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Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Windspeaker.com
Award-winning Cree artist Michelle Thrush is bringing her play Inner Elder to the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver. Her creation is a solo performance that weaves together personal stories of survival, imagination and healing.
The Firehall, tucked into Vancouver’s East Side, is where her career began, she told Windspeaker.com
“My very first professional play—The Ecstasy of Rita Joe written by George Ryga. At that time it was the only play I knew that was actually dealing with Indigenous characters. I worshiped that play for a few years. To be able to do it when I was 25 at the Firehall was amazing and now to come back to the Firehall years later is amazing too.”
Inner Elder takes audiences through her real-life memories, something Thrush says she’s always examining.
“I feel like I've been writing about my life forever. I feel like it's a huge part of who I am and has been sort of dissecting my life from an early age.”
Inner Elder grew out of work she had created for high schools. “I took little snippets of that and then the character that I become in Inner Elder is my clown character that I've been doing for 30-some years.”
Thrush is clear this show is “absolutely true to my life experience.” The process involved teaming up with Karen Hines, a director known for her expertise in clowning.
“I felt like I wanted to do something that had a lot of comedy in it because I do love comedy so much,” Trush said. Her clown character is a kookum.
“I took real-life intense traumatic experiences that happened to me and I turned them into moments of my life that I'm not at all a victim in.” It was important for Thrush to “not victimize how much trauma I've been through in my life, to really just own that and put a little clown into it.”
Clowning is an expressive therapy that can help process emotions and experiences, she said.
“I've been a therapeutic healing clown for over 20 years. And I've been working with three- to six-year-olds who've been through trauma using therapeutic healing through clowning,” Thrush said.
“There's a really beautiful distinct part of our culture that has clown in it, in the ceremonies. And then there's performance clown, which is what I love doing. So, there’s lots of clown happening in my life,” Thrush laughed.
Spirit is something Thrush talks a lot about in the show. “It's what allowed me to survive growing up.”
“It's hard to explain because nobody taught me religion or ceremony when I was a child. My parents didn't have the capacity to do that,” Thrush explained. Alcoholism was a strong presence in her early life.
“It was Spirit that really transformed how I saw the world, and it wasn't taught to me. I found that talking with trees was my therapy as a child. I would go into the woods and I would find trees and I'd sit there and I'd just tell them everything that was going on in my home and not even sure who else to turn to at that point. And the trees just always listened and accepted and were completely still. And then when I was done, they would rumble. And I felt like I had real communication with them as a kid.”
Inner Elder is a very personal look at what it's like to grow up with two alcoholic parents and how to survive that. Thrush’s imagination is her “main superpower,” she said.
As a mom, kookum and Gemini-award winner, Thrush is grateful.
“I've had such a blessed life. I feel so blessed in everything I've been through, the good and the bad.”
Her advice for young Indigenous performers is to avoid being impacted by “this influencer world right now, putting so much identity into outside acceptance from the outside world.”
Although Thrush has received acclaim for her performance of Gail Stoney in Blackstone, she says it’s important to have a life beyond the industry.
“There's so much rejection in this business, and I just try really hard not to allow that to dictate who I am. You get rejected a lot. Even if you get rejected 20 times, you still have a story to tell. Don't give up,” she said.
“If you want to be an artist, if you want to be an actor or a storyteller, make your own stories. Create your own plays. Create your own work. Don't sit around and wait for people to call you up.”
Inner Elder runs from May 22 to May 31, 2025 at the Firehall Arts Centre located at 280 E. Cordova Street
Preview: May 22 at 1 p.m.
Opening Night: May 22 at 7:30 p.m.
Performance Times: Wednesday-Saturday, 7:30 p.m. | Saturday & Sunday, 3 p.m. | Pay-What-You-Can Wednesdays, 1 p.m. | Thursday, 1 p.m.
Tickets: From $30 at firehallartscentre.ca | 604.689.0926
Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada.