From the Scenic Designer

Here are a few pictures of Susan's model! They don't have any back lighting tricks yet, like we're planning to use in the show, but these two photos give a clear idea of color and shape of the piece. Thanks Susan!

Joy's Journal Entry: 12/11/08

December 11, Honolulu

I wake with a crack of thunder. It’s raining in Honolulu. Not many thunder-beings visit here. I wake up with the song I have found to follow the Redbird leaving home scene. It was going to be Equinox, which has the right feel, but the lyrics don’t carry the story forward. I could change the lyrics but for me, Equinox is Equinox, including lyrics. I sat with the scene yesterday, then remembered a song draft I have wanted to do something with, a horn and keyboard fragment. It works, exactly. I even made myself teary-eyed. Now, the work begins and I find I’ve left my midi keyboard in Albuquerque. Need to find one. Will work up the part on guitar because Larry will be the other half of this song.

Joy's Interview with David Burton

Recently, Joy had an opportunity to answer a few questions from David Burton. The interview gives a great insight to Joy as an artist and her work on Wings. The interview can be read below or as a GoogleDoc: An Interview with David Burton.

An Interview with David Burton

DAVID: As a successful poet and musician, what inspired you to create a work of theater?

JOY: As a poet and musician with a relatively heavy performance schedule I began, naturally, to consider developing a fuller and deeper arc, to consolidate all of the elements. When I perform with poetry and music I've always included storytelling, riffing, quips, all depending on the event, the audience and my own mood. And in the last few years I had been hearing, in the midst of the performance, my spirit saying, "use this," "develop this for your show," "you might try this." I began to see how I could combine everything I had been working on into a larger piece, into theater. Theater is one of my first loves. It was one of the first places my soul could let loose. I used to create theater with my friends as a child and put on shows for our families. I especially delighted in reshaping what I had heard from hiding under the kitchen table. Though I was terribly shy and reticent as a child, that shyness disappeared when I was a character in a school play, when I sang, danced or painted. Before the family grew and there was a little extra money I took modern and tap dance classes. I still have my red dance outfit. Then, when I went to high school from Oklahoma to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, I was talked into taking a drama class by one of my best friends, Belinda Gonzalez. I can still hear myself saying: "I will never get onto a stage." Still, I took the class, and it changed my life. We had a visionary drama teacher, Rolland Meinholtz, who was actively considering and developing a truly indigenous theater. His mentorship, teaching and directing literally saved my life. I became a member of the theater company. We learned all manner of stagecraft, and modern dance with Rosalie Jones was a large part of it. That June we traveled to the Pacific Northwest with the show "Deep Roots, Tall Cedar."

DAVID: What are some of your earliest memories about your tribal heritage?

JOY: I don't believe any of us separates our becoming-child selves from our heritage, whatever that heritage is-culture makes the coloring, the tone. I grew up until Indian school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is literally a tribal town inside the boundaries of the Creek Nation west of the Mississippi. I always knew I was Creek Indian, like my father. And I knew my mother was Cherokee, Irish and French. We just were. The culture was around us, and though my parents didn't take part in the traditional ceremonies we had relatives who did. I felt at the center of many tribal cultures and various practices. There existed many other cultures in that time and place that influenced me, like country western guitar player culture!

DAVID: What role has the awareness and/or practice of traditional ways played in your life?

JOY: My first awareness of a traditional way was with the sun and my relationship with the sun. As a child the ritual of the night and day cycle sustained me. I often marked sunrise and sunset in my own way, despite chaos between my parents and in the house. My first native song performance was in kindergarten, when I was chosen to learn a Pueblo Indian corn grinding song and sing it to parents. My parents attempted to make their lives into a modern life, to move away from what they had learned was backwards. It was my generation who embraced and immersed our traditional cultures. We found the wisdom and depth in what our relatives had denied for survival. I had relatives who were waiting for me and took me in.

DAVID: What does "survival" mean to you?

JOY: Survival means growing a culture naturally, allowing it to breathe and develop.

DAVID: What does "healing" mean to you?

JOY: Healing is allowing expression of that which informs your true knowing. Too often we bend into unrecognizable shapes, to please, to survive, to get by. Healing is untangling.

DAVID: What do horses mean to you?

JOY: I have a whole preface in the new Norton edition of my book She Had Some Horses. I'll attach it here:

Preface or Introduction to She Had Some Horses

What do the horses mean is the question I've been asked most since the first publication of the book She Had Some Horses in 1984. I usually say, "it's not the poet's work to reduce the poem from poetry to logic sense". Or "it's not about what the poem means, it's "how" the poem means." Then I ask: "So what do the horses mean to you?"

Like most poets, I don't really know what my poems or the stuff of my poetry means exactly. That's not the point. It never was the point. I am aware of stepping into a force field or dream field of language, of sound. Each journey is different, just as the ocean or the sky is never the same from one day to another. I am engaged by the music, by the deep. And I go until the poem and I find each other. Sometimes I go by horseback.

No, that's not it at all.

The horses are horses. My father's side of the family is inextricably linked with horses. We aren't a Plains horse culture, though we came to know horses. I understand there was some exchange of power between the horse people and my relatives from seven generations or more back. I am the seventh generation from Monahwee (sometimes spelled as "Menawa") who is still a beloved person to the Mvskoke people, my tribal nation. I was told how he had a way with horses. He could speak with them. And he also knew how to bend time. He could leave on horseback at the same time as his friends, then, arrive at his destination long before it was physically possible to arrive. He had a little black dog that followed him everywhere.

My cousin Donna Jo Harjo was a champion barrel racer, and knew how to speak with horses. She had to live close to horses, or not live at all. They were her people as much as any of the rest of us.

And there was the horse who came to see me once in the middle of a long drive north from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Albuquerque. I perceived him first by an ancient and familiar smell. Then I was broken open by memory when he nudged me, in that space that is always around and through us, a space not defined or bound by linear time or perception. He brought the spirit of the collection of poems that was to become She Had Some Horses.

Later was my horse Casey. The last time I ever drank too much was in a "proletariat bar" in Krakow, Poland because I was happy to meet and play music with some Bolivian Indian musicians and a Hawaiian, and we were all so far from home. In the grey of the early morning, when I was whirling around sick in my hotel room, my horse Casey came to me with a worried look. He was concerned because his last "owner" had died of complications from alcoholism. I assured him that this would not happen between us. And it didn't.

Horses, like the rest of us can transform and be transformed. A horse could be a streak of sunrise, a body of sand, a moment of ecstasy. A horse could be all of this at the same time. Or a horse might be nothing at all, but the imagination of the wind. Or a herd of horses galloping from one song to the next could become a book of poetry.

I follow in the tracks of gratitude. I thank the horses, my ancestors who loved them, and those who grew to love their cars and trucks instead. I thank my mother and her family. They are the ones who brought me songwriting, guitar players and singing. I thank Simon Ortiz for singing original and old horse songs. I thank the shaman/healer I saw perform a poem and become what he was singing. It was then I began to comprehend the true power of the word: the dangers, the beauty and all the healing elements. This was when I began to write poetry. I thank those who continue to believe in the horses, in poetry.

What a journey.


DAVID: What does John Coltrane mean to you?

JOY: Coltrane is the bible of saxophone. He's saxophone soul. His sax sound is a road to God.

DAVID: Why is song and music important to "Wings"?

JOY: Because I see the play as a ritual of sorts. All theater is ritual of some sort. Music and song enable that which is beyond words to be expressed.

DAVID: What has been your process in incorporating music into "Wings"?

JOY: The music and the play were born together, alongside each other, with each other.

DAVID: Tell me about your ongoing collaboration with Larry Mitchell and his role in "Wings."

JOY: Larry is a monster guitar player, and a Grammy-winning producer. He produced my album: Winding Through the Milky Way. Many of the songs are in the play. We work together intuitively, something I appreciate.

DAVID: Is the spoken word musical?

JOY: There's rhythm, there's pitch, there's sound senseŠ.

DAVID: What has led you to Albuquerque and Hawaii? Do they feed different parts of your soul?

JOY: New Mexico helped give birth to my poetry, to my philosophical direction as a native artist. Hawaii has given me a home like no other. The water continues to teach me.

DAVID: "Wings" feels very personal. Do you consider it auto-biographical?

JOY: I know I'm going to get this question. You might call the shape of it semi-autobiographical. The similarities are that both Redbird Monahwee and I are Creek from Oklahoma. We have some of the same relatives. I believe most art involves the autobiographical, thought not necessarily the literal elements of the personal story. There's the autobiographical of the emotional plane, the mental plane, the physical, the spirit. If the story were to be cut to the purely autobiographical literal elements there'd be three or four pages left. Emotionally the whole story might be, cut from some imagined past.