Author Description

Review This collection is an important and moving contribution to the field of Native American performance studies, critically interweaving histories, ancestral knowledge(s), and the call to collective spirit through transformative indigenous performativities. --Inés Hernández-Ávila, University of California, DavisThe excellent essays in this new volume on Native performing arts bring much deserved critical attention to a fabulous and diverse group of Native performers and performances. The scope is exciting, both in what the essays focus on -- contemporary Native plays, an early 20th century Sun Dance opera, punk rock band musicians, turn-of-the-century jazz bands, contemporary modern dance -- and also in the issues the authors raise and consider. These include ways of acknowledging the spiritual power of Native performance in contemporary settings, as well as tendencies to exotify; the power of performance to transform, and the difference between this and concepts of theatricality as mimesis; tribally specific rhetorics for reading and staging works previously filtered through other frames; appropriation and encroachment, codes of conduct in Native theater production, and the possibilities of Native/non-Native collaboration. Discussion of some commonalities that many Native performances share weave throughout, such as the close interconnections among place, time, memory and language; Indigenous cosmologies; ancestral connections; incisive political critique; sly and wry humor. The authors approach these performances and the topics they raise with fearless openness, and the result is a vibrant, insightful, wide-ranging and crucial contribution to the growing discussion about this important field. --Jacqueline Shea Murphy, University of California, RiversideAmerican Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions will deepen discussions of American Indian theatre and performance for both scholars and students. Organized in two sections, Contemporary Performances