The Sleeping Land awakens on the stage

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How far does a writer go for a good story? In the case of Floyd Favel, the journey took him half way around the world.

Favel's newest play, The Sleeping Land, premiered Feb. 17 at Regina's Globe Theatre.

In addition to being the author, Favel, who is originally from Poundmaker First Nation, is the director and one of three actors in the play. He stars with Tracey McCorrister, a First Nations actress from Winnipeg, and Sergy Ostrenko, a Latvian actor.

The play is performed in English, Cree and Russian, with the Cree language substituted for the language of the Evenk (pronounced ee-ven-kee), the Indigenous people of the area of Siberia where the play takes place.

The play centers on a writer's quest for knowledge about the Tunguska explosion, which in the early morning hours of June 30, 1908 rocked the Siberian tundra along the Tunguska River. The explosion flattened several thousand square miles of Siberian tundra and forest in the heartland of the Evenk people.

In the first act, the writer meets a professor, whose housekeeper is an Evenk woman whose Elders witnessed the explosion. But both the professor and housekeeper are reluctant to tell the writer, an Aboriginal man from Canada, about the site of the incident.

The play's second act, set about 60 years in the past, sees the professor as a young man. He meets a young woman in a Siberian village and an Elder who was blinded by the explosion. The three face natural and supernatural horrors as they progress to the blast site.

Although almost 100 years have passed since the Tunguska explosion, the event still remains one of the most mysterious events of the 20th century. Astronomers speculate the explosion happened when either a meteorite or a comet raced through the earth's atmosphere at thousands of kilometres an hour. As it did, it generated so much heat that it exploded with the force of a 35-megaton nuclear bomb-more than a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The government in Moscow didn't send anyone to investigate the explosion until 1921. They interviewed many of the Evenk eyewitnesses and travelled to what they thought was the epicentre of the explosion.

The Evenk people treat the site of the explosion with reverence.

"They were very secretive about it. They didn't very much like to speak about it," Favel said. "For them, it was a huge catastrophe. It had a huge cultural significance. Any natural catastrophe is looked on by Indigenous peoples as a cultural and spiritual event because of their relationship with the natural forces of the environment."

In fact, the site of the explosion is off-limits to the Evenk people.

"The Elders forbid them to go there, just as any discussion of Tunguska is forbidden in their culture," Favel said.

"I was going to research a forbidden topic and that's what the play is about, too. The contradiction between getting scientific information and private spiritual information."

Favel, who has made his life in the theatre for the past two decades, became interested in the Tunguska event five or six years ago. In 2001, he started planning his trip to the site of the explosion. The next year, that plan came to fruition.

In May 2002, Favel went with a documentary film crew from Toronto to an Evenk nomadic camp where they stayed for 10 days.

The Evenk people are the first peoples of Siberia and they continue to live in a traditional way. In addition to hunting, trapping and fishing, they look after communal herds of reindeer and live as nomads to follow the herds.

"When I was there, the days would begin before 7 a.m.," said Favel. "At that time, the days are very long and the nights are very short. They would do their chores, and then they would do their daily tasks like keeping the herds safe from wolves and bears. They would let the reindeer graze for 10 to 20 days in an area. The reindeer would feed off lichen and moss, and then they wuld move the herd to another area."

At first glance, it appears that the Evenk people's livelihood hasn't changed very much in hundreds of years. But they're not immune to the political, social and economic changes that have shaken other Aboriginal cultures.

"Any situation is comparable when there's a colonizing force," Favel said. "It's very different, but it's comparable. In the end, the result is the same."

The Evenk have found themselves on the losing end in their dealings with government. Whether it was under czarist rule, the communists, or now the current Russian leadership, the Evenk culture has faced official harassment from government and from western economies, Favel said.

"Under communism, they did have work and collective farms. But with the fall of communism there was a collapse of the reindeer herding industry, and a collapse of the collective farm systems. They're now trying to find their way to operate within a free market economy."

To make the situation worse, mining and oil drilling companies are exploring the traditional lands of the Evenk, and if such projects go ahead, much of the reindeer grazing area could be destroyed.

When Favel got to the site of the 1908 explosion he found that Mother Earth has done a fine job of healing Tunguska's scars.

"You wouldn't recognize that anything had happened," Favel said. "Every once in a while you'd see burned out stumps, but you'd see little evidence of the blast."

The blast itself isn't portrayed on stage. However, its cultural aftershocks reverberate in the play.

"In Greek drama, the main event doesn't happen on stage," said Favel. "What's more important to the story is the professor's journey to Tunguska, the centre of the event. What's more important is the journey, not the event itself."