Muriel Miguel: Tell Stories That Are Important to You

by Gaye Jeffers

Standing before a keynote audience at the SETC Convention in Knoxville, Muriel Miguel played her favorite role: storyteller. Starting from her childhood days as an outcast “city Indian,” she recounted the twists and turns that led her to become part of the avant-garde theatre movement of the 1960s and later to found Spiderwoman Theater, the longest-running feminist Native American theatre company in North America. Miguel made it clear that, at 81, she remains passionate about making theatre – and weaving tales that make a difference.

Throughout her life, she has been drawn most strongly to two causes that remain her focus today: feminism and the marginalization of Native Americans, especially women. Her latest work, Misdemeanor Dream, explores the Native tricksters and spirits that exist in the stories and daily lives of indigenous people. In September, Miguel will travel to Ottawa, Canada, to direct The Unnatural and Accidental Women, a play by Marie Clements, at the National Arts Centre.

“The play is about the disappearance and murder of indigenous women in Vancouver,” she said. “It’s based on real events and reminds us that everyone has to watch over everyone else.”

Her lifetime of work as a trail-blazing storyteller, director, choreographer, playwright, actor, dancer and educator who worked with some of the major figures in theatre – and became one herself – earned her recognition as SETC’s 2019 Distinguished Career Award winner. In her Saturday keynote address and in an interview with Southern Theatre, she described the path she followed, which started in her native Brooklyn, NY.

Embracing Native Culture

A driving force in all of Miguel’s work is her heritage. Born in 1937, she is the youngest of three sisters in a Native American family that was committed to place and community. She grew up curious and remains a studious and vocal observer of a changing world. Her father was a Kuna from islands called Kuna Yala, off the coast of Panama, and her mother was a member of the Rappahannock tribe of Virginia. A self-described “city Indian," Muriel was raised in a family rich in tradition, with a heritage based in storytelling, Native American dance and song.

Miguel grew up in a time when the government forbade ceremonial rights for Native people. Many Native families had left their homelands and the reservations and come to New York City. Some had found work performing in Wild West shows and were left stranded, with no way to return to their homes.They carried their history with them, the power of the past informing much of life in the present. The Native Americans who came together as a community in Brooklyn shared their histories and taught each other stories from their pasts. As Miguel noted in her keynote address, “And that’s how we began.”

“Most of our families came from what we always referred to as ‘Indian Showbiz,’ which meant that you and your family did the advertisements for the cowboy and Indian shows, for the Pontiac car, for anything that sounded Indian,” Miguel said.

Her father often performed the ballyhooing in front of movie theatres, encouraging passersby to purchase tickets. Watching her father perform ignited a passion for history and dance in Miguel.

Sisters Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel appear in Reverb-ber-ber-rations, a play about growing up in Native American culture, in 1994 at the International Women's Playwrights Festival in Adelaide, Australia.

Her Performance Career Begins at 12

In elementary school in Brooklyn, Native American children were taught that their culture was dead. After hearing this from her teachers, Miguel felt called to challenge this assumption and prove them wrong. In 1949, 12-year-old Muriel and her friend Louis Mofsie formed the Little Eagles, a group of children who met to embrace Native traditions. Because they refused to accept the notion that their culture was dead, the children were chastised by their teachers. “We all got in trouble for speaking out,” she recalled.

The children met in a church basement and performed the songs and dances of their culture. With the support of their families, the Little Eagles visited schools, performing songs and dances, proving that Native culture was decidedly not dead, but was in fact flourishing in the middle of Brooklyn. The Little Eagles transformed over a period of years into the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, a troupe that continues to perform nationally and internationally.

While Miguel connected to the past through the Little Eagles, her older sisters, Gloria and Lisa, encouraged her to be more “cultured.” To Miguel, this meant embracing more “white” culture. She listened to her sisters, who often served as second mothers, and suffered through a series of piano and dance lessons, including ballet. Drawn to modern dance instead of ballet, Miguel studied and performed throughout her teenage years. After being turned down to study at Juilliard in 1960, she found her way to the Henry Street Playhouse, a performing arts center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (now the Abrons Arts Center).

Miguel’s dance training at the Henry Street Playhouse placed her in the middle of the avant-garde performance scene of the 1960s. She studied with Alwin Nikolais, known for his abstract style of dance as motion, and Lynn Laredo, who focused on the theories and techniques of Rudolf von Laban. She kept her Native dance separate from the modern dance that she was learning, not quite free to allow the forms to mix. For Miguel, there was still something missing. “I always felt like I was swimming upstream while everybody else was going downstream,” she said. “I found myself still searching.”

Finding a Home with Open Theater

In 1962, a new experimental theatre ensemble was forming called the Open Theater. It was spearheaded by Joseph Chaikin, who had recently left the Living Theatre. Building on his interest in improvisation, imagination and the theories of Jerzy Grotowski, Chaikin wanted the actors to be able to move and work with their bodies in ways that current training was not providing. He met Lynn Laredo, who offered to bring some of her Laban-trained dancers to his group to demonstrate. Miguel was one of those dancers.

“When I got to the Open Theater, I was like, ‘Whew, I understand this,’ ” Miguel said.

She was invited to join the Open Theater and became one of its original members, along with Sam Shepard, Megan Terry, Peter Feldman and Chaikin. Miguel worked with the Open Theater throughout the 1960s, taking her young child with her as the company toured Europe. The type of storytelling that Chaikin was exploring was the type of storytelling that Miguel had been exposed to all of her life. She recognized how to mix her Native roots and her current performance techniques. She appeared in groundbreaking productions of Megan Terry’s Viet Rock, Jean-Claude van Itallie’s The Serpent and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

Creating Her Own Feminist Work

In the early 1970s, Miguel decided to strike out on her own in order to grow and explore her own approach to theatre and tackle issues that she felt were pressing.

“When I left Open Theater, a number of things were happening,” she said. “It was the beginning of feminism in the United States. Gloria Steinem was working like mad. I really felt that I had to say something. I had to do something. I was getting angrier and angrier because of how women were treated. I come from two sides of matriarchs. Women were doing all of the work, and men were taking all of the credit. I decided I wanted to work with women.”

Miguel gathered women of all ages and backgrounds. “I was only thinking of women – I wasn’t thinking of Native women at this time – only women. All women. So I did workshops around Manhattan.”

Muriel Miguel portrays Belle in Red Mother, a show she wrote that weaves Brechtian themes with demon tales, at La MaMa Theater in New York in 2010.

Carey Lovelace

Story Weaving: Three Become One

Working with women from diverse backgrounds and experiences, Miguel began to think about storytelling in terms of sound and movement, moments and breaths.

“I had listened to stories all my life,” she said. “I realized that there’s no beginning and no end for a lot of our stories. That you can start in the middle, you can start at the end. But it all somehow comes around to the same thing – an understanding.”

Miguel asked two women, Lois Weaver (later of Split Britches) and Josephine Mofsie Tarrant, Hopi/ Hochunk storyteller, for personal stories. Each woman had a different story: Weaver’s story involved a dream she had of making love to Jesus. Miguel’s story was inspired by the Sun Dance ceremony and a conversation she had with a butterfly. Tarrant’s story was about the Spider Woman, a figure in the Hopi tradition that teaches people how to weave.

Realizing that all three stories centered on the idea of creation, Miguel experimented with how the stories could converge.

“And then we started to talk about things like breath, and then we started talking about the weight – the weight of a word and where does the weight come from and what is the word,” Miguel said. “So, we worked with that, and at times all three of us would say the same word. Now, these are three different stories, but they’re all the same. They all have the same core. Creation. And that was really the beginning of how I looked at story weaving.”

Story weaving – the process of crafting several stories into one unified performance – soon became the hallmark of Miguel’s style.

Spiderwoman Theater

Miguel’s collaborations with women marked the beginning of Spiderwoman Theater. Miguel founded the company in 1975 with Lois Weaver, Pam Verge, and Miguel’s two sisters, Lisa Mayo and Gloria Miguel. Spiderwoman’s first production, Women in Violence, premiered at New York City’s Washington Street Methodist Church in 1976.

On the recommendation of Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Camposino Theatre, Spiderwoman was invited to perform Women in Violence at Le Festival Mondiale du Theatre in Nancy, France, in 1977. This world theatre festival welcomed avant-garde artists from around the world. Spiderwoman held a benefit at The Public Theater and with the backing and support of Ellen Stewart, founder and director of Café La MaMa, raised money to make the trip to France. “Ellen was really like a mother,” Miguel said. “I met her when I was like 18 or 19. She was part of my world.”

The expression of violence in Women in Violence polarized the festival attendees, with some women denying there was a problem while others embraced Spiderwoman’s message. The performance opened a floodgate for women to experience theatre that was about them. Women approached Miguel and shared stories of workplace harassment and being ignored by local police when reporting abuse.

“A woman came up to me after the show one night and said that she was beaten up,” Miguel recalled.

Spurred on by Women in Violence, women at the festival and all around Nancy, along with Spiderwoman, demonstrated at the police department to demand that reports about abuse and harassment be addressed and acknowledged. The demonstration was covered in newspapers in France and America. Women in Violence connected with women in different countries who spoke different languages. A seed was planted in Miguel.

“I realized how important it was to talk, how important it was to listen,” she said.

Miguel continued to work on issues affecting women. Thinking back to her own family, she remembered secrets kept by her parents and sisters and how detrimental they were to the idea of healing.

“If we can only get past secrets and realize that to just say, ‘Yes, that happened,’ can bring about some kind of resolution,” she said. “The whole idea of shining the light on a secret. I mean, where does the poison start? Let’s take the flashlight, let’s take the light, and let’s shine it and expose it.”

At a time when issues regarding the care, support and education of children were making headlines around the country, Miguel focused on the plight of Native children: children being killed, children being “thrown away.” Native American history includes stories of children in the U.S. being taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools to be indoctrinated into American culture. Native women shared personal stories of being separated from their parents. Mothers told stories about the feelings of emptiness after giving birth. Spiderwoman developed a play called Throw Away Kids that addressed the ties between mothers and children in all derivations. From Miguel’s point of view, processing the pain of the past through plays such as this helps clear the way for progress.

As theatre and performance groups around the world recognized the need for the marginalized voices of indigenous people to be heard, Miguel became a leader in the movement, convinced that creating and listening to stories is a way to have a conversation about issues. She was invited to the Aboriginal Brecht Project at the Aboriginal Arts Program at the Banff Centre in Canada. The project, Justice, looked at using Brecht to explore the subject of justice from an indigenous point of view. Working with original Berliner Ensemble member Uta Birnbaum, Miguel was inspired to create a piece based on Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. The piece that she developed, Red Mother, was workshopped in 2007 and was presented by many organizations, including the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, as part of its Native Expressions Series in 2008.

“I wanted to dedicate it to all Native mothers that people said failed: the whores, the drug addicts, the women who ran away and left the children with the grandmother,” Miguel said.

Fear of Oatmeal, a play written by Muriel Miguel which premiered in June 2018 at Theatre for the New City in New York, features (left to right) Soni Moreno, Joe Cross, Gloria Miguel (seated) and Sheldon Raymore.

Walesca Ambroise

Continuing to Tell Stories

More than 40 years after the theatre began, Spiderwoman’s first performance piece, Women in Violence, continues to develop and shift in response to current affairs. The latest incarnation, called Material Witness, is a response to Miguel’s realization that today’s Native American women face many of the same obstacles that others endured 40 years ago. “We were in the same place,” she said. “Women were still being raped. Women were disappearing and being murdered. Nothing has changed for Native women.”

Miguel remains committed to producing theatre that reaches out on a personal level, addressing the wounds that need to be healed in a society or community– and inspiring women to tell the stories that are important to them.

“More women are talking, and that’s what’s important,” Miguel says. “That’s what’s important tome. It’s important to tell your stories. It’s important to tell your stories to everyone. It’s important to look in yourself – inside yourself. And it’s important to sing those songs or dance those dances.”