Writing is a dance
Larissa FastHorse still looks like a ballet dancer: long-limbed and graceful, delicate face framed by dark curls. But after injuries ended her 10-year ballet career -- “It’s a brutal world, there’s a lot of blood involved,” she says -- FastHorse turned to TV and film writing.
Now, she’s “coming home” to the theater, gaining notice as a fledgling playwright.
FastHorse’s first play, “Average Family,” about an urban Native American family and a rural white family on a TV reality show set in the 1840s, was commissioned and produced in the fall of 2007 by the Tony Award-winning Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, the country’s leading theater for youth.
“We’re already talking to her about the next piece,” says Peter Brosius, CTC’s artistic director. “There’s a freedom, almost a filmic sense, and a freshness of sensibility” to her work.
Her second family play, “Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders: A Class Presentation,” which FastHorse is also choreographing, opens Friday at the Autry National Center. Already scheduled for this summer is a workshop of a second play for the Autry’s Native Voices series, a program that develops and supports work by Native American playwrights and theater artists. Her first full-length musical is in the works, too, commissioned by the Los Angeles History Project.
“It’s been interesting,” FastHorse, 36, says of her new career path. “It’s been crazy.”
How crazy?
During an early “Teaching Disco” rehearsal, wearing her choreographer’s hat, Fast- Horse led the cast of professional twentysomething actors through square dance and disco routines, then stopped to quibble with her playwright-self over a prop placement.
“I get so mad at the writer,” she deadpans later. “I’m like, ‘Why’d you do this? Why’d you put these props here?’ We have heated meetings at night.”
Silliness and sadness
“Teaching Disco” revolves around three 14-year-old Lakota teens: Martin Leads to Water (Robert Vestal) copes with an abusive family; shy Amanda Smith (Tonantzin Carmelo) -- who is white and Lakota with white adoptive parents -- struggles with her cultural identity and the prospect of meeting her Lakota birth mother; and Kenny Two Hawks (Noah Watts), the product of a broken home, is in danger of going down the wrong path.
“My goal is to make the crises, the silliness and sadness the characters go through happen as organically as they do in kids’ lives,” says FastHorse, a Lakota of the Sicangu Nation and a spokeswoman on Native American issues. “You can be doing some crazy, goofy disco thing one minute and then the next minute, things get really real.
“And then you also have hormones and all that other craziness popping off that makes it a little hard to focus.”
Serving as the teens’ guide and ally is Grandma Two Hawks (Lavonne Rae Andrews). She’s 63, youthful and smart, and bears no relation to what FastHorse calls “those flute music moments” of Native American lore, “where the elder Indian sits down, the flute music starts, they have this nice backlighting and we all learn something wonderful.”
It was important to the playwright to make all the characters of the same tribal heritage. “I think it’s dangerous to treat us like we’re one indigenous people, FastHorse says. “We have different cultures, different religions, different languages, different traditions.”
She filters her work through a personal, specific cultural point of view, “and then, through the personal it becomes universal, because as individuals we are all going through the same stuff.”
“Teaching Disco” is the result of a yearlong play development process created by Native Voices. FastHorse’s play, one of two in the development process to be given an Equity production, is part of Native Voices’ new focus on youth theater. Playwright Jose Cruz Gonzalez serves as “Teaching Disco’s director and dramaturg.
The teens in FastHorse’s play are dealing with tough issues, says Randy Reinholz, Native Voices’ producing artistic director, and yet they remain “naive and funny and sweet. That makes it all the more real. And that’s what we’re trying to do: get real, truthful Indian stories out there.”
Native Voices’ goal, he says, is to create theater “that’s resonant, contemporary and bigger than the stereotype of what it means to be indigenous or Native American.”
Though FastHorse, who lives in Santa Monica with her husband, sculptor Edd Hogan, has been asked when she’s going to do a “grown-up play,” she says, teens and tweens “have kind of become my market.”
“It’s such an important time. It was really rough for me -- social stuff and school and confusion and all that. And literature and entertainment and things helped me get through it. So for me, the most sacred work I can do is work that helps kids get through that really weird transition time.”
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‘Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders’
Where: Autry National Center, Wells Fargo Theater, 4700 Western Heritage Way
When: Opens 8 p.m. Friday. Runs 8 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, 11:30 a.m. student matinees Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays
Ends: March 2
Price: $20; age 12 and younger, $12
Contact: (866) 468-3399, www.ticketweb.com
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