Fall Arts: ‘For the People’ Blends Artistic Worlds at the Guthrie

Photo by Joshua Cummins

In 2019, “Stories From the Drum” entered production at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater. Lead creators Ty Defoe and Larissa FastHorse were building on their initial Guthrie collaboration, 2017’s “Water Is Sacred,” a blend of dance, music, ceremony, and text. The work emerged from Native community workshops.

Their Guthrie partnership would continue. So, what should come next? Community feedback was clear, FastHorse says: a full stage production. An award from the Joyce Foundation, a big arts funder in the Great Lakes region, made it happen.

The result is “For the People,” a play debuting this Saturday, Oct. 7, about a woman who returns home to open a Minneapolis wellness center for Indigenous people—before facing rejection and deceit. A Guthrie commission, it is unique as a performing arts piece because, in this case, the traditionally Western, white form of a play merges with Native community engagement. “I don’t think either of us has ever done anything that isn’t, in some way, in conversation with the community,” FastHorse says.

She and Defoe met years ago through Native Voices at the Autry, a theater company committed to Indigenous talents. “All I remember is going for an epic walk and just talking forever,” Defoe says. “When your ribs hurt when you laugh, it’s a deal.”

Defoe (Ojibwe Nation and Oneida Nation) is a Two-Spirit artist, writer, and cultural worker based in New York. His art, from dance to music to theater, seeks to upend oppressive ideas about what this type of work should be. FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) is a Santa Monica-based playwright and choreographer. With “The Thanksgiving Play”—her recently staged, heart-pumping satire about white folks attempting to neatly package the holiday’s damning history—she reportedly became the first Native woman to debut a show on Broadway.

A few months from the Guthrie premiere, the meeting place today is Zoom. Defoe sits before a digital backdrop of the Earth as seen from space. FastHorse sits in a hotel room. The visual split, as though they speak from different dimensions, echoes Defoe’s description of how it feels to keep both a Native audience and a white audience in mind: It’s like 2022’s cosmic multitasking film “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once,” where realities meld without compromising integrity, like songs overlapping. 

In practice, that means the two have done Guthrie workshops while also bringing a reading to the Indigenous cultural corridor on Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis. “And that, for us, was very revolutionary,” Defoe says, “in terms of ‘Will these jokes land here? Will our people think these are funny?’”

Together, their efforts have orbited community response. In 2015, they formed Indigenous Direction, a consulting firm that assists artists and companies wanting to appropriately create works about Indigenous peoples. “[‘For the People’] is a continuation of all the other work we do together,” FastHorse says.

Community outreach started as soon as they teamed up with the Guthrie, in 2017. It has taken whatever form, including online gatherings during COVID-19, although some communities lacked WiFi access. “That was literally the pivot for us,” Defoe says, “to get more voices to the table.”

He also recalls randomly chatting with an elder on a bicycle. “We are trying to leave, and Larissa stood there for literally, like, 45 minutes to an hour, listening to an individual tell stories and being in conversation and being in right relation with the community.”

As FastHorse puts it, “We have to be able to go home to these people, right? Like, these are our people. The Guthrie can walk away, never talk to a Native person again, never do another Native play. They made it the first 50 years without doing one; they can continue. That’s fine for them. But we have to go home.”

Community feedback was clear about another aspect of the play: It has to be funny. The base of Native culture is “always humor and always teasing and always joking,” FastHorse explains. During press for “The Thanksgiving Play,” she talked about comedy as a Native means of survival. “And this Native grandma came to me and was just like, ‘Larissa, stop it! You’re giving them credit.’” She says she frames it differently now. “We happen to use [humor] to deal with the colonizers and to deal with such tragedy, but it’s just who we are.”

“For the People,” Guthrie Theater, Oct. 7-Nov. 12