Imagining a Contemporary Native Theater || An Interview with Rolland Meinholtz
It was in the fires of creativity at the Institute of American Indian Arts that my spirit found a place to heal.
Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
In her memoir Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo shares the story of how she arrived at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of sixteen. It was 1967, and she describes the city as “the epicenter of hippiedom in the West” (86). She decided at an early age that she could not live at home with her stepfather. She also knew that she wanted to be at an Indian boarding school, where she could live and study with other Indian students in “a place where [she] would belong, where [she] would be normal” (82). She learned about IAIA and submitted her application along with her original visual art. Reflecting on IAIA, she writes:
As we made art, attended cultural events, and struggled with family and tribal legacies, we sensed that we were at the opening of an enormous indigenous cultural renaissance, poised at the edge of an explosion of ideas that would shape contemporary Indian art in the years to come. The energy crackled. It was enough to propel the lost children within us to start all over again. We honed ourselves on that energy, were tested by it, and destroyed and recreated by it. (87)
The school was an innovation founded in 1962 during President John F. Kennedy’s administration. Visual artist and cultural educator Lloyd Kiva New and Charles Loloma, his close friend who became a renowned potter and jewelry maker, created the model when they, in cooperation with the University of Arizona in Tucson, mounted an experimental arts program for Native American young people. The resulting success of their experiment shook up the approach to Indian education that had been in place thus far (in the form of Indian boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and came to the attention of Stewart Udall, then secretary of the interior. Udall, most known today for his enduring commitment to the environment and its conservation, along with his wife Ermalee, urged President Kennedy to bring this groundbreaking approach to the BIA. George Boyce, a longtime BIA official who had headed the Intermountain School as well as the schools on the Navajo Reservation at Window Rock, Arizona, was named superintendent of the newly formed Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe that year.
The Institute for American Indian Arts brought arts education to an Indian school campus that for decades had focused on assimilation tactics and emphasized vocational and domestic training for young Native Americans who had been either forced to attend or sent to live there. These schools operated in a militaristic way, often included indoctrination into Christianity, and were run by bureaucrats through the BIA. Harjo describes it:
The Indian School world was rife with paradox. Formerly run like a military camp by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the school had been transformed into a unique school for native arts, like the New York City “Fame School” but for Indian students. Almost overnight, the staff, mostly BIA employees, were asked to accommodate a fine arts curriculum and faculty—an assortment of idealistic and dedicated artists, both Indian and non-Indian. (Crazy Brave, 87)
Rolland Meinholtz was one of the “idealistic and dedicated artists” that Harjo met and studied with at IAIA. She describes him as a “master teacher,” someone who expected total professionalism from his students and instilled in her an approach to acting that “demanded an alert and knowing body with powerfully developed links to the subconscious” (Crazy Brave, 113). She writes about studying dance, storytelling, meditation, and stagecraft, and shares, “Theater gave me the door through which to enter the dreaming realm” (114). Over two days in Fall 2016, I spoke to Meinholtz, who taught drama from 1964 to 1970. This interview highlights his philosophies about art and culture and provides insight into his approach to teaching theater to Native American students and their process toward crafting a contemporary Native American theater movement during a renaissance of Native American culture.
PRISCILLA: Can you tell me about your background and how you became the drama teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts?
ROLLAND: I guess, the first thing I’d say is I have a fairly decent amount of Cherokee in me, but I was adopted and raised by a completely white family in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had a curiosity about being part Indian, and there is a strange phenomenon in Oklahoma because a large number of people have some kind of Indian blood, but they don’t live as Indians. They don’t live on reservations, and they don’t know anybody else who is Indian. That was my situation. I became a theater student very early on, and I started dramatizing plays and stories when I was three, and I just kept on doing it forever and ever. Then, I went to Northwestern University, and from there I went on to do my graduate work at the University of Washington, in the directing program. I started that program in 1959, and when I finished, I was looking for a job. My boss in the Washington program knew that I was part Indian for some reason, and when he saw the Santa Fe job description, he said, “Hey Rolly, I think this might be something for you, uniquely.”
I responded to their query, and after talking on the phone, and doing all the usual dances we have to do, I was invited down to IAIA, and the person who took charge of me, showed me around, and interviewed me was Lloyd Kiva New. I was hired under the music department, and I worked with Lloyd because drama and dance were in the same program as music. There were eighteen different faculty teaching in the arts for three hundred kids, and then there were academics teaching English, history, science, and that sort of thing.
Lloyd and I became very close, maybe because we were both Cherokee, I don’t know. He was terribly interested in drama and the possibilities of Indian drama, so the theater program was really a special baby for him. We worked directly together, and we started unintentionally bypassing Jim McGrath [head of the arts program] and Louis Ballard [head of music]. There probably was some resentment about that, but basically it worked because Jim and Louis were big about it. Lloyd was the one with stimulating ideas, and he was willing to get you juiced up and then take a step back. He had vision about what was possible, but he didn’t try to spell it out. He was looking for somebody who could do that. He gave me a little test when I arrived. He handed me a copy of Diné Bahané, the Navajo myth of creation. It was an old version, and it was beautifully printed. It sort of looked like a one-of-a-kind edition, printed solely out of love. It was quite different.
PRISCILLA: Can you tell me about this myth?
ROLLAND: The Navajos conceived of pre-lives for people. We were down below this earth. People would find a hole in the sky to climb through and come into a new world; the Hopis believed this new world was the fifth world. Changing Woman, a character in the story, was created in the fifth world, which is where we are now. It was ruled by terrible monsters, and anytime people tried to come up and be in the fifth world, the beautiful world, they would be eaten by these monsters. The other world was dark and damp; people weren’t happy, and they were hungry. It wasn’t a nice place, and something had to be done. Changing Woman was given an urge to seek out the Sun. She thought the Sun might be a person like herself, and so she climbed up a mountain and was actually impregnated by the Sun and, in the story I read, she had twins. These magic twins grew up to be creatures who went around the world killing off the monsters. So, during my interview for the job, Lloyd handed me this story and said, “How would you dramatize this? What would you do? What would it look like?” I don’t remember much of what I told him or did for him, but we both got very excited about it, and it was a wonderful thing for me. This story fit in perfectly with my interests and the studies I’d been doing. It got me the job, and it continued to fascinate me. It stayed with me during my entire time at the institute.
Three years after that, I started working on a play of my own based on that legend and a Hopi creation myth in which the people come up and meet the Hopi god of death and life. He’s the god of both. He’s called Masawu, and they work in agreement with him so that he allows them to come up and be a part of this world. That became the play that I wrote called Journey to the Sun. I self-published it with another one of my plays called Black Butterflies alongside works written by my students at the institute.
PRISCILLA: Can you describe your interests and influences in theater?
ROLLAND: I studied theater with Alvina Krause as an undergraduate at Northwestern, and she was very important in my art and life. She wrote about the creative process and developed an expanded approach to teaching acting at Northwestern. I have a picture of Alvina and a picture of Lloyd on my wall here, and I consider them my artistic mama and papa.
Somewhere along the way, I became aware of the work of Jacques Copeau and the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in France in the early twentieth century. His innovation was really a return to the basics in terms of acting and staging. He was famous for using a bare stage in his productions. He was influenced by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. He also developed a system of acting that was particularly geared to using the body to speak more than the voice does. I found all of his ideas very exciting, and I wrote my dissertation on Copeau’s work. I was also studying French theater at that time, and I made it a point to see as much French theater as possible, particularly French theater in the French language. I did a thesis performance of a play by Jean Anouilh, and I used what I learned from Copeau in that production. I also had a very firm background in Stanislavsky’s method. In his system, the actor discovers and explores their inward impulses regarding the dramatic context and the individual character they must bring to life. When the work is stylized, as in Molière or Shakespeare, the actor steps into that stylized world, but the core of their reality, the inner basis, steps with them. Such an actor develops an exquisitely detailed sense of the forces (both cultural and theatrical) that shape their character’s life. Then they adopt their character’s outer circumstances and, using their inner work as a foundation, build the overarching style, the structure of why and how their character does what they do. Copeau, and the French movement, excited by Stanislavsky, took his method a step further by developing physical training for their actors, which gave them the tools to successfully communicate the innermost lives of their characters through physical presentation that many felt revelatory in its precision and poignancy. I believed that Native American theater would profit from this same approach.
I was also very interested in Greek drama, and through Greek drama, I became interested in Indian drama—that’s not American Indian, I mean from India. Kathakali, the classical Indian dance form, particularly caught my eye and ear. I was most interested in early theater that did not use the proscenium stage. The way dance was used in India to tell stories was utterly fascinating to me. Balinese shadow puppetry and dancing was also interesting to me. I brought Copeau’s influence and these additional interests in theater from around the world with me to IAIA.
PRISCILLA: How did you learn about Kathakali and Balinese shadow puppetry? Did you study those forms in college as well?
ROLLAND: I learned largely by reading about them. Though while I was at the University of Washington, I had a wonderful experience with the Manzo Nomura family, a Noh theater group from Japan. We actually saw them perform, and they demonstrated specific techniques for us. It was just remarkable, the artistry of this family. The father and son were key to the company, and the son was a tremendously virtuosic actor. He was wonderful to work with and to watch. He was exciting to be with, but Manzo, his father, was like the codification of a lifetime in the theater. He glowed with the love of the theater. He possessed all of the virtuosic techniques of his son, but these were not his raison d’être; rather, these were seemingly effortless tools that he could use when he found it appropriate. Through his performance, the deepest spiritual meaning of the work manifested. It was a truly remarkable experience for us, as students, to be in his presence. They also directed us in the staging of a Kyogen play. After we cast the play, they told us that they wanted us to perform it in Japanese, but we couldn’t quite swing that. What touched me the most happened as we prepared for our final dress rehearsal and performance. These great artists knelt on the floor and costumed us. They tied the ties on our costumes, and they shared the history of the form with us. It was so moving and utterly remarkable.
PRISCILLA: What was the drama program like when you arrived at IAIA in 1964?
ROLLAND: When I first got there, I didn’t really know much about what I was going to do. I had never taught people who weren’t theater people to start with, and these young people were just kids—they were actually high school kids. Almost all of them had been raised in tribal circumstances, and that meant that we had a healthy complement who came from towns and cities as well as from reservations. They were Indian in a way that I had never been in my life. I remember I would have nightmares about how might I connect with these kids. I would think, “What’s it gonna be like? Will they think I’m just a stupid old white man trying to get them to do stuff?”
Well, that all quickly went away. They were wonderful. The first group I taught were the most wonderful students I’ve ever had in my life. I also learned a great deal from them. Their values are different. Human relationships are thought of differently. Family is thought of differently. Quickly, it became obvious to me how incredibly important grandparents were to these young people. They also seemed to be one step closer to creativity than we were, than most people are, especially those who came from strong cultural networks. It was less common to see that in the young people who came from cities like Los Angeles or Chicago. I’m not quite sure why, you know, because a lot of people say baldly that American Indians are intrinsically artistic. There’s a germ of truth to that, but I think it’s wrong-headed as a generalization. They’re not necessarily more gifted artistically than anybody else, but they’re much closer to artistry; it’s not such a journey to get to full creative expression as it is for the rest of us sometimes. And so that was a wonderful gift to work with, because we had an exciting idea, and they got excited about it, and wonderful things really did happen very quickly. It was just amazing.
We began working, and before too long, we developed two projects. In my playwriting class, two kids were trying to write about their grandparents, so I began working with them and hoping something would come up for us. In acting class, I introduced those students to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I quickly learned that there was a story among the Nootka Indians on Vancouver Island that was extremely close to Macbeth. This story had some wonderful differences, too, that were typical of Indian culture. We all got excited about it. From the very beginning, Lloyd guided us with his vision: “We believe American Indian theater to be different than European theater.” We asked, “If it is different, then how would it be different?” This was the foundation of our work.
PRISCILLA: What do you remember about the school?
ROLLAND: The library at the institute was extremely good, and it was useful for this work. It was a small library, but it had wonderful Native American materials. I researched anthropological papers, archaeological papers, and stuff you wouldn’t find anywhere else. I began doing massive research. I’d just come out of graduate school, and I was in the mode of using a library in very creative ways for my theater work. It was terribly important to me to have powerful visual material available. There were tremendous stores of photos and paintings and other such things about Indian life starting in about the 1880s. The photographs by Edward Curtis were incredibly important to our work. The details that you could see and really get a feel for what it was like to be alive when Native people were Native people and not so heavily influenced by the European culture that was invading their country. I remember back to our development of the character of the grandmother in the play Black Butterflies. That character came from a Curtis photograph of a little old lady who was bringing home a huge pack of firewood on her back. But, the most outstanding thing to me about the school was that it didn’t have a building or even a space within a building that was a theater. None.
PRISCILLA: That’s a challenge. [Laughs.]
ROLLAND: But the rest of it was positive. One of the ways the school did things was that when the kids would create art, it would be somewhere where you could go to see it and interact with it. Art was everywhere you went. Every building had art studios. Kay Wiest taught photography; I’m not sure she had a studio per se, but she had a developing room and a place where she taught. They had several painting ateliers. The artists Otellie Loloma, Leo Bushman, and Allen Houser had a shed with their studios together. There was art everywhere you went. Pots, pictures, textiles. Seymour Tubis shared his printmaking and his printing on fabric. Josephine Wapp displayed beautiful traditional weaving, another form of textile art, on the walls of her studio. It was tremendously important. You could not get away from it. On the campus there were statues and fountains, and we had an art gallery in the administration building. So the kids knew if they produced things, that everybody was going to see them and they were going to be talked about; this was all part of the community of who we were as artists. I’ve never been in a school like that, and I felt like I was on fire. It was really special. There were eighteen professional artists on the faculty. One of the qualifications was that we needed to be actual professionals in our fields. You know, I was probably the weakest one there, by the way. [Both laugh.] It was great to be able to talk to these people and share ideas and have them see what you were trying to do, and they’d listen. And they didn’t always comment, but sometimes they got excited. You could see they were excited, and you’d say, “Well, you know, that’s neat.” That was nice to have that kind of excitement and that kind of reinforcement.
PRISCILLA: Yes, that sounds really wonderful.
ROLLAND: I like that it was a residential program for the kids. It helped the focus. They didn’t have the distractions of home or the hangouts of wherever they lived. Everybody lived here at IAIA, they ate here, and they worked here.
PRISCILLA: Did that help build a sense of community among the students?
ROLLAND: Absolutely. They also had a wonderful counseling system on campus. We didn’t limit the kids at all. All they had to do was say, “I want to be there,” and they could come. If they had a portfolio, fine. If they didn’t, fine. As long as they said they wanted to be there, they could come. We had kids who were so troubled we couldn’t keep them sometimes. We had one boy who came, and he was kind of interested in theater, and I had hopes for him. He looked like he might be a wonderful Coyote person, I don’t know; he took too much of whatever drug he was on, and he went down the line of the academic building and broke every double window on one side of that building. It was really spectacular. He did these flying tae kwon do-type kicks and just knocked out every window. Well, of course we couldn’t keep him here. I wish we could’ve—that kind of fury has got to go somewhere.
PRISCILLA: Exactly.
ROLLAND: Most of the kids were really sweet and wonderful. But they often needed a great deal of help. Indian life is no bowl of cherries. Through the counseling program, we were able to actually deal with the rougher side of their life and give them an important plum. We would say, “You can be a creative person. You can use this juice to make things that matter and are beautiful, expressive; things that are important to you and the rest of the people in the world.” We created a wonderful, wonderful atmosphere. It was the most amazing thing in my life. Northwestern was a pretty exciting place too, but it was nothing like working at the institute.
PRISCILLA: I wanted to also ask you about Father Staudenmaier. Joy writes about his profound influence on her in Crazy Brave, and she credits him as “the first person to talk about the soul to [her].” Could you tell me what you remember about him?
ROLLAND: He needed to complete fieldwork as a part of his graduate program, and he asked to be sent to the Institute of American Indian Arts. He became tremendous friends with the kids because he could really talk to anybody. He became a moral buttress for almost everybody. We had tough times because some of the kids were fighting their addictions, and sometimes there were fights between the tribes. We had kids from every tribe in the country, including Indians from Hawai’i and Alaskan Inuit. We also had Native people who don’t consider themselves Indian. So there were disagreements and problems. We had a very large Pueblo group of students because we were so close to the Pueblos, and we also had a large Apache representation. There was a large Sioux contingent largely because of the Catholic fathers, who would seem to do more than others to get those kids to come to government schools. They would say, “Here’s this school, don’t you want to go? They won’t restrict you. They’ll take you if you want to go, and it’s supposed to be a wonderful place. Why don’t you go and get out of here?” Father Staudenmaier was really wonderful dealing with such things, and giving us a primer on what was going on. He helped us understand that we needed to pay attention.
Later, when we toured our productions with the students, he became our main connection to home for us. He really took care of us while we were away. He opened many doors for us and kept other doors closed that might have been troublesome. He was a wonderful guy to have on your side, and he was certainly on our side. He was a good friend to me personally, and he was very supportive during a later time when there was real personal trouble developing in my family.
PRISCILLA: Did the theater students have much experience as performers prior to coming to the institute? How prepared were they to work on a production?
ROLLAND: I think most of them would have had a least one pass at something, but it was not very significant, in my experience. Now, Joy, she looked pretty raw, scared of failing, but she had mountains of earnestness, not only about theater but everything in her life. There was a lot of training that had to go on there.
My program really started to take shape in the second year, and I felt very strongly that I had to give the students a theater education that would not embarrass them in front of anybody else in the theater. I wanted them to know who Shakespeare was, who Chekhov was, who Aristophanes and Sophocles and Euripides were. And what commedia dell’arte was. I wanted them to know all of that and to be able to do a great deal of it. So we spent the fall and a little bit of the winter working on theater, as it is commonly understood. I wasn’t interested in Broadway, though we did do one play from Broadway that the kids loved deeply, and they did terribly well with it. We performed A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, and that was right down their alley. Those young people really understood that play, and it was a wonderful production. The kids at the school, of course, were the bulk of our audience, and they would keep coming back to see it. Time after time they just came back to see the show because they understood it and loved it so much. By that time we had a proper theater to do our work.
PRISCILLA: What was your theater space like?
ROLLAND: It was an open stage arrangement, not terribly different than Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier. There were more similarities to it than to the Globe. It was a bare stage sticking out into an audience that was severely raked in front of it. The seats were almost at a bleacher rake. It created a very intimate feeling. We quickly decided that dance would be an integral part of any Native American performance that we created. The idea of Native American theater didn’t exist in those days, but we decided that dance would be at the center of everything we did. We hired Rosalie Jones, dancer and teacher, and the kids would spend half of their time in theater and then they would spend half their time in dance. It was a very close relationship.
In the second half of the year, we experimented with dance and plays our students wrote. And since we said that dance was central, we had to ask, “How do we incorporate it?” Ceremony is also very much a part of Native American theater. It’s one of the pillars: dance, ceremony, and a relationship with the spiritual world that’s not in terms of anybody’s specific religion necessarily. Spirits are important regarding what happens on this earth. I became interested in that kind of theater before I came to the institute. Early on, I was somewhat uncomfortable with that idea. It was through my connection with the Japanese Kyogen group that I learned about Noh theater. That was my first experience with theater that concerns itself with the spiritual more than the literal. And through that, I gained a comfort with that idea. At the institute, we decided that the Native theater we were creating would place that same value on spirituality, and we began to work on how to do that.
PRISCILLA: What were some of the productions you directed, and what do you remember about them?
ROLLAND: We did a production of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov; we did a production of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Actually, the first Greek play we did was his Elektra, and the students really enjoyed that. They knew what it meant to be angry in a situation that had been terribly unfair to them. That play really reached their hearts, and they did beautifully with it. You would think that high school kids would make fools of themselves, but they didn’t! It was just magnificent. The choral part of the play helped us introduce the idea of dance in the theater. Well, it wasn’t exactly dance we did, it was actually marching, but we got them closer to being able to express themselves with their bodies that way. Rosalie began doing dance pieces that were simply unique and powerful. That production opened the door for us to do our own stuff.
PRISCILLA: What was Santa Fe like in the mid-1960s? Was there a thriving arts and culture scene?
ROLLAND: Yes, there was traditional ceremonial theater going on all around us. That was one of the glorious things about having the school where it was. There was this tremendous web of theater occurrences. You have to put quotes on the word “theater,” I suppose, because the purpose was primarily ceremonial not theatrical, but it was theatrical as well. Whenever possible, we would grab a bus with the kids, and we’d go and see a ceremony at Cochiti or ceremonies at Santa Domingo or at Taos. Some of the most important events we attended were the Shalako ceremonies at Zuni. We actually went through the whole ceremony there. It was an all-night ceremony. It was thrilling and very moving. Lloyd and I made a point to go to the Long Horn ceremony at the Zuni. Then Otellie and Charles Loloma opened a door for us; it was just unbelievable. They were the reason we were able to go. Lloyd and I were invited to go to the Hopi Bean dance, and we were permitted entrance into the kiva, which as far as I know has very seldom happened for anybody else. The Bean Spirit appears at the crack of dawn at the edge of the village, and then she comes into the village with the sun rising behind her. It’s wonderful theatricality going on there. She holds bean sprouts in her hands, and this is in February. This is how the Hopi emphasize the idea that life renews itself; it goes away and it comes back. The people sprinkle corn meal on the kachina, and they take the sprouts back to their homes. They grow them into plants, and they do whatever they want to do with them. There are performances all day long and into the evening. And what they did [laughs] for us—I’m pretty sure it was deliberate—was they did a great deal of spoofing white people who go to Florida for vacations. It was just a hoot. [Laughs.] Of course it was all men, and they had lots of wonderful cross-dressers, and they did what they considered outrageous for women of the tribe. It was just a funny and wonderful performance.
There is something else I remember. We came in and saw how they rehearsed. The elders coached the performers. Do you remember when I described the Kyogen performers robing us and how that was so beautiful for us? I can’t describe for you how moving that was to see the same ritual at Hopi. You know, I could practically write a whole book about that experience.
PRISCILLA: You would take students to see these different kinds of ceremonies and different performances?
ROLLAND: Yes, whenever we could, we would take them. We also took them to many ruins that were all around us. One of the most important to me was Chaco Canyon. I went with Lloyd originally, and then I took students there. I’ve been back since several times. It’s just an amazing place. It’s a huge settlement. Chaco Canyon is probably the ancient population center of the United States. They may have had, well, nobody knows, but somewhere between twenty and forty thousand people in this area, and their architecture was incredible. It’s very beautiful, and Pueblo Bonito was three stories tall. They’d have these huge kivas; that’s one reason why this was so important. The kiva is essentially an architectural theater space for the staging of ceremonies. The biggest one is at Chaco Canyon, and I believe it is about sixty-five feet across. There is a big circle for performances much like the ones we saw with the Hopi, only we were in a twenty-by-twenty building there. We also visited the Aztec Ruins National Monument in Farmington, New Mexico. It is close to Chaco Canyon. They have a completely reconstructed giant kiva there, and it’s a thrill to see in every way. The acoustics are incredible. They designed the space, which consisted of smaller rooms that were all connected to the central, great room. I describe this place in the article that I wrote for Birgit Däwes’s book, Indigenous North American Drama (2013). In that piece, I share the discovery about sound design that Lloyd and I made when we visited there. This confirmed what we wanted to do with Paolo Soleri Amphitheater at our school. Lloyd invited Soleri, an Italian architect who taught at Arizona State University, to design an outdoor space for us in 1965. Lloyd, Charles, and I gave our input based on the various types of ancient and modern theater venues we knew about. Soleri was a leader among architects who proposed that architecture and ecology can and should work together.
PRISCILLA: As you introduced these ceremonies and these spaces to the students, did you ask them to reflect on their experiences? How did they bring what they learned into the creative process that you were developing with them?
ROLLAND: Mostly, it just happened. We did have conversations, particularly about dance and the role of dance, and we reflected on that. We particularly felt we had achieved something. Like with any project, we had a lot of chaff—things that we tried and that didn’t work, and we’d say, “We’re not gonna do that again.”
The first show that we did was Moqwina/Macbeth, and we masked everybody one way or another, either with heavy paint on the face or with actual masks. For the three witches, we used a Bokumus. The Northwest Bokumus is a spirit that has a grudge against mankind. The spirit goes off in the forest, and it tries to lure particularly important people into the forest with it and lead them to madness. We translated the witches in Macbeth into something familiar to Native Americans. After doing that, we looked at it and we talked about how we felt face-painted masks were too much somehow. The students and I realized that what was more typical, as we looked at Northwest ceremonials and the Pueblo ceremonials around us, was that the mask was only used for a specific character who had real spiritual power. This is how the Bokumus is portrayed. It signifies that the character is sort of extra-human. And so that became our practice. Most of the people did not wear masks, but for instance, in Black Butterflies, the character of the grandma was masked. She was a good and special person to the two young people in that play. One of the things I reflect on with sadness is that the way we worked didn’t continue. Hanay Geiogamah started his theater company around 1970. As far as I know, he took a bunch of our students and, with Café La MaMa as their sponsor, created the American Indian Theater Ensemble. That was after I’d left the school. When Hanay got the kids, their work went in an entirely different direction. I don’t know, it’s like, what we had done went totally by the wayside.
PRISCILLA: Do you mean that the elements of ritual and ceremony and those sorts of performance practices went away?
ROLLAND: Yes, as far as I can tell, those elements weren’t very prized at all. This was during the time when Indians were protesting for the first time. The occupation at Wounded Knee happened at that time. I think the protests just grabbed the forefront, and whatever we had done did not seem to have ways of dealing with those situations. When I think about what happened to our ideas about theater and what could have happened, that’s one of the areas that I ruminate on the most.
PRISCILLA: There didn’t seem to be a way to reconcile the social protest with the ideas of ritual and ceremony in performance?
ROLLAND: Yes. Now, William Yellow Robe, who I taught at the University of Montana, he has done some work in that area, and he has begun to try to develop some of the ideas. I do remember that in one of his plays, he used a sort of proto-dance and a choral effect for the characters. It happened near the end of the performance. It brought that scene to vivid and memorable life.
And it just kills me that the people up in Indian territory in North Dakota right now who are protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline aren’t using theater. There ought to be theatrical performances up there! Performance is a part of protesting and making community together, and they’re not bringing it in. It just drives me nuts! It’s absolutely what we were about.
PRISCILLA: I can totally see your point. Can we talk about some interesting things that happened when you toured Black Butterflies? Joy mentioned some memories from Port Angeles in Washington. Can you tell me about that?
ROLLAND: Yes, we performed two pieces at Evergreen College: Black Butterflies and our main piece, Ianius, written by Monica Charles. She’s Klallam Indian, and the reservation is about ten miles outside of downtown Port Angeles. Monica was raised in third world circumstances; she knew desperate, desperate poverty on the reservation. Lloyd met her when he was visiting that area, and he just was so appalled that he made a special effort to make it possible for her to come to the school. Her mother refused to help her and even tried to stop her from coming, even though Monica was old enough to come on her own.
The play is autobiographical for her. In it, she shares how it was that she came to the Institute of American Indian Arts. One of the main reasons that she came was because of an uncle of hers who had always taken a special interest in her, but he was also a man who was deeply censured by his tribe because he was something of a drunk and a rascal. He could never settle down to ordinary life. Monica explored this contradiction of feelings about her uncle in her writing. She loved him so much, and yet he was labeled as no good. The play is about making peace with that, and showing her own people that he was extremely valuable to her and that he mattered. He’s the main reason she decided to leave the Port Angeles area and to come to our school. Her uncle is the main character in the play. Well, we arrived at the theater, and we were excited to be there. We were really looking forward to presenting the play in Monica’s hometown. As the audience started to arrive, we realized that it was overwhelmingly Native people coming in. It was practically Monica’s whole reservation in the house.
PRISCILLA: Wow.
ROLLAND: Then who should come in but five minutes before the play started, but her uncle himself. Monica came up to me and she said, “My God, he’s here.” She was afraid of what he would think about seeing himself in the play, and she was practically a nervous wreck! He came right down to a seat in the middle and in the front. Everybody in the community, every single person in that audience knew he was there within five minutes of his arrival. There was an electric zing in the air; you could just feel this energy go through the whole theater. We performed the play, and it seemed to be well received. Afterwards, Monica went down and talked to him about it, and he was fine. He asked if he could meet the cast, particularly Keith Conway, the actor who played him. For the character of the uncle, we used a mask. Do you remember I told you the special characters in the drama, the ones who are special people with spiritual connections, were always masked? The uncle’s character was masked in our production. Her uncle was fascinated by that. He talked to Keith, and he seemed to like the play very much. Then he took the mask and looked at it. Slowly, a big smile spread across his face. He licked his teeth and looked at the mask and said, “Jeez, you’re no good!” [Both laugh.]
One of our ideas was to develop a theater for Native people, and if other people like it, that was fine. But we saw our work as a place for Native people. I remember when we were in another town where we did the show for people from another reservation, and they stayed after the show. They were so excited to see something about themselves and about their ways of life that they held us up for about thirty minutes. They wanted to talk to us, and it was a wonderful feeling.
PRISCILLA: Can you describe more of your artistic process and how you collaborated with artists from other disciplines?
ROLLAND: One of the most helpful things that happened to us was that we were asked to create two different festivals [the American Indian Performing Arts Exhibition in 1965 and the Festival of the Arts of Indian America in 1966] at the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC. In preparation, I traveled all over the country to meet with Indian peoples and to select groups to be in the festival. I went to Florida and worked with the Seminole tribes, and then I went to New York and met with the Seneca people, and then the Apache people in southern New Mexico, and the Navajo at Chinle, Arizona, and the Alaskan people in Haines, Alaska. We auditioned groups to be in our show, and we had to figure out how to include them. Most of them didn’t have shows per se. They had dances, and we talked to them about how to use what they had. Lloyd and I worked together on both shows to develop a framework for these different pieces so that they would flow together. The first festival was a really lovely piece, and the second one was a lot more adventurous. We really developed a script for the second one that was based on the Sipapu stories of the Hopi. Louis Ballard wrote the music for the piece, and he’s a tremendously talented composer. He proved to be very difficult to work with. [Laughs.] That’s one reason why the show was not quite as lovely as it might have been. Both of these shows really got me out and aware of what Native performances were like all over the country.
We had visiting artists come in to the school to teach. Rosalie Jones was the first guest artist, and we were very impressed with her. I had seen her work at the University of Utah, where she was in the master’s program and had been working on using Indian materials in creating modern dance pieces. She was just a beautiful fit in terms of what she was doing with her art and life and what we were doing. We ended up hiring her in the second year, and we worked together very successfully. She worked with us on how to physically express the unique spirituality of Native Americans. During her time at IAIA, she also did innovative work with floor patterns. We knew that dance was important to Native Americans in terms of how it was laid out on the floor. We made great connections with the audience because of that kind of work. She also paid close attention to sound patterns such as rhythmic stepping, the stomping of feet, clapping of hands, thumping of bodies, and chanting. We explored all these things to find out what we could use and what was right. She also worked out how to visualize the spiritual relationships we explored in our work. She developed one dance from the Sioux Sun Dance ceremony. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of the dancers that peg sticks of bones into the skin of their chests. Then they dance against the thongs, which are wrapped around the pegs on one end and tied to the top of a pole on the other end. Their dance maintains a tension between the dancer and the center pole until the dancer achieves spiritual ecstasy and passes out. Rosalie’s choreography reflected the overall image of the ceremony. She used a simple rope to connect one Sun dancer and an imposing woman, costumed in a white deerskin, who represented the center pole.
The show Deep Roots Tall Cedars ended with a major dance. We used screens designed by faculty member Neil Parsons in it. The dancers carried screens with Northwest designs on them. The screens were on poles that came down and touched the earth, and they could lift them, pound them, rotate them, and interlock them into visual patterns. This was another way that we worked with different artists.
Later, Rosalie introduced us to Barry Lynn. He was a private dance instructor in Salt Lake City, where Rosalie went to school. She developed a friendship with him, and she worked closely with him. He spent half of the school year with us, and he was really wonderful to have because he was very influential in helping us develop our understanding of how dance could ground our work. The soul of dance, for us, was its connection to the earth. Barry really understood that idea, and we improvised together. We had long conversations, and then he actually developed studies with the students where they would try out various ideas of what we might do. Barry was very much trained in the Martha Graham style, and sometimes Graham just didn’t go with anything Indian. But, it was all really delightful to try. He choreographed a duet for men and some small group pieces that proved to be exciting and provocative for our work. He worked on the challenge of the repetitive nature of Native American dance. Because it is so repetitive, it can become boring in theater. As ceremony, it can go on for hours. At Pueblo villages, the dancing goes on all day. There are artistic reasons for doing that, but our problem was that we didn’t have all day to achieve our effects. We also wanted to appeal to not just a Native audience, but to other audiences as well. We wanted to create excitement within ritually exciting things. We all worked extremely well together, and he advanced our thinking. Barry gave Rosalie a great deal of confidence in what she was doing and attempting.
Charles Weidman, one of the fathers of modern dance, came to work with us, and he had a great impact on our work, too, even though he only came for a long weekend of dance workshops. Rosalie spent time with him beforehand, so he was hip to what we were going after. He developed a piece with our students that looked something like the kind of flowing serpentine rapid group movements that Mark Morris does these days. It was lovely. I also remember that he would bring humor into the work, and that was tremendously helpful when we started doing our comic shows.
Tone Brulin, a Belgian playwright, actor, and director, was another person of real influence on us. He had studied extensively with Grotowski in Poland, and he was with us for a full academic year. He’d originally been brought to Antioch College, and they found they just couldn’t use him there. They called us up and said, “We have this embarrassment of riches; can you do something with him?” And we said, “Sure!” [Laughs.] He taught us a sequence of yoga moves that he learned from Grotowski’s company. The sequence is called “The Cat,” and it had an immediate and profound beneficial effect on our training. I have used it ever since then. Tone also worked with Bruce King in developing his play To Catch Another Dream. They worked on it for about three months, and then we produced it in the winter of the last year I was at the school.
Tone taught us how to make use of the bare stage, especially with naturalistic material. We learned how loudly one, precisely chosen, prop could speak to an audience. This helped us tremendously with Bruce’s play that was set in urban Chicago. We learned how to use our bare stage to create that place with only a few props and a single set piece. We really made it all work.
Terry Allen was the creative writing teacher, and she was a willing and very helpful comrade. She had all the kids who wanted to write in her class. We had lots of strength coming from her program into ours. Monica Charles started writing in her class. Terry was a very talented teacher that I was sure glad to have as a colleague.
Henry Gobin was an assistant teacher to Jim McGrath in the beginning, I think. He was a former student, a very recent former student, and Lloyd assigned him to be my right-hand man when I first started during that real shaky period that I mentioned earlier. He was ideal. He really was a tremendous help. It was through him that we became aware of the outstanding theatricality of the Northwest Indian tribes, which led us to the Moqwina/Macbeth performance. That was done with Northwest Indian masks and costumes. Henry was the assistant director for the first Washington Indian Festival that we did for the BIA. He was a young man of a great many ideas, and he was excited about what we were doing in the theater program. He was somebody who was just really nice to have around. He was a potter and a visual artist.
Charles Loloma was also on faculty, though he wasn’t there much. He was one of the most sought-after jewelers in the world when he was alive, and he’s even more so today. I can’t believe how much his jewelry’s gone up in value. He is one of the great artistic names in the history of Hopis. His home was in Hotevilla, Arizona. We spent time there on several occasions.
Charles was also a great potter, and he became utterly fascinated with china during the time he was at the school. He worked with porcelain on a big wheel down in his studio. One day I walked in, and he was throwing a porcelain pot. It was at least eighteen inches tall, and it was ten or so inches across the flange at the top. He was trying to take it down to the china thickness, which is, as you know if you have any china, very thin indeed. When you throw something like this, it has the tremendous capacity for falling down. It’s wet clay, you know. It was amazing to watch him. He’d just reach in with one hand while he had the other hand on the outside. It looked like he was nursing … I don’t know how to describe it. And, of course, his focus! It was tremendous.
He was very strong, and he wanted his pottery to be as beautiful inwardly as it was on the outside. The shape of the pot was absolutely vital to him. The beauty of his process overwhelmed me. I got pulled into watching him create the space within the pot. The combination of his focus, his skill, and his daring was very much a part of it. When he finally finished, he turned and looked at me with the devil in his eye because he knew he had defied everything. The piece was huge, and I was drawn into watching him create that enormous space within it.
PRISCILLA: Would you say that what you saw in his focus and in his creativity was something that you wanted to translate into theater?
ROLLAND: I don’t know that I thought about it at the time, but yes, it was a transfer of his art coming to my art, I hope. Charles was probably much more of an artist than I ever thought of being, but he certainly gave me many gifts. He and I were getting a little high one night and he brought over a wonderful bottle of almond-flavored tequila. It tasted a good deal like a good medium-weight sherry. It was incredibly smooth, and we were having a great conversation. All of a sudden, he grabbed my knees and he put his knee outside of mine and he kind of locked me in to a knee embrace, then he leaned over to me and began breathing loudly and deeply. He was missing a couple of teeth, and some of the other teeth had big gaps in them. I was very conscious of the whistling of his breath, and then suddenly he barked, “Don’t you UNDERSTAND, Rolly? How important breath IS to the theater, to EVERYTHING.” I don’t think he said much more than that. In and out, breathing and showing me. Giving, taking, receiving. It’s the whole basis of everything. I don’t know if those were precisely his words, you know, but it was just an electric moment that only could come from somebody like Charles. Once again, an elder teaching a protégé.
In our theater practice, we began using breath, particularly in Tone’s cat exercises. It was very logical as with all the yoga work, that breathing was very important. We began to see breath as a connection between us, and I would have the actors breathe together in interesting ways as we prepared for our performances. Sometimes we would put our heads together radiating like a sundial and then breathe until we were perfectly in sync together in the same rhythm and at the same time. This was very important for us.
PRISCILLA: What are your observations about the differences between Native American theater and non-Native theater? What differences have you experienced when attending plays?
ROLLAND: Well, any play begins from where the audience is when they come in and sit down in the theater space. There is usually the anticipation of the performance, the quieting down when performers appear, and then it’s almost like we sit up a little straighter to see what’s going on. Most theater shares this. However, we, Indian people, like to extend that time by including some kind of processional. At powwows, for instance, the dancers make a grand entrance to a very slow, beautiful song. Everybody who participates in the powwow will come in and move through the powwow circle several times and then find their places and make final preparations for what they’re going to do. That’s really universal. When people come in to any of the Native performances, there’s a sense of low conversation and warmth because of the fire, which is at most of the performances. There is a sense that something significant might happen. I think we share that, but it’s more geared to beauty, happiness, something that will touch you, your life, that that’s somehow more expected, I think, in a Native audience. Because of its ceremonials and rituals, there is a sense of going to church in the theater. Another observation I have is that Western drama seems to be built at the base of mountain. In the beginning, you arrive, and then it begins its ascent. You climb and you climb and climb until you reach the top! And then somehow, very quickly, you are magically, once again, at the bottom of the mountain without too much peril. That seems to be the kind of thing that’s going on in European drama. In Indian performance, I would shift the image to that of a glass being filled very slowly with a beautiful liquid, and then through movement and time, the glass is full. That’s the difference. Native performers and audiences are patient. It’s good because something really lovely is happening. Oddly enough, the audience feels emptied, almost in a sense that a flute is empty after you play a beautiful tune on it. Is it really empty? You know, if you just heard this beautiful thing come out of it? Is that really empty? Or is it a quivering space? I don’t know. There’s something romantic about it. [Both laugh.] But then maybe it’s an inner buzz that points to something important. That’s woven into my heart, my being.
There is another difference I want to share. I remember seeing O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night about forty years ago. I had to stand for the performance; it was standing room only, and it lasted three hours, easily. Maybe it was four hours. It was one of the ultimate experiences of my life. I loved the playwright and the actors. By the time it was over, my partner and I were just struck dumb. We couldn’t say anything. We could barely walk, but we did, and the only place we wanted to go was to a bar and get a big shot of whiskey. We could not talk until we’d had almost all of that whiskey. Then we began talking for a long time. It’s very difficult to describe, but the Indian feeling would have been different. After seeing the play, you would not be struck dumb, you would feel lighter, you would walk lighter, you would feel happy. Even with serious drama, you would feel energized, not depleted. I think we came close to doing that with our work at IAIA, but I can’t say we ever really achieved it. I would have loved to achieve that feeling. It’s out there; I know it can be done.
PRISCILLA: That’s really beautiful. Now, I want to ask you about the time when the school changed from an art institute to a college? What were your impressions of that change? What do you think of that change today?
ROLLAND: First, I should tell you about a rather important evaluation visit from José Limon and Martha Hill. Limon stands with St. Denis, Graham, Weidman, Cunningham, and Ailey as a leading light in the history of modern dance. Ms. Hill was the director of modern dance at Julliard for many years. They were brought to our campus as a critique team. I invited Father John Walsh, the widely known and respected head of drama from Marquette University, for the theater portion of the evaluation. The idea was to assess our performing arts program, identify what we might do to improve, and think about what might be developed in the future. They observed our performances and classes, and then we made remarks about our work. After that, we had a formal discussion with the evaluators. All three were thrilled and extremely complementary of our programs and the achievements, but unfortunately this process set the stage for great damage to be done to the program.
PRISCILLA: Oh no! Why was that?
ROLLAND: Well, Ms. Hill felt that Rosalie, while good, in the long run was not sufficiently an exalted teacher to base the future of our program on. So she said, she’s gotten you off to a good start, but you really need somebody else to look long into the future.
PRISCILLA: Wow.
ROLLAND: Of course, being young and full of myself, it never occurred to me that she might have, and perhaps even wanted to, make the same comment about me. Anyway, Ms. Hill and the other people in the program, our program, chiefly Jim McGrath, put a lot of pressure on me, and I’m ashamed to say that I gave in to it. It’s one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made in my life. That’s how we came to separate from Rosalie, and that’s how things were killed off. Rosalie was absolutely a key person in our program.
I’m trying to skip over some of the grunge details. Juan Valenzuela came to us around that time. Oddly enough, Rosalie had him lead a workshop on our campus as an artist in residence. I think he was there about a week. He was slick, and he gave wonderful workshops. The students loved working with him, and he seemed perfect for us. So after finding some pretext for letting Rosalie go, I went to him and talked him into working for us. Why he agreed is an interesting subject for speculation. He and I did not work well together. He did not see theater and dance as a marriage. He did not believe in the existence or possible creation of a unique Native American theater, and the day-to-day grind of teaching a small group of students was not his cup of tea. Now, that’s my view. I don’t know if anybody else on earth would hold that view, but I’m telling you honestly the way I felt about it.
During that time, Lloyd and I also began a concerted effort to gain financial support to run our program during the summers in the Soleri Amphitheater that had been completed by then. We made a money trip to Oklahoma to try to raise funds from universities in Indian states with Indian programs. We were certain that neither the BIA nor the Department of the Interior were going to do anything for us. This was during the Nixon administration. The funding situation from that era was beyond belief. We had been essentially on the same budget for four years, and of course, the funding was less every year. The dollar amount was the same, but because of inflation, which was much more significant in those days than it is now, we had less. I couldn’t see any hope. I think Lloyd was really feeling the stress, too. Our search for money to support the summer program was a total failure. It astounded me how little people were interested in supporting that. Despite the many strong points we talked about and what we had already achieved, it didn’t seem to make any difference. It began to look like we might lose our financial support altogether if we were not able to don the robes of being a college program, rather than a high school.
Lloyd saw the writing on the wall and put all of his efforts into transforming IAIA into a college. At the same time, I was in personal crisis with my wife and family. It just looked like I needed to get out of there, so I did because I didn’t see the possibility of any improvement. There was also a tension between us and other BIA schools. It seemed like the other schools envied us. They seemed to think that IAIA got everything that they couldn’t have. And they wanted to know why. They seemed to ask, “Who were we? Why were we so special?” We were spending something like four thousand dollars a student for the year, in those days, and they got something like twelve hundred dollars for the year. And of course, we would say, “Well, you’re the ones who are being wronged. We’re getting what is necessary to do a good job. Look at what we’ve done. You guys have had 70 percent of your kids never make it beyond high school, or even finish high school, and we’re up to 80 percent of them who finish high school and then 50 percent who go on to college.” There was a reason for that, you know. We had positive proof of success. We had students like Kevin Red Star, Earl Eder, Tommy (T.C.) Cannon, and Larry Ahvakana. I could just go on and on and on about the kids who have made names for themselves, who became somebody. Jane Lind, a girl from my program, went on. And Joy, and all these people. They have done important work and made real contributions. Joy, as everyone knows, is an internationally known and loved poet.
So Lloyd supported the change from a high school to a college. I talked to him years afterwards, and I know he was not entirely pleased. He never felt at home with the school after that. For a time, they were not terribly friendly with him either. I think they reevaluated that. Later, Joy taught there. She can tell you about her experiences. William Yellow Robe really wanted to be the drama person there for the longest time, and finally he just said, “It’s not worth it.” I don’t know the college very well these days. No one there has ever contacted me except one time, and then suddenly they just stopped. They were talking about having an interview with me like you’re having now, and it just never happened. I had the impression they had little or no knowledge of the achievements of the school that preceded them.
PRISCILLA: That all sounds really difficult and even disappointing. I really appreciate getting to know more about you and your work at IAIA.
ROLLAND: Thank you. This has released a great deal for me. I think I have some writing to do now. Nobody is able to tell the story that I can tell. I feel it’s so necessary. I feel like I want talk to Joy and see if we can’t get together to really talk through a lot of the memories so we can pass this knowledge on. There’s so much more that has to be done before I lose it. [Both laugh.] You know, Joy inspires hopes. She is an artist who has the attention of the world for what she does.
NOTE
For further reading, see “Coyote Transforming: Visions of Native American Theatre” by Rolland Meinholtz in Birgit Däwes’s Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History (State University of New York Press, 2013)
WORK CITED
Harjo, Joy. Crazy Brave. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.