The Lakota Summer Institute and Lakota Language Consortium are proud to announce distinguished theater professional Steve Elm will direct a new play this summer as the culmination of the annual Lakota Summer Institute – a play that will be performed entirely in the Lakota language.
“Language, to me, is the key to theater,” says Steve Elm, who is the former Artistic Director of Amerinda Theater in New York City, and former Editor of the literary journal Talking Stick Native Quarterly. “I became an actor when I learned to love language. I became a writer because I wanted to create language. I became a director so that I may translate language.”
Elm, who is Oneida, faces a language challenge this summer that is different from anything he’s ever done before: directing Lakota language teachers – non-actors — in Lakota, a language Elm does not speak.
Iktómi Lečhála Tȟawíčutȟuŋ (Iktomi’s New Wife) is a stage adaptation of two Lakota-Dakota tales about the trickster Iktomi: “Iktomi and the Ignorant Girl” and “Iktomi’s Blanket.” In the play, Iktomi has another fight with his old wife and he is determined to get a new one – and he will put on a dress to do it.
The language teachers who will rehearse and perform the play under Elm’s direction are fluent and proficient Lakota speakers from tribal school systems in North and South Dakota, as well as advanced language students. They are co-creating this production with improvisation and music under Elm’s guidance, while attending a special three-week class at LSI, Lakota Drama and Performance.
Other tribal colleges in the region, most notably Oglala Lakota College, have theater and drama courses to express Lakota identity with the language, but the LSI class intends to help Lakota language teachers build theater skills for use in their classrooms, to make learning and speaking Lakota exciting and fun.
Elm comes to the production with a background in professional acting, directing and playwriting, as well as educational theater development and teacher training. Trained at London’s Rose Bruford College and with professional credits in London and Manchester, Elm has performed and directed extensively for original Native American productions as part of festivals and for established Native American performance companies. With Gloria Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater, he co wrote her solo piece, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, which he directed at New York Theater Workshop La Mama, ETC., and the Freed Center in Ada, Ohio.
“I have a passion for working with young people and non-professionals,” he says. “In the 1990’s I directed the New York City based American Indian Community House Youth Theater Project. There, a company of young Natives collaborated through improvisation, games, storytelling and discussion to create theater that resonated with their lives and had a profound effect on the community and served to educate and familiarize non-Natives with contemporary Indian youth. The plays were often raucous, often musical, usually funny, and always poignant. Most importantly, the plays were created by the young people themselves. My role was to guide, facilitate, and stage.
“I worked for many years with the Creative Arts Team at City University of New York, where I specialized in creating drama in education; again, focusing on the issues and concerns of young people. These theater experiences provided a forum in which the participants interacted with the performers by taking roles in scenes, suggesting different ways in which characters could behave, commenting and discussing the action. The line between performers and students was erased; thus providing deeply student centered learning, as well as offering those involved a chance to be immersed in theater and drama.”
Currently, he is a freelance director and a Master Teacher at the Wolf Trap Institute for the Performing Arts, working with early learners and training teachers in drama and storytelling. In September Steve will join the New School of Northern Virginia as Director of Theater.
Elm sees the opportunity to work with Lakota language teachers, who will be acting in a language he doesn’t understand, “an honor and a challenge.”
