Quelemia Sparrow and Noah Drew’s Ashes on the Water podplay shares the beautiful story of the birth of the Squamish peoples’ Women’s Paddle Song during the Great Vancouver Fire of 1886. This podplay, as with the others in the series by New World Theatre, powerfully unearths the presence of Indigenous stories in urban spaces where they have been so readily erased by settler colonialism. However, stories carry responsibility, and can be lost if they are not embodied, lived, and passed on each time they are shared. In this post I will discuss how Ashes on the Water fulfills the obligation of transmitting the Squamish story in a responsible way by offering an immersive experience in which listeners embody the character, as well as by mapping the story onto the listeners’ conceptions of the Vancouver landscape.
Listeners are implicated in the telling of the story from the very beginning because the walking tour led by the podplay roughly follows the actual path which the settler woman in the story takes as she flees from the fire. Even though the wooden boardwalks described are now cement and there is a large concrete overpass which must be traversed to access the ocean, a continuity between the past and present is felt as listeners follow the woman and her baby to safety at the ocean. Listeners are invited to imagine themselves in her position, and as they follow her path while being immersed in her thoughts and the sounds of her breathing and footsteps, an experience of embodiment is achieved. Unlike seeing the story performed in a conventional theatre or listening from the safety of one’s own home, the format of a podplay walking tour forges tangible connections between history and the present day. The women featured feel neither far away nor historical as the story and its characters are presented as relevant to the present moment.
In addition to making connections with the protagonists, listeners also create connections with the land on which the story took place. In my experience, I had never been to CRAB park before, despite being a lifelong Vancouver resident, so the story was able to fully shape my
perception of the area. It felt feasible that this hidden park held stories which I had not heard before, so I was able to readily form meaningful associations between the place and the story. In contrast, near the end of the piece when the narrator prompted listeners to look out onto the landscape across the water, I saw familiar places which elicited recall of
my own stories, such as Grouse Mountain and the tip of Stanley Park. In this case, the story superimposed onto those landscapes, building on top of my lived conceptions. As the dialogue ended and the Paddle Song began, I started to imagine how the land with which I feel so familiar and close holds countless Indigenous stories, as if overflowing. As I strained my mind’s eye to see past the industrialization on the landscape, I had a beautiful experience of the land as it has been for millennia.
Overall, the immersive experience of the podplay walking tour format of Ashes in the Water implicates the story in each listener’s present day as they come to embody the characters and experience an urban space anew. I left the piece feeling a responsibility as a beholder of the story to not only remember and pass on this specific story, but as a settler on the land to help fuel the myriad of Indigenous histories around me through listening, learning, and sharing.
David Gaertner
November 26, 2015 — 3:43 pm
This blog starts of exceptionally well. You offer a very thoughtful and necessary point of access for your reader and help to demonstrate the import of the podplay with the context of settler colonialism. The responsibility of storytelling (and of bearing witness to stories) is a big one and I was very glad to see you raise it. In what follows, a little more needs to be done to meet the claims you lay out in the introduction. I am not left with a very strong sense of how you see responsibility operating in “Ashes.” Coming back to that key term in your conclusion would have helped with this. Good work; you’ve left me with lots to think about.