SPOILER ALERT: We will be making further productions of Lake of the Strangers in the future so if you weren’t able to make it out to one of the theatrical performances in early 2019 and wish for the plot to remain a mystery, please don’t continue reading!
Welcome to the third Reflection Ceremony blog post! This month we sit down with Juleta Severson-Baker, a published prize-winning poet and Arts Immersion Educator at Calgary Arts Academy with two decades of experience teaching Speech Arts and Drama in Western Canada and beyond. She is a firm believer that everyone should have the chance to explore the power of their voice and we were overjoyed to have Juleta explore hers on our ride back to 1973 and up into the stars.
Who is she?
first woman, human woman, star woman
in a bauble of light
in the drowning lake
earth mother, water woman
she turns to me and says — let go
from her we turn away
we turn away, strike out at night
into uncertain woods
all muscle and song
forgetting Bear, forgetting our father’s stories
not once remembering how our mothers
drank the smell of our sleepy hair as they sang to us
gulping the scent like medicine
she birthed us from her loneliness
and from the distance
between sparks of the first fire
we came sliding
in a gush of black blood
sliding, crying
into the midnight forest she let us go
into a midsummer, moonlit meadow
aspen air and freshness lifting off the lake
being brave, being good
forgetting our father’s stories
forgetting our mother’s songs
she comes to us and says
the dead are gone
but they don’t go far
she is who tells us to let go
so we can find ourselves
in the stars
All rights reserved to Juleta Severson-Baker
What moment or moments from Lake of the Strangers did you respond to with your artwork and why?
I was touched to the core of my being by Lake of the Strangers. My experience of being in the audience, having come out of the cracking cold of February 2, warmed my very soul. I responded to the piece with a sense of being healed. So many things were happening in the play; the beauty of the set design, the sound of the water, the transformation of the actor, Hunter Cardinal, into a young man, the story which hooked me from the first moments and wouldn’t let go, the spiralling plot which opened into the mythical, the generous window (offered to anyone, to all of us in the theatre) into a Cree worldview, and the courageous response to grief. This theme of how grief moves, which the character and poetic text brought to life, moved like a healing through my heart.
I responded to the masculine energy of the play. It was a story of a boy becoming a man, of a man becoming a warrior, of a warrior becoming immortalized in the stars. Or was it the story of a constellation made human so we could understand the universe? Either way, the voices were masculine — the boy, the brother, the father, the bear. I responded to the glimpses of female in the story.
I wondered about the boy’s mother. I wondered about the woman in the bubble of light in the lake.
As I began to write a poem in response to my viewing of the play, I realized that I felt a female creative energy was there in the play all along; sustaining the foundation of the play, or perhaps driving the hero away from home, and then freeing him.
What medium did you choose and what was the inspiration for that decision?
I chose to write a lyric, free-verse poem in response to the play because I am a poet. Poetry is my art form and where I find my voice.
How did you approach creating this work both technically and artistically?
After seeing the play I was so filled with love, light, and awe that I knew I would need to approach the writing of a responding poem with great respect.
As soon as the house lights came on, I scribbled a few words so that I would remember some key lines. I knew the phrase from the play “the dead are gone, but they don’t go far” would inspire my writing eventually because it spoke to my personal experience of grief very clearly.
I wrote it down. Then I knew I needed some silence and space. I knew if I were to rush the writing of my poem, that I would drown in the effort. I needed to wait. I needed the full experience of the play to settle in. I just treasured the experience for a few days. I remembered the play a lot. I re-told the plot of the play to my family. I re-told it to my closest friends. I waited. I waited for the familiar, quiet voice in my head that would say ‘now’, telling me to begin to write. When it came, about 5 days later, I began free-writing about grief and the feminine.
A great deal of the final poem, a great deal of the vocabulary that ended up in the final poem, came out in that first free-write. I wrote for about 30 minutes without editing or judging, just letting words flow, until I felt tired and depleted. I allowed my mind and soul to remember images from the play, and I realized the near-drowning was a key image for me. I wrote a lot about that.
I’ve been to the shores of Slave Lake before. In 1997 I spent some incredible afternoons all through the fall there. I let myself remember sensory details of the beach. I just let the words flow.
Then I let the free-write sit. I closed my notebook and didn’t look at it for a few days.
When I was ready to return to the writing, I cut, slashed, re-arranged, and fine-tuned until I had what looked like a poem. Then I read it aloud a few times, and let it sit for another day. Then I did some final edits; again, mostly cutting and re-arranging. Finally, I felt like I had a poem in my own voice, honouring the female power of the universe, and honouring the play.
What do you hope people take away after experiencing your piece?
I hope readers of the poem, whether they were lucky enough to be in the audience of Lake of the Strangers or not, take away a sense of how much love our mothers carry for us, and how powerful that love is. Whether it is a physical mother, a spiritual mother, or a universal mother, mothers ultimately birth our freedom and make the triumphs of warriors possible. The title of my poem is “Who is she?” And, who is she?
She is the good woman who is brave enough to let us go, and wise enough to teach us how to let go of her so that we can spiral out into the stars of our best lives.
Some art revolves around the creation of one piece or experience. In joining the creative journey with Lake of the Strangers, can you share your experience in creating an artistic response alongside the show?
Being invited into the Misewa method was an honour. The generosity of trust which the Lake of the Strangers creators offered to artists who created a response piece was palpable. It felt right. I felt a sense of “all art should be overtly like this”.
Isn’t all art a conversation with art that came before?
How beautiful to collaborate intentionally, and then invite a wider circle to respond. How rich these ripples of ongoing art are!
If you’d like to learn more about Juleta and her work you can check out her website here.
For other posts in this series, you can visit the Iskotew: Our Circle page on our blog and to hear from the extraordinary person who made this Reflection Ceremony and all of its creations possible you can click here.
