Tunguska Odyssey - Prairie Dog, February 5-18

From Siberia to Globe's Stage - The Leader-Post, February 17

TUNGUSKA ODYSSEY

Vanishing cultures and a mysterious explosion spark playwright’s trek to Siberia

by Gregory Beatty

Prairie Dog

February 5-18

Floyd Favel wears many hats. As a performer, he’s perhaps best known for his role as Jasper Friendly Bear in the CBC Radio comedy Dead Dog Cafe. Most recently, he played the Biographer in the Globe Theatre’s April 2003 production of Coronation Voyage. As a writer, director and producer, his credits are numerous. Lady of Silences, House of Sonya and Governor of the Dew (a love story which re-imagines the first contact between Aboriginal and European people, Governor was performed for Prince Edward, a noted theatre buff, when he visited Regina last June). Now, Favel is set to debut his latest creation, The Sleeping Land, a play inspired by the Tunguska event of 1908, when a mysterious explosion packing as much energy as a large H-bomb occurred in the sky over Siberia.

“I first heard of the Tunguska event five or six years ago,” Favel says. “I was busy with other projects, but I read about it in my spare time.”

Apart from the sheer magnitude of the devastation — trees were toppled in a 16 km radius of the blast site, and seismic vibrations were recorded 1,000 km away — Favel was drawn to the occurrence out of a life-long interest in the indigenous peoples of Siberia. “I was fascinated by their remoteness, their distance from modern life. With global warming, the boreal forest environment that the Evenk live in is being destroyed. So I thought the Tunguska event could be a dramatic metaphor to address cultural, environmental, social, personal and spiritual themes.”

Born on the Poundmaker Reserve in northwestern Saskatchewan, Favel’s upbringing was grounded in traditional Cree culture. His first brush with performing came in 1983 when he joined an aboriginal theatre group in Saskatoon. From there, he moved to Toronto, where he spent four years at the Native Theatre School. Between 1988-90, he studied at Tukak Teatret, a school for indigenous performers in Denmark. He followed this up with three years at Centro di Lavoro di Grotowski-Pontedera in Italy, where he studied experimental theatre. In 1990, he co-founded Takwakin Performance Laboratory with current Globe artistic director Ruth Smillie.

Once Favel decided to write about Tunguska, he endeavoured to travel to Siberia to gather information on the Evenk people. “It took two years to establish contact. The first year, I had no success. The second year, Giselle Gordon, a documentary filmmaker with Urban Nation, was able to contact a representative of the Evenk government. The woman spoke fluent English and was very keen about the project.”

In May 2002 Favel travelled to Russia, arriving in Moscow. The rest of the journey was something of an odyssey. “We took the Trans-Siberian Express to Krasnoyarsk just north of Mongolia. Then we took a plane north to Tura — about two hours. From Tura, we took a small biplane to a village [where] we got on a helicopter. It dropped us off at the camp. Then 10 days later, at a set time, it returned to pick us up.”

The Evenk, says Favel, earn their living as nomadic reindeer herders. They move into an area, let the reindeer graze for 10-20 days on grass and lichen, then move on to greener pastures. “It’s a very hard, rigorous life,” says Favel. “They’re all very fit. They’re constantly in motion from sunrise to sunset doing different tasks (such as protecting the reindeer from wolves and bears). In communist times reindeer herding was like ranching. But with the breakdown of collective farms, systems to sell the reindeer have weakened. So now they barter reindeer for clothes and other goods.” Oil and gas exploration poses yet another threat to the traditional Evenk lifestyle. “It’s beginning, and there’s talk of building highways [to open up the territory],” says Favel. Already, Evenk youth tend to leave their communities in search of greater economic opportunities. Once development of their home region begins, this process will only accelerate.

Upon meeting the Evenk, Favel says, some of the hopes and ideals he’d harboured at the outset of his expedition were shattered by what he describes as their “realistic attitude to the future”. While sitting in a yurt [tent], he recalls asking herders if there was any hope for the Evenk culture. “There was a pause, and they said ‘Nope.’” I asked “How do you feel about that?” They said, “That’s just how life is.” I didn’t hear the false hopes and rhetoric that we often hear in Canada about the environment or traditional cultures.”

BIG BANG

The Tunguska event happened at 7:17 a.m. on June 30. The closest observers were a group of Evenk herders about 30 km from the epicentre. Not until 1921 did government authorities investigate the incident. When they did, the herders’ eyewitness accounts were invaluable. While scientists believe the explosion was caused by a meteorite with an approximate diameter of 60 metres which vaporized upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, the Evenk, says Favel, “like all indigenous people, look upon natural phenomena as supernatural signs that they must listen to and derive whatever lessons they can”.

While in Siberia, Favel visited the blast site. Few signs of the catastrophe remain. The Evenk generally avoid the area out of respect for its supernatural aura. Neither do they talk much about the event. “They’ll say ‘I don’t know anything about it’ or ‘My grandfather knew the story but I don’t.’” During the early 20th century Soviet authorities waged a campaign to lessen the influence of religion by outlawing shamanism and other spiritual practices, which presumably contributed to the Evenk’s historical amnesia (for additional information on this campaign see the current (and, sadly, last) Dunlop exhibit, Godless at the Workbench).

The Sleeping Land, which stars Favel, Sergei Ostrenko and Tracey McCorrister, is set in present-day. It concerns a writer who journeys to Moscow to interview a scientist who has knowledge of the Tunguska event from a traditional Evenk perspective — knowledge garnered from an ethnographic expedition he undertook to Siberia in the 1960s. As the scientist tells the writer his story, we travel back in time to when he was a young man.

In writing the play, Favel says, he relied more on theatrical conventions like formal dialogue than he has in the past. Still, his use of song and movement to capture the otherworldly nature of Evenk spirituality does give the work a decidedly expressionistic feel. While some viewers might be tempted to draw a parallel between the Evenki’s plight and the hardship experienced by Plains First Nations when the buffalo was hunted to near extinction by settlers and colonists in the 19th century (a reading which is reinforced by Favel’s decision to substitute Cree for the Evenk language), he says it wasn’t his intention to conduct a comparative study. “I’m not after conventional parallels but enigmatic relationships. I don’t have a clear-cut answer why I went to Siberia or why [I wrote about] Tunguska. There’s no deep value in that. The value is in the pondering and the questioning, as that’s what keeps you moving.”

If there is one thing that has characterized Favel’s artistic career it’s movement. The travel he’s undertaken, he says, has permitted him to challenge himself and grow as an artist. In Canada, he maintains, “all aboriginal artists — not just me specifically — are labelled. I don’t think anyone’s happy with that. It’s an obstacle that the Canadian theatre and art [communities] have to overcome, if not immediately, then hopefully very soon.”

House of Sonya (1997) exemplifies Favel’s philosophy. Adapted from Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya”, it’s set on a Saskatchewan reserve and involves a woman (Sonya) who returns home for her uncle’s funeral, where she reminisces about her youthful romance with Dr. Astrov. Through his blend of Western and Aboriginal narrative threads, Favel evokes a pan-human sensibility that emphasizes the commonalties people share — life, death, love, heartbreak — as opposed to their differences.

A work that was three years in the making, and which took its creator to Siberia and back again, will at last be unveiled this evening when The Sleeping Land is presented at Globe Theatre as part of the Shumiatcher Sandbox Series.

Written by Floyd Favel, the piece was inspired by the explosion that rocked Siberia in 1908, a blast believed to have been a thousand times more powerful than an atomic bomb, and which destroyed some 1,500 acres in the Tunguska region.

The event has stirred debate among scientists and researchers, and to this day there is only speculation as to its cause(s). Theories range from comets and exploding asteroids, to anti-matter and UFOs. There has even been talk of conspiracies and coverups.

"The consensus is that it was a mystery and it still is a mystery," says Favel, who confesses that for a time he himself was "enamoured" of the various explanations.

"But after a while, one goes beyond that," he says, and indeed, for the purposes of The Sleeping Land, what matters most is not what caused the explosion, but that the explosion served as a point of departure in Favel's discussion of environmental and cultural issues in general, and of issues like "the loss of language" and the "loss of the boreal forests" in particular.

Favel's research involved extensive reading, not only into the sciences, but the reading of Russian history and philosophy as well. He also took an expedition to the site itself, which was profound, but in some ways anticlimactic, too.

"It's a forest," he says with a smile that asks: what were you expecting? "There's not a shrine there. You're in a forest, and you suddenly think, this is it."

While he was researching, Favel made a conscious effort to not think about characters, themes, scenarios and storylines. He wanted to merely absorb, "trusting that it would all eventually come together -- and it did."

What emerged was a structure unlike anything Favel has conceived in the past.

"It has its own structure, and I'm happy with that structure. I didn't want it to follow any formula I had already used," says a playwright whose works include The Lady of Silences and Governor of the Dew, both of which will be familiar to Globe Theatre audiences.

"One grows, I think, with every play," Favel says. "Sometimes growing means you have to be willing to start all over. That's what I did with this play."

In the end, what he did was blend four theatrical styles and (he believes) made them "harmonious."

This play has elements of Modernism and Impressionism, and at various times it is a mime/dance drama and an ethnic/folk drama.

The Sleeping Land is performed in English, Russian and Cree, with original music composed by Anthony Rozankovic.

Favel himself appears as the Writer, in a cast that includes Winnipeg's Tracey McCorrister as Masha,  and Sergey Ostrenko of Riga, Latvia, as the Professor. Inga Ryazanova is the off-stage translator.

Masha, Favel explains, represents "the indigenous world view," while the Professor stands for "intellectual, scientific Western civilization -- and its disintegration when faced with a mystery."

© Copyright  2004 The Leader-Post (Regina)