Harbourfront Centre joins celebrated Indigenous artist Santee Smith at her studio for a behind-the-scenes look at her latest contemporary work, Homelands.
Driving through the rural backroads of Hagersville, a small hamlet west of Hamilton, Ontario, long expanses of blue sky and snow-covered fields flash by our windows in a pastoral scene befitting our classic Canadian winters. It’s eerily quiet out there — no city pollution, few cars, and even fewer people, but within this muted scene, we’re given a moment to listen to a different soundscape: the ones that are nature-made. Wind whipping, ferocious through the air, branches that crackle on barren trees, snow dripping under the rays of a February sun.
It is fitting to be introduced to Mother Earth’s landscape like this. We’re minutes away from Six Nations of the Grand River, the most populous First Nations reserve in Canada, home to one of the country’s leading Indigenous multidisciplinary artists, Santee Smith. From the Kahnyen’kehàka (Mohawk) Nation, Turtle Clan from Ohswé:ken (Six Nations of the Grand River), Smith is the founder and artistic director of Kaha:wi Dance Theatre and an internationally recognized leader in the performing arts. She has invited us to her studio for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at her latest work, Homelands. Harbourfront Centre is presenting its world premiere in the spring, part of the 2023 season of our international contemporary dance series, Torque.
It’s a rare experience to be allowed into Smith’s intimate space of creation. Her artist studio, Talking Earth, once the home of her father’s pottery workshop (Smith comes from a long line of potters), feels purposefully tucked into nature’s fold, surrounded by a thicket of forest and open sky. The space hums with serene energy, full of light and scattered with clay pottery (some made by her father, others created by her). You understand that this is where her Indigenous stories are developed, layered within earth’s presence and her memories.
The rehearsals begin with a smudging where Smith and her dancers, Katie Couchie, an Oji-Cree dance artist from Nipissing First Nation and Feryn King, a Kahnyen’kehàka artist from Akwesasne, Quebec, burn braided sweet grass. The medicinal herb is meant to remind people of the love and gentleness provided by Mother Earth and to purify the body and mind and space. This practice is profoundly sacred for Indigenous Peoples, and we’re offered into the ceremony ourselves, drawing the smoke over our heads, hearts and bodies. An energy shift happens when Smith turns on Indigenous Life by FIJI, part of her “Powwow Bootcamp” playlist. Music fills the room, a thumping reggae propelling the mood and pace of all three dancers as they move across the wooden floor. Smith is a tour de force: While Couchie and King move in powerful rhythmic harmony, she leads the choreography, instructing them to breathe with intention and to push and pull energy through the space. “Feel the energy at the bottom of your foot — it should feel alive,” she says. “Arms should be expansive like an eagle’s length”; “You’re dropping into the earth, curve your core like you are hugging a tree.”
While these words feel abstract to us, the prompts are familiar to the dancers, reminding them where energies exist — within themselves and those in the world around them. For Smith, tapping into nature’s energy pathways is a critical storytelling piece in developing Homelands choreography. “Our knowledge comes from nature — it is a part of us, guides and teaches us. Our philosophy as Onkwehónwe / people is to align and be in balance with nature,” she says. “As an artist, I’m interested in the alignments of natural forces in everything.” This philosophical understanding is embedded into the work — learning how to yield to the earth’s energy to pull it into the body so it comes through the movement with energetic intention. It sounds complicated, and it is. “This is a life-long training process because it requires practice and deep listening,” she says. “The earth is sending us its energy, and we have to learn how to respond to it so that it becomes alive in your body and your movement. It’s a call and response. Then, we translate that into story and so the audience they can interpret what they see.”
Connecting to earth’s power is a foundational narrative in Homelands. Produced by Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, it is a story on the deep umbilical ties of Indigenous women to their lands and waterways. Through original music, live dance and cinematic media capturing the homelands and waterways of Kahnyen’kehàka territory/enhsenonhstate’ (Upstate New York) and Ohswé:ken (Six Nations of the Grand River), the immersive contemporary piece is a call on the caretaking of land and soil by Indigenous women and that generational network that exists throughout the cosmos and the seasons.
Upstate New York was Smith’s ancestor’s home territory before they moved in treaty to Six Nations. Returning to her homelands to create this land-based work was transformational, in some ways, a return to home. “We experienced a shift when we entered the land there,” she says. “You feel it in your body on a cellular level, and you resonate differently. It feels like you are home.” For Smith, it was paramount that for the work to take shape, she and her team had to be in sync with the landscape — the foothills of the Adirondacks, waterfalls and streams — while reflecting on the colonial displacement from her traditional territory and the journey her ancestors took to the “postage stamp” of the territory they are on now. “How do we reconnect with the land where we’ve been displaced; how do we listen, respond and take in nature’s energies to infuse into the work,” Smith says. “The story about grieving the land and displacement from home is, in many ways, universal. It’s my hope audiences will see the beauty that exists in nature and the connections we all have to our homelands.”
Inciting fresh dialogue on Indigenous identity and pushing the boundaries of contemporary Indigenous performance is at the heart of Smith’s artistic vision, noted in the breadth of her celebrated works, which includes 14 productions and short pieces which have toured nationally and internationally, including the Dora Award Winner, The Mush Hole, a theatrical dance performance about the truths of Canada’s first Indian Residential School, The Mohawk Institute. When pressed on audience expectations, Smith is reflective. “This work doesn’t centre trauma and harm of colonial implications, there is another story we’re telling: the power, beauty, freedom and profound knowledge in being Onkwehónwe and of Yethi’nihstenha / women’s unbroken connection to our land and waters. We have wealth of love, song, dance and joy. Homelands is really about celebrating that — the joy.”
Homelands premieres on April 14–15, 2023, at Harbourfront Centre. For more information, please visit: harbourfrontcentre.com/event/homelands.
