Premiering at Roy Thomson Hall on Sunday, 'She Holds Up The Stars' blends movement, Indigenous storytelling, Western music and striking puppetry.Jason George/Supplied
The multimedia theatrical experience from Red Sky Performance, She Holds Up The Stars, is deeply personal to director Sandra Laronde.
Based on her 2022 young adult novel of the same name, the performance follows Misko, an urban Indigenous girl who spends the summer on her home reserve with her grandmother. There, she connects with her culture, heritage and nature, beginning a healing journey as she tries to understand what happened to her mother when she was little.
“Misko is up against a world that is both beautiful and cruel,” Laronde, who is Teme-Augama Anishnabai, says. “How does she make sense of that world when she’s coming into her own sense of who she is at 12 years of age? In terms of identity, connection and connection to land. And she also is grappling with and up against racism, and against colonization, which, of course, at the age of 12, you don’t make sense of it like that.”
Premiering at Roy Thomson Hall on Sunday, the production blends movement, Indigenous storytelling, Western music – performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, a co-commissioner of the performance – and striking puppetry.
Working with British puppeteer Nick Barnes, Red Sky created a life-sized wooden horse puppet that will feature prominently in the show. “It has that beautiful woodland design etched into it. It’s so subtle and beautiful,” Laronde says. Barnes brings extensive experience with such large-scale designs, having designed a life-sized horse for Al Adiyat (2020, Dubai Expo) and the puppets for the stage version of Life of Pi.
Fitting a life-sized horse puppet, its puppeteers and the cast – which includes Julia Davis as Misko – all on the stage of Roy Thomson Hall has been no easy feat.
In a conventional setup, Laronde explains, “The conductor would be in the way” of the puppet. Instead, for She Holds Up The Stars, a slightly reduced TSO orchestra is arranged around the actors, with the conductor facing the audience. This reconfiguration reflects Laronde’s broader approach to storytelling. “For the first time, the audience will be able to see the face and the beauty of what a conductor does,” she adds.
Long-time Red Sky collaborator and composer Eliot Britton (Red River Métis), who wrote the music for the show, agrees that this configuration is unorthodox, but it opens creative possibilities for new sounds and presentations of theatrical experiences with full orchestras. “Orchestras aren’t opposed to doing things differently,” he says. “It’s just they have done things a certain way for a very long time.”
Britton’s music, like the puppetry, supports Laronde’s story, providing emotional depth beneath the dialogue. “The story is 50-per-cent me, 50-per-cent fictitious,” she said, explaining that She Holds Up The Stars fulfills Red Sky’s mandate of providing broader Indigenous representation on Canadian stages.
“We don’t see reflections of ourselves. I wanted to create a story that speaks to my experience and holds truth. When you don’t see yourself reflected in the world around you, or the stories are distorted or diminished or stereotypes, it can make one feel erased.”
Throughout the story, Misko’s resilience anchors the narrative. “She keeps searching. She keeps connecting and she never gives up. That’s where the hope is,” Laronde says. Though Misko faces a lot of difficulty, she takes that spirit and finds beauty and magic.
Laronde would love for audiences to see that “young people can stand up for what they believe is right and just. The world extends far beyond that, which is human.” And for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audience members to leave with “the understanding that Indigenous stories are powerful, exciting and expansive.”
Red Sky’s productions have appeared on stages around the world, including sold-out shows in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Laronde hopes the “expansive, rich and deep” She Holds Up The Stars will, if not travel the world, at least continue her goal of “changing the future of Indigenous storytelling on the orchestral stages of Canada.”