An Evening with Madeline Sayet, an event where Madeline Sayet performed excerpts from her show “Where We Belong,” and spoke on her life and play’s impact, took place at the EZ Blackbox Theatre in the Center for Performing Arts Wednesday. Jessica Vallejo hosted the event which was compromised of 15-minute excerpts of Sayet’s show, a conversation between Sayet and Vallejo and an opportunity for questions. Before the event started, a land acknowledgment was read aloud.

Sayet is a Mohegan theatremaker named in Forbes 30 Under 30, a TED fellow, an NCAIED Native American 40 under 40, an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow and received the White House Champion of Change Award from former President Barack Obama. She is an assistant professor at Arizona State University in its English department and the executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program.

“Originally, I trained to be an actor, I grew up doing a lot of Shakespeare because that was what was available. Now I have a very complicated relationship with Shakespeare because I now recognize the systemic structures in place that means that Shakespeare is everywhere,” Sayet said. “When I got to school, my final year of undergrad, there was a course being taught in contemporary Native drama. It was completely revolutionary to me because I didn’t know Native theater existed and that comes up for a lot of different Native theater artists. Suddenly it was like these stories that resonated and were important to me and felt so deep and so connected. I shifted into directing first as a way to facilitate community spaces with other Native artists.”

Sayet’s original play, “Where We Belong,” was first performed at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London and received four out of four stars from The Chicago Tribune. Sayet’s website describes the play as “a search for belonging in a globalized world. It is at once a rich investigation into the impulses that divide and connect us as people, but it is also about a wolf that learns how to become a bird and fly.” Two excerpts from the show were performed at the event.

“When I wrote [“Where We Belong”], it was because it’s something needed to be processed that I couldn’t process any other way other than on stage,” Sayet said. “Because it was so specific, and because it was so personal people found different resonances with the story. That also helped heal other people, which wasn’t something I had foreseen or realized. And that’s ultimately why I kept telling the story was because when I would perform it, I’d get notes for people in the audience that would like that would tell me how much it meant to them.”

Jessica Vallejo, who hosted the event, is Dine, Yoeme and Xicana. She is a doula, licensed massage therapist, wellness practitioner and birth keeper who offers traditional family support at Sacred Spaces 216. She also serves as the secretary for the Committee of 500 Years of Dignity and Resistance and serves in Diversity Equity and Inclusion for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Monsters, Charge, Legion and Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse Events. Vallejo spoke on how much Sayet’s work meant to her.

“A lot of Native folks have struggled through creating an identity for themselves in this world, post-colonial,” Vallejo said. “Our community has struggled for visibility and against the backdrop of racist imagery for 100 years. We are beginning a journey and this is part of it, telling our stories and giving that visibility back to our lived experiences and the ongoing barriers that we have to access that as an identity in 2023. I’m a little emotional.”

Sayet’s “Where We Belong” is currently touring the nation produced by the Wo0lly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library, and is published by Bloomsbury.

Lex Ogilvie is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected]

Last year, a group of Wyoming women passionate about art came together and formed the Wyoming Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. By creating this committee, the group is able to nominate one upcoming Wyoming artist to the 2024 Women to Watch exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. Sarah Ortegon High Walking will be that artist. Wyoming Public Radio’s Kamila Kudelska spoke with Ortegon High Walking on what this nomination means to her and what her art hopes to express. First, they dove into her childhood.

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Sarah Ortegon High Walking: I was born into a family of 12. My mom had six boys and six girls. I was born in Denver, Colorado. And my parents would, from the age of three, they would take me to the [Wind River Reservation]. And we spent our summers out there. And maybe from age of when I was 11, or 12, they actually would leave me with my aunt and uncle George and Shirley Enos. They would leave me to basically just play outside on the rez, with my aunt and uncle, and we stayed with them for a few months during the summer.

Kamila Kudelska: Can you tell me a little bit of how you started working in art and how that kind of came out for you?

SOHW: I don’t actually know why I started doing art. It was just a part of something that I believe was always a need to express myself. And not always having the resource of needing to actually speak my emotions. I always say that art is a quiet expression. But sometimes it can be the loudest because they say that our paintings are sometimes worth 1,000 words. I was more of a quiet person growing up. And because my dad was a preacher, I was required to be seen and not heard. And so that led to me expressing myself through art.

KK: What does it mean to you to be chosen as the Wyoming woman representative at the National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibit?

SOHW: It’s a huge honor to be chosen. It’s also very nerve wracking, because I feel like there was a reason that I was chosen, and I want to live up to the artist that I can be. I just had a baby. And so my art production has slowed down. But that doesn’t make me any less of an artist. So I think it’s going to have a profound impact on my future, not only on my present, because I think that this is going to solidify me in the art world. It’s really hard I feel sometimes for women to be taken seriously as artists, because we have to be so multifaceted. We have to work and it is the same for men, but in the capacity that we’re needed as mothers and as sisters, there’s just a lot that’s required of us. And so even throughout history, there’s not a whole lot of women artists that are recognized. But the women that were recognized were very powerful artists. And so it just means a lot to me. And I honestly think that it’s going to change the trajectory of my life.

KK: My understanding is that you already have an idea of the piece of work that you’re going to be presenting at the exhibit. Could you describe it?

SOHW: In 2013, I went and competed in Miss Native American USA. And I did not believe that I was going to win the title. But I did win the title. I was practicing in the first jingle dress that I was ever given. And I was already 23 by that time. And typically, we begin to dance when we’re two or three years old already out in the powwow circle. For me to be 23 and taking my first steps in a jingle dress, and I used that jingle dress to compete, it was just…that was also a very life changing time in my life. And so I depicted the jingle dress, and I got my inspiration through Frida Kahlo, and how she depicts herself in two separate viewpoints. But I removed my physical self and I just painted the dresses, and it looked like they’re moving, they’re just floating in movement. And the background was white. I added beadwork onto the belt areas of the two dresses that I put side by side on the painting. The dress was red, and I called it my first steps. And so I wanted to replicate that on four different panels kind of in a circular motion. The panels will be square, but it’ll be hung in a circular motion. I’ll be painting different dresses, and they will be representative of the different seasons of our life, of the different seasons of the world…winter, summer, fall, and spring. I am planning to take footage of Wyoming in its different seasons and put those videos on top of the paintings that I paint. So it’s going to show the transition of the different seasons on the paintings.

KK: I love that. Can you kind of talk about what a jingle dress is?

SOHW: So the jingle dress comes from the Anishinaabe people, which are also known as the Ojibwe people. It was a dream that came to an elder whose daughter was sick. And there are different versions of the story but this is the version I was told. So I’ll share that. And so through his vision, he saw the dress. And originally it was tobacco can lids that were used for the jingles. We use tobacco in order to pray so it’s a prayer dance, basically. So the dress can have up to 365 jingles on it representing each day of the year. Not every jingle dress is that way. There are contemporary jingle dress dancers now. And it’s a lot more fancy than what it used to be. So that’s basically what a jingle dress is. It’s a dress that you dance in and it has jingles that sound like rain when you dance. If you were to dance without a drum, it sounds like rain on a tin roof.

KK: The exhibit in D.C. has a theme, which is “New, Future, and Alternative Worlds.” So I wonder if you can describe how that theme fits with the piece of work that you just described?

SOHW: What I am relating to new and alternative worlds is the fact that we as human beings need to go back to helping one another. And, as in, like, whenever we’re talking about prayer for things or supporting one another, I think that’s something that has become lost in the digital era. Right now, I feel like when you lose contact in the physical realm of being in another’s presence, it kind of separates people from one another. I feel like if you’re to go back in time, and to see how Shoshone and Arapaho people have… previously they were on the same reservation, but traditionally, you know, enemies. But that’s not what I want to focus on. What I want to focus on, is even as a separate people, there was always a home for our people. There wasn’t this concept of money, everything was more of a natural life. And so I feel like that’s what I’m wanting to bring back to the future of who we are. Not even just Native people, but people in general. Nature could be very violent at times. But it’s also there to help support each other, like the water supports the trees, supports the birds, supports the feeding of our predators. And so it’s a continuous cycle of regeneration. And that’s one thing that I want to bring back through my artwork is going back to the humanity of who we are, going back to our family relations and to praying for one another.