Local youth to contribute to Tekcno Powwow project

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Take one Aboriginal arts collective, Add in three internationally recognized Native artists from the United States. Fold the talents and enthusiasm of a group of Aboriginal youth from Regina's inner city into the mix. Add a dash of traditional powwow music, dance and regalia, and a liberal sprinkling of contemporary music, moves and media. The end result: Tekcno Powwow.

Tekcno Powwow is a large-scale outdoor art installation that for 24 hours next June will take over the Treaty Four Powwow Grounds in the Qu'Appelle Valley. The installations will feature interactive stations, video, recorded music, and live performances where traditional will meet contemporary and futuristic, where powwow will meet hip hop and techno. It is also a project that goes beyond being a means for artistic expression, and becomes a tool for reaching out to and helping to empower local Aboriginal youth.

Tekcno Powwow is the brainchild of Bently Spang, a Northern Cheyenne multi-media artist from Montana. Spang has teamed up with filmmaker Gabriel Lopez-Shaw, who is Pyramid Paiute from Nevada, and Bert Benally, a Navajo artist and DJ from New Mexico.

"Each of the artists have international reputations, and we're quite excited to have the opportunity to bring them up here," said Reona Brass, Tekcno Powwow project leader with the Sakewewak First Nations Artists' Collective, which is producing next summer's world premier. "Because they are an amazing resource for any community, but particularly this community since we have such a high number of inner-city Aboriginal youth and these guys are Indian men, and very talented, and also very talented at working with youth," she said.

"They each have their own professional art careers. And as a part of their careers, they've each, out of their own decision, taken projects where they've worked with youth from their own reservations ... and that's why they've come together and created this project, which has been created primarily for the youth that they each individually deal with and are concerned about all the time," she said.

"We're really trying to target the local Native youth particularly with this piece," Spang said, "Because, at least in my own experience in my community, the kids, they only get a couple options in terms of artistic expression from what I've seen. They can do traditional work, which is very important. Or they can do sort of romantic depictions. And it may be different up here in Canada, but in the States, its fairly cut and dried, they get just a couple of options. And so I've always tried to give the kids in my community other options of how to express themselves media-wise, and also just expressing themselves personally," he said.

"So hopefully, we want to acknowledge the power of those forms that they're already familiar with, that they're already sort of drawn to, like video and DJ techno music, and being able to sample and mix and scratch and all those things. We want them to see that to be a Native person today, there's no parameters on anything. You can really express yourself in any way you want, musically, video-wise, performance, installation. You can grab anything off the ground and make it into something that expresses your experience. So that's what is at the sort of core of this, is helping them, celebrating the fact that as Native people from the very beginning, we've always been innovative. That's been really at the core of who we are, is being able to innovate and adapt. We wouldn't be here if we didn't have that built in."

The youth who get involved in the project will attend workshops on film, music and acting, and will get a chance to sit down with the project collaborators and find out how they do the work that they do. Those workshops are set for the end of September.

Spang said the idea for Tekcno Powwow actually came to him a few years back, when he was in grad school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

"A friend of mine, who is actually ne of the collaborators, Burt Benally, he started taking me to raves. He's a DJ, and also an artist. And I was just struck by the power of those events. They're like walking into an art installation. And I was also struck by the way the music grabbed me and how similar it was to when I go to powwows back home on my reservation ... and I just kept feeling all these crossover emotions, about the music, about the space itself. And as I would dance, I would-even though I'm not a powwow dancer, I know the dances-and I would sort of fall into those powow moves like grass dance and things like that. All these things started to cross over for me, and I started thinking this would be the perfect kind of thing to bring together the techno atmosphere and the music and also the idea of rave as subculture."

"Just visually, sort of watching people at these raves, the young kids, the way they would dress and what not. They were sampling from the larger culture, things, and taking them out of context and putting them into that context, like construction gear, face shields and respirators, things like that. And I could see the similarities in what my people have done for years, which is sample from other cultures to create our own identity. And that's part of why we've survived through a lot of things to get to this point, is that we were able to adapt things around us to support who we are."