Now Online: Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment
Chocolate Woman Collective
(Tkaronto)
Word Conjurer: Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock)
Spectaculars: Monique Mojica and Barry Bilinsky (Métis/Cree)
Directed by: Carlos Rivera Martínez (Nahua/Mexica)
Nozhem First Peoples Performance Space (Room 101, Enwayaang Building, 1 Gzowski Way, Peterborough)
Venue accessibility guide available here
March 8 & 9, 2024 @ 7:00 PM
Co-Presented by Chocolate Woman Collective, Nozhem First Peoples Performance Space and Public Energy Performing Arts
Tickets are sold on a sliding PWYC scale* from $5 to $50.
Please note that the below link is only to reserve tickets. Tickets are pay-what-you can at the door and Nozhem is a cash ONLY venue.
Reserve your tickets online now! In-person tickets are SOLD OUT!
Click here to purchase online stream tickets
*Sliding scale pricing is offered to make our tickets accessible and affordable for everyone. All tickets are general admission*
You can also reserve tickets by email or phone (no credit card required). Please email your request to admin@publicenergy.ca or call 705-745-1788.
Step right up to witness a performance that transmutes time: a barbaric banquet boasting aberrant bodies and dusky denizens from exotic cultures — ALIVE!! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
Behold the wonders of Injun rarities Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock) and Barry Bilinsky (Métis/Cree), for a limited performance run. This Ten-in-One odditorium will highlight Izzie The Invisible Woman- an Alchemist, FlimFlam Sam – The Outside Talker, The Authentic Cockboy, Vibora de los Veinte Venenos and a full Cabinet of Curiosities for your viewing pleasure.
Hurry, hurry, claim your seats and observe these exotic stories in Nogojiwanong’s very own sideshow before their next jump. With freakish alchemy and chaos, there is only one way to find out if Izzie M. will be able to pull-off her own disenfreakment! It will leave you gasping in delight, aweing in amusement, defying your wildest dreams — and nightmares!
Following the blowoff, visit the concessionaire to purchase your souvenir parlour card of Izzie M. (Monique Mojica) & FlimFlam Sam (Barry Bilinsky). These rare collectors items shall never be reproduced.
Spectaculars: Monique Mojica and Barry Bilinsky
Directorial Odditorium: Carlos Rivera Martínez
Conductor of Secrets & Head Wrangler: Lindy Kinoshameg
Congress of Designaturgs: Andy Moro
Limelighter/ Sound Mechanical: Michel Charbonneau
Cabinet of Costume Design: Kinoo Arcentales
Properties Empresario: Tim Hill
Song Catcher: Pura Fé
Melodic Illusionist: Marc Meriläinen
Paint Roustabout: Jay Soule
About Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock nations) Actor/Playwright/Dramaturg:
Monique’s artistic practice mines stories embedded in the body in connection to land and place. She has created land-based, embodied dramaturgies and taught Indigenous Theatre in theory, process and practice throughout Canada, the US, Latin America and Europe.
Most recent: the role of Wanda in My Sister’s Rage at Tarragon Theatre, Aunt Shady in The Unnatural and Accidental Women, at the NAC and Izzie M.: The Alchemy of Enfreakment written by Monique with a diverse creative team. Monique has collaborated with Santee Smith as the dramaturg for Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s tryptic, Re-Quickening /Blood Tides/SKe:NEN and for Teneil Whiskeyjack’s Ayita for Edmonton’s SkirtsAfire Festival. She is a member of the newly formed Indigenous Dramaturgy Circle at Tarragon Theatre and she was the inaugural Wurlitzer Visiting Professor at the University of Victoria’s Theatre Department in 2023.
About Barry Bilinsky (Métis/Cree):
Barry Bilinsky is a professional theatre creator of Métis, Cree and Ukrainian heritage. Based in Alberta, he has worked as a director, curator, performing artist, stage manager, and technical/production manager across Canada with projects centred primarily around the proliferation of Indigenous arts, artists, and collaborations. He is currently Akpik Theatre’s Associate Director. He has studied Drama and English at the University of Alberta, attaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2012. Barry is an Artistic Associate with Dreamspeakers Indigenous Film Festival as well as having been involved in many capacities with: Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts; The Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society; Iiniistsi Treaty Arts Society (REDx Talks); Fool Spectrum Theatre; among others.
Barry is committed to developing honest, respectful, and purposefully compassion creations that challenge the overarching cultural assumptions we often face in the performing arts community.
About Carlos Rivera Martínez (Nahua/Mexica) Director:
Carlos is a director, choreographer, actor, and a dancer, originally from Mexico City.
He graduated from the Indigenous Residency Program at National Theatre School in 2018 and recently graduated from the MFA in Directing for Theatre Program at the University of Ottawa. Carlos has worked and collaborated with several performing arts companies across Canada including Red Sky Performance (Toronto), Globe Theatre (Regina), Raven Spirit Dance (Vancouver), MT Space (Kitchener), Puente Theatre (Victoria), Qaggiavuut (Iqaliut), Les Productions Ondinnok (Montreal) Lemon Tree Creations (Toronto) Micro-Scope Productions (Montreal) Vancouver Opera Company, among others. He is continuously working on numerous artistic projects in dance, film, theatre, and performance.
BACKGROUND (COURTESY OF CHOCOLATE WOMAN COLLECTIVE)
“During the 1930s, Monique Mojica’s mother and aunt (the future founders of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater) worked the Side Show at the Golden City Amusement Park in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, New York. Their tipi was next to the sword swallower, the bearded lady and those performers with physical anomalies who performed as ‘freaks’. They posed for tourists in their buckskins and feathers and danced for the Boy Scouts. (A generation later, so did she.) Leanne Howe’s Aunt Euda “ran off and joined the circus” when it camped on the outskirts of Ada.
The re-embodiment and re-enactment of family histories against the backdrop of historical events explores the legacy of “playing Indian”, being an exotic on display, an objectified body, always available for the colonizer’s amusement & titillation, while exploring the relationship between the freak show, the “pornography of disability” and their relationship to the pornography of cultural “othering”.
This juxtaposition between structure and story highlights the tension between Indigenous hyper–visibility — “Indians” marked as freaks and exotics — and our invisibility: a deliberate concealment and erasure of the evidence that marks our sustained presence on the landscape. Indigenous peoples, like the presence of the effigy mounds and earthworks, are “hidden in plain sight”.”
ABOUT CHOCOLATE WOMAN COLLECTIVE
Chocolate Woman Collective is comprised of senior Indigenous artists, artist/scholars and their collaborators, and was formed in 2007 to research and create the theatrical performance, “Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way“. These accomplished artists are brought together by our shared interest in research, exploration and practical application of Indigenous aesthetic principles in all areas of the dramatic arts, in theory, process and practice. Chocolate Woman Collective is inter-disciplinary, cross-cultural and inter-generational. We are pushing the parameters of our respective art forms as we devise culturally specific dramaturgies from which to build Indigenous performance.
Chocolate Woman Collective is dedicated to the rigorous application of a creative process that privileges Indigenous Knowledges, cultural aesthetics and performance principles. Our artistic practice integrates theory, practice-based research (both archival and field) and embodied studio work in the creation of new work that dislodges colonialism from the body. Our mandate is to create collaborative, inter-disciplinary, cross-cultural and inter-generational Indigenous theatrical performances and to tour them hemispherically and throughout the world. The performances created from this practice serve, for our audiences, as interventions that shift cultural paradigms and contribute to a larger project of cultural and historical reclamation.
Chocolate Woman Collective is proudly funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council
To learn more about the Chocolate Woman Collective, click here
