Where We Belong: Madeline Sayet — Photo: Jon Burklund/Zanni Productions
Madeline Sayet opens Where We Belong () not with her own story, but one from the land she is performing on. In a voiceover, she tells of Nansonnan, one of the last traditional chiefs of the Piscataway, on whose territory Washingon, D.C. now sits. We hear that Nansonnan demanded justice from colonial authorities after the ransacking of her late daughter’s grave, one of the few times we can hear the Piscataway speak for themselves in records from that time. The story, she acknowledges, is not her own. It is of another woman, belonging to a different people, in another time.
When Sayet begins her own personal history, it is in a more surprising place. Recalling a flight from London to Stockholm, far from home, she opens her solo show with the tale of a brash Swedish border guard asking the passengers how they voted in the then-recent Brexit referendum. Not British herself, Sayet was, of course, unable to vote, but she satisfies the guard by telling him she would have voted to remain. It’s not lost on Sayet that she found safety on the “correct” side of a conflict, much the way the Mohegans did centuries ago, when, as she reflects, their leader Uncas allied with the British and thus spared his followers the genocidal fate of their Pequot kin.
The affinity between Nansonnan’s 1707 demand for justice, Uncas’ sage diplomacy and Sayet’s present-day journey to the UK to study…
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