After more than six weeks of playing one of the main characters in šxʷʔam’ət (home), a play about reconciliation, Madeline Terbasket, says she is leaving the stage with a different outlook.
“My idea of what reconciliation is changed,” the Similkameen Elementary Secondary School graduate said prior to a performance in Kamloops Sunday.
“I was only looking at it through one frame, I guess. It’s about repairing the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, but we don’t think about all the steps that need to occur. Settlers are so far behind. There’s going to be a lot of things that have to happen before we can have a healthy relationship.”
The 24-year-old, who is from the Syilx, Anishinaabe and Ho Cak nations, is one of 14 Indigenous and non-Indigenous cast members.
The production aims to shed a light on what reconciliation is and looks like for communities and individuals.
Terbakset plays Siya, a young Indigenous woman, who embraces her ancestral connections to the land through activism and decolonization. During the 30-minute play, directed by David Diamond, Siya (Terbasket) confronts a friend about her settler privilege, and helps a young adopted Indigenous man who knows nothing about his birth parents.
After the play, the evening becomes interactive with audience members having a chance to come on stage and intervene in the scenes.
“We have a lot of white people coming on stage that aren’t as far in the reconciliation journey and, umm, sometimes that leads to racism coming on stage that they didn’t know they had,” she said.
At a recent performance in Penticton, Terbasket was grateful to see so many family and friends in the audience and on stage.
“It was awesome. I got to improvise with my uncle with the father/daughter scene. In the scene I’m wanting to go up to Burnaby Mountain. I’m telling my father and he doesn’t want me to go because he’s worried I’m going to go to jail,” she said.
“His technique was to tell me to go but that I’m probably going to be arrested and am I ready for that. Am I ready to be chewed up by the justice system? That was really intense for me to really think about.”
In another scene, not involving any of her family members in the audience, a woman came on stage to intervene to play the mother of the adopted Indigenous son.
“She kind of centred the scene on her white tears and how it was all affecting her. Because my character is based kind of on me, I helped to kind of shape her, I get to deal with those situations in a fun way. I just walked away,” she said with a laugh.
“At the end we get asked if we have any thoughts on what happened and I just said, ‘I’m just over white tears.’ It was really insightful for a lot of the settler audience.”
The last show of a 23 date Alberta and B.C. run, outside the Lower Mainland, was Sunday. But there are still nine shows left being performed at Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre from March 2 to 10.
After the show’s run, Terbasket who trained in Acting for Stage and Screen program at Capilano University, plans to return home to the Similkameen to recharge. Terbasket is involved in many artistic endeavours including podcasts, clowning and acting.
The last show will be a live web cast with audience members at home being able to intervene through web actors. The live web cast will start at 7:15 p.m. and anyone can stream it as long as they have internet connection. For more information about the web cast visit http://www.headlinestheatre.com/present_work/sxwPamet/webcast.html.
