Cree artist Michelle Thrush pokes fun and puts her own truth onstage as Kookum Martha
In Inner Elder at the Firehall Arts Centre, the Calgary-based theatre veteran draws on more than three decades of Indigenous clowning experience
Michelle Thrush as Kookum Martha in Inner Elder. Photo by Ben Laird
Inner Elder. Photo by Ben Laird
The Firehall Arts Centre presents Inner Elder from May 22 to 31
WHEN KOOKUM MARTHA is onstage, she has a sixth sense for exactly who to tease in the audience.
The spunky character, which Calgary-based theatre artist Michelle Thrush created more than three decades ago, is a Cree grandmother whose personality draws on the fundamentals of Indigenous clowning. Kookum Martha is also the focal point of Thrush’s one-woman show Inner Elder, which is based on her own childhood memories; and audience interaction is an integral aspect of the piece.
At a performance of the production in Edmonton several years ago, recalls Thrush, Kookum Martha was poking fun at a non-Indigenous man wearing a three-piece suit in the front row of the audience. After the show, the man knocked on Thrush’s dressing room door. It turns out he was the Minister of Indigenous Relations for the Government of Alberta at the time.
He ended up loving Inner Elder, Thrush says, and she’d had no idea who he was before his introduction. But Kookum Martha seemed to know intrinsically that she needed to talk to him.
“Clowns knock people down who are too high on their own belief of who they are,” Thrush tells Stir by phone with a hearty laugh, adding that her character reminds folks that “we’re all just human beings. We’re all fragile and easily make mistakes. We all sometimes think we’re bigger than we are. And clowns, that’s their main priority, is to really just bring things back to reality.”
Kookum Martha will soon take the stage in Vancouver for the Firehall Arts Centre’s presentation of Inner Elder. The show draws on the years Thrush spent touring her character everywhere from schools to Indigenous band offices with nothing but a bowl of flour as a prop, talking about her life and the important role her grandmother played in it. Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit commissioned her to transform Kookum Martha’s story into a full-length stage show, which premiered at the High Performance Rodeo festival in 2018.
Thrush chose her friend Karen Hines, who is a highly skilled clown in her own right, to be the show’s director. She began the creation process for the play by telling Hines stories about her upbringing.
“She was mostly shocked about everything I went through, but it was things that really are a part of the intergenerational trauma of being an Indigenous woman,” Thrush relays. “And she just kept going, ‘I can’t believe this happened to you. I can’t believe this happened to you.’ And I kept thinking, ‘This is not something that is shocking. This is something that my cousins, my family, everyone I know as an Indigenous person, has been through.’ Which for me was alcoholism with both my parents, just a lot of chaos in my childhood.
“And I made it very clear to Karen,” she adds, “that what I was sharing onstage I did not ever want it to be coming from a victim point of view. I always wanted my stories to be known as a part of my survival as an Indigenous woman.”
Thrush’s artistry is steeped in the principles of Indigenous clowning, which is centred around tricksters: supernatural figures whose specific features vary from nation to nation, but who are ultimately all intent on “mirroring back to us our deficits as human beings, and showing us how silly we are,” as Thrush puts it. There are also sacred ceremonial components of Indigenous clowning that differentiate it from other styles of the artform.
For Thrush, bringing characters to life through clowning is truly a lesson in embodiment. “I honestly feel like there’s a part of me that is almost taken over by the clown energy, or the clown spirits,” she says. “So I just trust that. I know there’s been many times through the years where I’ve performed Kookum and she just takes over.”
For the past 20 years, Thrush has also used clowning to do therapeutic healing with Indigenous children who have been through trauma. And though she has brought Inner Elder to the stage several times now, things are a bit different these days—because on top of being a mother of two, she’s now a grandmother as well. The life change, she says, has only strengthened her desire to use clowning and theatre as tools for healing.
“It’s always a really vulnerable place to be as an artist, to put your own truth onstage,” Thrush shares. “And I feel quite exposed. But again, it’s all done in this really practical way of, you know, fun. I think for me, it’s truly about reclaiming my voice and knowing that I did go through a lot, just as a lot of people in my family and a lot of people I know have been through a lot of struggle living in this country.
“For thousands of years,” she continues, “my people have lived in this country, and yet the last few hundred years have been such a huge struggle to survive as a human being, and as a woman, and as a mother of daughters. So for me, it’s about allowing my struggles to be seen—but also knowing that they made me into the strong woman I am today.” 
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