Photo: Kevin Michael Campbell.
In partnership with Cornerstone Theater Company : Cornerstone Theater Company makes new plays with and about communities.
This article is part of an exclusive series about Cornerstone Theater Company 's Hunger Cycle play, Urban Rez, a community -engaged production created in collaboration with members of the Native American community in Los Angeles. Urban Rez, written by Larissa FastHorse, an award -winning playwright and choreographer from the Sicangu Lakota Nation, reflects a contemporary story of urban Indians in Los Angeles through performances that examine the hunger that persists when culture, language, land and identity are denied.
Playwright Larissa FastHorse has worked to develop Urban Rez in response to her communitys specific challenges. Her desire is to provide an experience that blurs the lines between theater, culture, and education and to present the play at outdoor venues, connecting audiences with the lands of the Native people of the Los Angeles Basin. The artistic process began by interacting with indigenous peoples of Southern California and learning about their culture, issues, needs, and aspirations. The end result will be an immersive theater experience that unfolds as part of an interactive cultural fair, held outdoors this spring at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and Kuruvungna Springs.
This series explores the play's development process from the perspective of community members and artists involved in the project. In this interview, scenic designer Shannon Scrofano details the process of building Urban Rez.
Photo: James Cheeks III.
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In the Tongva/Gabrielino tongue, na means place. L.A. still retains select traces of this in some of our street and neighborhood names -- Cahueng(n)a, Topang(n)a, and in full na form it survives at important native sites like Kuruvungna Springs and Hahamongna Park.
Urban Rez, Larissa FastHorse's new work in collaboration with Cornerstone Theater and artistic director Michael John Garc s, explores and explodes the concept of place for the thousands of people of Native descent in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. This includes individuals or families who may have come from other tribal lands across the current U.S. map, as well as people who have descended from tribes that have called this area home for centuries and more -- although they are unrecognized by the U.S. government for their long service to and knowledge of this land.
They keep this place, keep its histories, keep rich knowledge of its possibilities, and keep our attention on its critical, incalculable resources. People like Anna Lopez at Kuruvungna Springs, creating an ancestral garden of native species and Nicholas Hernandez, fighting to keep the Hahamongna Cooperative Nursery thriving in Pasadena. Place-keeping is a term I am thrilled to hear more and more often in dialogues about community capacity, cultural vitality and civic health and equity. It hinges on diverse and direct mutual investment of local stakeholders, shared governance, powers of observation and acknowledgment to bring the implicit assets -- including people -- to the forefront of the way we view places, and encourages nurturing, partnership, and a robust sense of sustenance and maintenance of the places we live, work, visit, preserve and restore.
Photo: James Cheeks III.
Urban Rez hatches directly from the urgency of this need to keep place, and to make its keepers visible in their very diverse narratives. In describing what it means to be part of a tribe, the character Walter explains, Its more than the people. There is a place on this earth that has always been ours. Our DNA is connected to this piece of the planet. We could be anyone, but the land makes us who we are.
This is nothing if not a very prime and prescient moment in political times to consider identity and how it relates to physical land, borders and occupation. Displacement is an overwhelming, immediate part of the contemporary situation. According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) statistics from mid-2015, globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the worlds 24th biggest. Physical land is still intimately tied to the ways many of us survive.
Pre-civilization, humans were entirely defined by place. What could the place grow for you to eat? What materials could be used to make tools? What does the place express in shapes and forms that might be translated to objects or symbols or artworks? That's what there was -- place, as source of physical environs and climate, ecosystem, and terrain which delivered or obstructed the paths of other tribes for trade or disputes or alliances. Certainly the contemporary urban environment in particular has obliterated much of our connection to the land as a provider or source of meaning -- converting it, depleting it or subjugating it. Place is not foregrounded in contemporary life. We force that occupation further, bringing in products from far-flung areas of the globe, repeating best practices haphazardly across geography, copying, pasting and cloning our built environment needs onto the landscape, and cloning our material and food desires as well.
In select corners of dialogue, place has re-emerged as a conversation, a re-recognition of how regionality and locational specificity can express itself through detailed attention to local resources, seasonality, and even in the work of builders/architects (who have been beating this drum for longer than most) who are listening and reflecting our built environments differently -- in shapes, materials, the nature of access, and ecological impact. It's not yet the dominant approach by a long shot, but many artists, thinkers, and like-minded o
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