SAMANTHA FRIEDMAN: In advance of establishing New York City Ballet in 1948, Kirstein founded or co-founded multiple precursor companies.
JODI HAUPTMAN: Here, you’re looking at Karl Free’s designs for the ballet Pocahontas.
SAMANTHA FRIEDMAN: Kirstein establishes something called Ballet Caravan, which is a traveling company and while they're traveling throughout the United States, they’re presenting ballets on uniquely American themes. Ballets like Billy the Kid, Pocahontas, Filling Station, all of which you see around you in this gallery. And it should be said also that when we look at many of these designs today, there's much that's problematic about them.
KENT MONKMAN: My name is Kent Monkman, and I'm Swampy Cree from Fisher River First Nation in Northern Manitoba. I'm a visual artist. I have developed an art practice in painting, film and video, installation, and performance.
When I see these images what I see is pretty typical of a kind of colonial gaze on Indigenous people, and it really comes, stems from imagination more than actual contact with real Indigenous people or observation.
And, so this is about almost like a fetishistic way of depicting First Nations people clothed in corn husks and leaves and draped in flowers and you know other elements from nature. It just plays up on those stereotypes that that exist.
I've actually designed for the stage before myself, so I can appreciate them for how they express the imagination of the designer, but I would say that they are more fantasy than reality.
The romanticization of Indigenous people is essentially a destructive program or theme, because what it does is it freezes Indigenous people in a time capsule, and it doesn't allow First Nations people to live in the present.