Starr Muranko dances through memories of a difficult year in Chapter 21
The Raven Spirit Dance artist reflects on the experience of becoming a mother at the same time as facing a cancer diagnosis
Starr Muranko in Chapter 21. Photo by Erik Zennström
Raven Spirit Dance presents Chapter 21 at the Firehall Arts Centre from September 29 to October 3.
TEN YEARS AGO, Vancouver dance artist Starr Muranko was visiting her mother’s Moose Cree First Nation in Moose Factory, Ontario, when she bought a pair of tiny moccasins.
Handcrafted by her grandmother’s friend, they represented what Muranko says now was a young woman’s “naive” dream of one day having a baby.
What she couldn’t have foreseen then was how much she would go through to have a child, or that the little leather booties—which somehow foretold a boy with their blue flower beadwork—would find their way into a deeply personal new dance-theatre piece a decade later.
“Before Sami came, we had several pregnancy losses,” the artist begins, mentioning the son she finally greeted in 2017. She’s talking to Stir before her Chapter 21, opening at the Firehall Arts Centre and produced by Raven Spirit Dance (where Muranko is artistic associate). “Something we don't talk about is miscarriages, or that sometimes it's not easy to get pregnant. So the moccasins were in my home and were just always there, and sometimes I thought, ‘I’ll give them away.’ But I was longing to be a mom.
“And now he dances with me in Dancers of Damelahamid and wears them,” Muranko adds, referring to the Northwest Coast troupe she’s long been a member of.
When Muranko was pregnant with Sami she found out he had an extra copy of Chromosone 21, and would live with Down Syndrome. Just as she was processing the realities of a condition she knew next to nothing about, Muranko was diagnosed with breast cancer, facing a taxing chemo treatment regime every 21 days.
The number 21 began to take on new meaning in her life. It also started to make her think about the idea in behavioural psychology that it takes 21 days to re-pattern beliefs, or for a resolution to become a new habit.
By 2018, Muranko was winning the battle against cancer, and Sami was thriving and helping to keep her focused on life in the moment. Muranko knew she wanted to go back to the dance studio to explore what she’d been through.
“I thought, ‘I want to see what my body has to say about this because it was so gruelling’. I looked at it as kind of unravelling it out of my body,” says Muranko, whose work includes 2015’s Spine of the Mother, the result of research with Indigenous artists in Vancouver and Peru. “Now I can go in and tell the story and continue on with my life, and then pick up Sami and be a mom. It became something that compartmentalizes it. I called it Chapter 21 because it’s a chapter of my life, but it's not the only chapter.
Starr Muranko. Photo by Melanie Orr
“I can process it and share it,” she continues. “On one hand it gave me a chance to talk about things we don't talk about in society—having a child with Down Syndrome, having cancer, or having a pregnancy loss. The art form was a way to have these conversations and process what went on.”
What began as just a personal exploration grew into a multilayered full-length show, in part because close friend and dance artist Alvin Erasga Tolentino told Muranko he saw potential in what she was doing. Eventually, Muranko also brought on celebrated theatre director Yvette Nolan to help pull together the show’s different elements—including spoken and recorded text amid a haunting soudscape, and props like those moccasins, a meaningful pair of blue shoes that were a gift from Muranko’s grandmother, and a wig. (See the trailer below.) There is also a dress form or “Judy” that plays a key role.
“Prior to having ‘Judy’, we had a basket of scarves I wore doing chemo treatments,” Muranko explains. “Yvette said, ‘I think you need something to put all that on.’ The mannequin came to represent so many things in the piece—the woman’s figure and body, and what we go through as women, as mothers, with breast cancer…”
The resulting piece is nonlinear, sometimes set to the swirling soundtrack of stats that doctors were presenting her with. The experiences of her trying year play out in vignettes, a bit like the way memories circle back to us.
“It feels like there are 10 solos—I keep flipping from scene to scene and I need a different emotional state for each one,” Muranko says.
As always with her dance, Chapter 21 seamlessly fuses Indigenous tradition and culture with contemporary form. Muranko describes the production as being grounded in the same Indigenous world view that helped her get through her struggles. That extends to the way each rehearsal is set up: “I always smudge the space,” she says.
Outside of the studio, things have also calmed down considerably. Sami is happy, enrolled in daycare while she’s dancing, and Muranko has a connected with other parents in the Down Syndrome community. Her strength and resilience hold lessons for the rest of us as we grapple with the ongoing uncertainty of a pandemic.
“What I’ve learned going through this is that it’s the job of medical professionals to give you all the probabilities, but you don't really know where you're going to land in those stats,” she reflects. “It wasn’t till I talked to other women that I realized there's a whole other side I've been missing. I just had to make a decision where I was going to focus. For my mental state of mind I had to focus on the positive.”
Todayv Muranko finds herself inspired to create dance like never before—despite, but also because of, what her body’s survived. She has a renewed appreciation for her art form, after so many months spent curled up in a ball, feeling sick during cancer treatments.
“I have a whole lot more story in my body now,” she observes. “In Indigenous dance, you can dance your whole life: you can dance as a baby or in your mom’s womb—while I would dance I would hold Sami in my arms. And even grandparents can be there shuffling their feet in the chair. So I’ll just keep dancing.”
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