Waylon Lenk is a Karuk dramaturg and storyteller whose family hails from the villages of Taxasufkára and Ka’tim’îin on the Klamath River in northwest California. Exploring the intersections between Indigenous and Western performance styles, Waylon pursues the question of what the old stories can teach us about the changed world we live in today. His work has been seen everywhere from the Celestial Ballroom in the Sycuan Band’s San Diego U.S. Grant Hotel to the Piggyback Fringe Festival on unceded Algonquian land in Wakefield, Quebec.

Focus for the week:

"I've contracted with Theatre, Ethnic Studies and the Native American Longhouse at Oregon State University to direct a series of readings of plays by Native authors: Drew Hayden Taylor's In a World Created by a Drunken God and Yvette Nolan's The Unplugging. Oregon theatres and theatrical presenters bring a sparse selection of works by Native authors to the public. Oregon State University maintains a high quality theatre program and cultivates a vibrant Native community on campus. By adding my dramaturgical skill set to the mix, I have been able to establish a collaboration between those two communities to present this reading series. I hope that these readings serve as a step towards building structures to sustain the development and presentation of Native theater here."

Questions from LMDA:

How do you define dramaturgy?

"I define dramaturgy as the confluence of the internal structure and sociological world of a given theatrical event. Dramaturgy as the internal structure involves the events internal logic and includes such things as genre, world of the story, and general cohesiveness of the story's elements. Dramaturgy as sociology means the ways in which the theatrical event exists within its broader communal context."

What is your favorite or dream project?

"For several years, I've been working on a piece that conflates traditional Karuk basketry with my family's relationship with Californian colonization. I premiered a version, called The Baskets, at the Piggyback Fringe Festival in 2012, and am in the process of rewriting. I'm particularly interested in how the processes and structures of Karuk basketry translate into a performance structure."