Lincoln Hayes
Dr. Boyer
Hum 104
April 22, 2024
Pledged
While on the Humes DC trip I attended the March 3rd showing of Madeline Sayet’s solo performance piece entitled Where We Belong. The performance took place in the Folger Theater inside the Folger Shakespeare Library. Entering the library felt like stepping back in time due to its well-preserved features from its construction. The large stone building had an interior full of books and finely carved wood features. The Folger theater itself was a smaller venue supported by wooden pillars and was lined with red chairs facing the stage. The stage was not very high off the floor and combined with the smaller size of the room the space felt very inclusive. The proximity between the audience and where the performer would be made the event seem much less formal, unlike a traditional play where most people are sitting a hundred feet away from the stage or are high up on a balcony. There was a dreamy ambiance in the room because of the warm lamps around the room combined with strange light fixtures above the stage. Seemingly randomly ordered vertical and horizontal LED tube lights were interspersed above the stage with a thin long LED structure snaking between them. This provided an interesting contrast between the presentation of modern theatrical performance and the style of the building’s architecture.
Madeline, who also goes by her Mohegan name Achokayis, began the performance by walking down the aisle through the crowd before going on stage. She also chose to go off stage or sit on the edge of the stage several times throughout the performance, interacting with the audience, diverging from the typical style of play performance that I have experienced. Her choice to experiment with what constitutes a performance space reminded me of what Dr. Green prompted the humanities class to think about last semester. The discussion around what counts as a performance space and how can people toe the line or challenge what we think of as an acceptable place to perform appeared to be something Achokayis was focusing on throughout Where We Belong. One of her goals was certainly to provide a unique theatrical experience for the audience through her use of the space to interact with the people who came to hear her story. She accomplished this by performing outside of the confining bounds of traditional theater norms and expectations. I had no knowledge of Mohegan culture and had never experienced a play where the performer interacted with the audience in the way that Achokayis did, and I think her use of the space was a very smart creative choice to leave an impression. The audience, especially regular season ticket holders who are used to typical Shakespearean plays, will not forget what they saw that day. Her critical lens on the colonial obsession of focus on Shakespeare in theater combined with her ability to subvert the expectations of what people think they will see in a Shakespeare theater left lasting impressions on everyone in attendance.
The performance itself focused on Achokayis’s life journey from the community work she did with her mother through her experiences as a Shakespearean Phd student and why she did not end up finishing her PhD. In her story there was a motif of her becoming a bird, freeing herself from her Mohegan wolf family that was centered around staying put. Her flight to England symbolized her becoming a bird taking flight to dive into the world of Shakespeare. In her pursuit of her PhD, she found that her identity as a native person was going to be exploited in the world of theater, leading her to drop her studies and return to the US. Despite not finishing her PhD, she used her knowledge of Shakespeare and Mohegan culture to write Where We Belong. Her ability to speak her own Mohegan language combined with her proficiency as a playwright allowed her to work on reviving her culture by speaking her own Mohegan language in a Shakespeare theater. Most people in the audience, including myself, had likely never heard the Mohegan language, or possibly even the Mohegan people. Achokayis’s education in her language early on in her life combined with her desire to tell the story of her community motivated her to write Where We Belong to successfully enlighten the audience of her people’s culture and history.
