MONIQUE MOJICA — playwright/performer
Guna and Rappahannock Nations
Actor/ playwright Monique Mojica is passionately dedicated to a theatrical practice as an act of healing, of reclaiming historical/ cultural memory and of resistance. Spun directly from the family-web of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater, her theatrical practice embraces not only her artistic lineage through mining stories embedded in the body, but also the connection to stories coming through land and place.
Monique’s first play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots was produced in 1990 and is widely taught in curricula internationally. She was a co-founder of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble with whom she created The Scrubbing Project, the Dora nominated The Triple Truth and The Only Good Indian. In 2007, she founded Chocolate Woman Collective to develop the play Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, a performance created by devising a dramaturgy specific to Guna cultural aesthetics, story narrative and literary structure.
Monique has taught Indigenous Theatre in theory, process and practice at Brown University, the University of Illinois, the Institute of American Indian Arts, McMaster University and is a former co- director of the Centre for Indigenous Theatre. She has lectured on embodied research and taught embodied performance workshops throughout Canada, the U.S., Latin America and Europe.
She was most recently seen onstage with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in I lost my Talk as part of the Life Reflected series and in Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s world premiere of Re-Quickening choreographed by Santee Smith. Upcoming projects include Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns co-written with Choctaw playwright, LeAnne Howe with an illustrious collaborative team of Indigenous artists from diverse disciplines.
Please visit www.chocolatewomancollective.com
BRENDA FARNELL, PHD – kinetographer / Mola Dulad
Brenda Farnell is an artist-scholar, movement notation specialist whose research interests focus on the moving body and performance, especially as these relate to Northern Plains (Nakota/Assiniboine) Indigenous knowledge and alternative literacies. She is the author of Do You See What I Mean? Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action and the pioneering, award-winning CD-ROM Wiyuta: Assiniboine Storytelling with Signs. Her research challenges the dominant western view of language as essentially verbal, and shows to the contrary that words, gestures and space participate equally in the creation of meaning.
Brenda has collaborated with Indigenous actor/playwright Monique Mojica since 2008 exploring the application of Indigenous iconic graphic forms to performative storytelling and its documentation. As the ‘kinetographer’ (movement scribe), she contributed to the development of a pictographic movement score of Mojica’s play, Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way. This score, rooted in Guna women’s textile art called molas, is called the Mola Dulad – “living mola”. In 2011, Brenda facilitated Movement Lab workshops for the Image and Spectacle Program for the Arts at the University of Toronto in association with the Toronto Native History Project and the Great Indian Bus Tour.
A professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Brenda is active in social justice and human rights issues and editor of the international Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement.