Post #89

The Rez Sisters’ Big Clit Energy

Royal Manitoba Theatre John Hirsch Mainstage Winnipeg, Manitoba May 4 – 28, 2022

Ininíwak playwright Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters follows seven Indigenous women, all related by blood or marriage, as they save, barter, and make their way to Toronto to participate in “The Biggest Bingo in the World.” Each woman offers a realistic portrayal of distinct personalities and attitudes toward life in their community and insight into their individual dreams of supporting and escaping it.

When I heard that The Rez Sisters would be showing here in Winnipeg, I was beyond excited! In 2005, I had the unforgettable experience of playing Annie Cook when the play was mounted by the Walterdale Playhouse in Edmonton, Alberta. It was the first time it’d been performed in the city and my first time performing in a theatre production in general. It was also an abrupt introduction to how casting took place at a community theatre; having previously worked solely in film and television, where casting directors provided scripts for specific scenes, I was told to come prepared with a monologue of my choosing. Since I had no idea what I was doing, I turned up to the group audition with a somewhat... unorthodox audition piece. While the other women in my group (all of whom were non-Indigenous) performed scenes from established plays, I’d translated a funny email I’d received a few weeks earlier about the painful hazards of waxing the nether regions into an exuberant performance piece—think blindness and blurring colours of pain and accidentally sealing everything shut. By the time my turn came around, I was almost sick with nerves as what I’d prepared didn’t fit in with anything I’d seen so far—I almost left the whole audition! However, I forced myself to go ahead as planned, gave it my all, was told by the only male member of the casting panel that it was the most disturbing audition monologue he’d ever seen, and won the role of Annie. Incidentally, I was shocked when I was offered this role since she’s an aspiring country singer and I told the casting board that I CAN’T SING at all... turns out the director decided that Annie can’t either.

In thinking about the themes and characters of this play, I couldn’t help but circle back to the conversations myself and my classmates had with our professor Dr. Julie Nagam in our recent Public Art: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures course about the importance of female inclusion in Winnipeg’s various street art scenes—a concept we ultimately termed “Big Clit Energy” (BCE). Chelsea Steiner’s description in her article “Forget Big Dick Energy, We’re Making Big Clit Energy a Thing Now” perfectly sums up this idea: “BCE is the self-possessed swagger and confidence of a woman who doesn’t care what anyone (but especially men) thinks of her. She is assertive, bold, and unafraid to speak her mind. A woman with BCE is empowered by the complete lack of fucks she gives. And no, you don’t have to have a clitoris to rock some BCE. BCE is leaving the house without a bra on and eating a burrito with your bare hands.”¹
The women in The Rez Sisters, each having suffered their own traumas, embody this powerful energy in their individual ways, from loudly vocalizing their disgust at the lack of female leadership on reserves, to outlining their plans to improve and provide for their community, to the way they unflinchingly face the realities surrounding the ongoing violence against Indigenous women and girls.²

Highway is such a preeminent writer in the arts and cultural communities due to his refusal to adhere to what bell hooks terms “ethics of dominance,” in which one group holds power over another.³ He didn’t write this play for a non-Indigenous audience (who, in the 1980s, were the primary theatre-going demographic); he instead presented the Indigenous community from an inside and unapologetic perspective. His work often reveals a wide cultural gap through the audience’s reaction to the play—largely Indigenous audiences roar with laughter, while mostly non-Indigenous ones awkwardly chuckle at best as the inside jokes fly over their heads. Highway celebrates his strong characters, with all their flaws, complex relationships, and love for one another, and doesn’t present a neatly-wrapped happy ending. For the seven women, life keeps persisting until one day it doesn’t.

The relevance of many of the play’s themes hasn’t diminished since it was first written and performed in 1986, and its various productions over the years have evolved to reflect each era’s social and cultural environment. For example, Waawaate Fobister, an Anishinaabe two- spirited man who goes by they/them, plays Veronique St. Pierre in the recent Winnipeg production and was cast based on their talent and suitability for the role; this is something that wouldn’t have even been recognized as an option for the casting panel in my production 17 years ago.

Looking back on my time in The Rez Sisters with the knowledge and experience I’ve gained in life so far, auditioning for the play and loudly torturing the audience with my “singing” during its ten-day run pushed me entirely outside my comfort zone, and I like to think that it was a bit of BCE that helped me to not only get through it while having an absolute blast doing it but also contributed to the person I am today.

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1 (Steiner 2018)
2 (Rymhs 2015)
3 (Fearon 2021, 53)

Bibliography

Fearon, Alyssa. 2021. "A Scarborough Love Ethic." In Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures, edited by Julie Nagam and Janine Marchessault, 50-57. Toronto: Public Books.

Rymhs, Deena. 2015. "Idling No More: The Road in Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters." Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (University of Nebraska Press) 2 (2).

Steiner, Chelsea. 2018. Forget Big Dick Energy, We’re Making Big Clit Energy a Thing Now. August 17. Accessed May 27, 2022. https://www.themarysue.com/forget-big-dick- energy-were-making-big-clit-energy-a-thing-now/.

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Amanda McLeod