“This empire eats his own children and calls it freedom.”
That’s one of the writing prompts artist Gregg Deal has written in his poetry journal. On Tuesday night, he performed a 20-minute set of poetry at Amphibian Stage as part of the 10-day annual festival SparkFest.
This is the fifth SparkFest, which offers visual art, theater, poetry and dance that center on a different marginalized community. One year the festival focused on communities from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Another year centered on Asian American and Pacific Islander artists. This year, the focus is on Native Americans and indigenous people from Turtle Island and Hawaii.
Deal, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, is a multidisciplinary artist who creates murals, paintings, performance art and spoken art and recently opened for Pearl Jam with his band Dead Pioneers. He said he’s grateful to participate in SparkFest because it’s facilitating opportunities for young Native creatives.
“It gives this power in real time where you can see a person who has been traditionally held as a monolith, a relic in the United States, not as a relic, but as a human being,” he said.
Jay Duffer, artistic director at Amphibian Stage, said one of the theater’s core missions is to bring together underrepresented groups and build community. He said Amphibian aims to create a space where artists can express themselves however they choose rather than feeding into certain stereotypes or stigmas – for example, not just telling stories rooted in trauma.
“We might have some stories that focus on where injustices have occurred,” he said. “But then, you'll also just hear stories from these storytellers of things they just want to say. It could be jubilant. It could be stories about mundane things that have profound meaning.”
Deal also believes art has a unique ability to speak to the moment in ways that expand our thinking beyond social and political divisions.
“Whether that's music or writing or visual arts or filmmaking or photography or any of those things has the power to not just inform those narratives but to also counter those narratives with something that is strong and painful and funny and informative, and there's a million different ways,” he said.
SparkFest will continue until June 22. There will be an acting competition and audiences can watch new plays like “Rotations of the Sky” and “Stuck in Honolulu.” Tickets are available.
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