For our 30th anniversary season Native Voices’ is producing the World Premiere of Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni at the historic Southwest Campus of the Autry, formerly known as the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. Staged in a space that once housed thousands of Native ancestral remains and cultural materials, Antíkoni makes us question what role museums have in caring for the dead.
In this timely retelling of a Greek classic, a Nez Perce family is caught between the pressures of the outside world—where a Nationalist Party threatens to silence their history. Set in the near future, Antíkoni must defend eternal truths, Kreon rides the waves of changing politics, and a Chorus of Aunties delivers raucous and wise traditional stories to guide them.
Join us in celebration as we reclaim both a physical structure, one that encased our art and ancestors while dismissing our humanity, and a literary structure deemed the epitome of western theatre which blatantly disregards one of the world's oldest forms of storytelling.
After the performance, join us for a discussion with the playwright, Beth Piatote (Nez Perce).
Native Voices 2024 Fall Production Schedule:
November 8-24, 2024
Opening: November 8, 8 p.m.
Thursdays and Fridays: 8 p.m.
Saturdays and Sundays: 2 p.m.
Student Matinees: November 15 and 22, 11 a.m.
About Native Voices
For the past 30 years, Native Voices has remained the sole Actors’ Equity theatre in the country committed to developing and producing new works for the stage by Native American, First Nations, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian playwrights. Devoted to training Indigenous artists and championing their work nationally through production and professional development opportunities, Native Voices provides a supportive setting for new play development. When founders Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) and Jean Bruce Scott entrusted their legacy to DeLanna Studi (Cherokee) and Elisa Blandford in 2020, the company's goals remained the same -- to foster greater understanding and respect for all and to showcase artistic voices that might otherwise not be heard. Native Voices remains steadfast in their mission of developing Native playwrights and theatre artists, to telling Native stories by and about Native people, and to providing the public access to these plays and playwrights, but now with the hope of Indigenizing theatre, both for artists and audiences, and to create pathways of learning for the next generations of storytellers and audience members.