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It’s one thing to use puppets to tell fairy tales, but this weekend at the West End Cultural Centre, they will be used to tell a “prairie” tale.
One for Sorrow, Two for Joy is a creation of music and puppetry that tells the story of a woman alone on the prairies of western Canada at the turn of the 20th century who takes life into her own hands as a nurse in the First World War and then as a farmer in the Alberta foothills.
The collaboration was forged at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity between Alberta puppet creator and artist Juanita Dawn and Winnipeg musician Jolene Higgins, known to local music fans as Little Miss Higgins.
“We wanted to create something more whimsical and magical because with puppetry, there are no boundaries,” said Dawn, speaking from Saskatoon in an interview on Morning Light where One for Sorrow, Two for Joy is also being performed. “You can make birds carry children away. You can go down gopher holes and have tea with gophers. The magic of puppetry really relates to this story.”
The magic of puppetry grabbed Dawn late in life, after she retired from a nearly-four-decade career as a registered nurse. “I always had a really strong desire to create no matter what I was doing, no matter what phase of life I was in, I was constantly creating and constantly exploring different avenues of creativity.”
In the case of One for Sorrow, Dawn’s creativity was sparked by the story that she created alongside Higgins. “You do need the story. You need the character quite clear, and you need to know what that character is doing on stage so that you can design the puppet to do those actions on stage,” she explains. “The story for us is the seed.”
The story gives birth to Willow Mae O’Reilly, the former First World War nurse and farmer. Dawn says she made twenty versions of the character – Willow Mae as a little girl, Willow Mae riding a bike, Willow Mae as an old woman. All of these versions that Dawn creates in turn influence the musical score written by Higgins, which is made more crucial by the fact that Willow Mae is also a nonverbal character.
“If there’s little bits that we want to drop in the storytelling process, then I would write a song for it,” says Higgins, who also created a soundscape to add to the world of the story.
Sharing a story like Willow Mae’s is important to Dawn and Higgins to ensure that the struggles of women are recognized as ongoing. “Sometimes, we can forget the impact of actions of other people and how we treat one another,” Higgins explains. “If we forget the journey of women on the prairie and what they contributed, and I mean obviously, historically, women were given very small roles, and the rules that they did play were often pushed aside. So, as an all-women team of artists… we really want to remember and honour what women did in the turn of the century.”
One for Sorrow, Two for Joy runs for one show only at 2 p.m. on March 16 at the West End Cultural Centre. More information can be found at the centre’s website.
