In March, Nozhem First Peoples Performance Place and Public Energy Performing Arts are presenting a limited-run performance by Toronto’s Chocolate Woman Collective that explores a dark time in the not-too-distant past when “Indians” were considered freaks and exotics.
Written and performed by Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock) along with Barry Bilinsky (Metis/Cree), Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment reveals the ways in which things that are sacred in Indigenous societies became profaned for entertainment and profit.
For around 100 years beginning in the mid 19th-century, “freak shows” not only exploited people who had physical disabilities or unusual conditions or talents, but displayed people who were non-white as “undiscovered” humans. While the freak shows began as far back as the 16th century, they became extremely popular in the Victorian era both in the U.K. and the U.S., where they were presented as sideshows at travelling circuses, amusement parks, and more and continued into the 1940s.
In Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment, Mojica draws upon her own family’s experiences with the freak show. During the 1930s, Mojica’s mother and aunt — who would later become the founders of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater — worked the sideshow at the Golden City Amusement Park in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, New York.
Their tipi was next to the sword swallower, the bearded lady, and those with physical anomalies who performed as “freaks”. The two women posed in buckskins and feathers for the tourists and danced for the Boy Scouts.
“I started to look at sideshow and freakshow because I knew that my mother had been in a sideshow as a child, and my family had performed in the sideshow,” Mojica recalls. “So I started to look at some of the rage, resistance, shame, that my mother carried, and that she had passed on. And where I carry my mother’s shame, where I carry my mother’s rage. My mother uses that word, ‘freak’. She still says, ‘They’re lookin’ at me. They’re lookin’ at me like I’m a freak’.”
VIDEO: “Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment” trailer
Set during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment highlights the juxtaposition between Indigenous people being very visibly displayed to settlers as freaks and exotics while that same settler society was trying to make Indigenous culture and heritage invisible, including through the deliberate concealment and erasure of the evidence marking their presence on the landscape — effigy mounds and earthworks that were not only brutally excavated and looted but also used as race tracks and amusement parks.
“Mojica mocks and topples colonial ways of knowing, historically so entwined with ethnographic harm and spectacle, while she plays with the stability of the colonial gaze in a staggeringly savvy way,” observes Jenn Cole, artistic director of Nozhem First Peoples Performance Space. “She also presences Indigenous (specifically Guna/Rappahannock) ways of knowing, ancestors, and earth mounds, and she models modes of ethical witnessing in ways that have changed me.”
Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment will be performed at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 8th and Saturday, March 9th at Nozhem First Peoples Performance Space at Trent University. Tickets are sold on a sliding pay-what-you-can scale from $5 to $50 and are available in advance at eventbrite.ca/e/i722219216117.
For more information about Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment and the artist collective behind the show, visit publicenergy.ca/performance/izzie-m-the-alchemy-of-enfreakment/.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a long-time media sponsor of Public Energy Performing Arts.
