is like breathing, something also easy, complicated, and brilliant. Brahms mines the Baroque and Renaissance music for something new, inspired by Bach’s Cantata No. 150. He did not try to do “authentic” ancient music; he discovered how he could understand it and then do it but differently. The entire symphony is full of energy even when the music is quiet. Passion drives the music, but it never colors outside the lines. Great and true passion lets us learn many possibilities and unifies the world.