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Association for Native Development in the Performing Arts (ANDPVA)

The Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts, or ANDPVA, is the longest running Indigenous arts organization, based in the heart of Toronto since its inception in 1972. The late James (Jim) Howard Buller was the driving creative force, taking ANDPVA from an organization to an official non-profit entity in 1974 (“History”). It was also the “first Native arts organization in Canada that was directed and operated by Native people” (Mumford 41).

Jim Buller created ANDPVA with the strong belief in the power of performing arts and the potential of Indigenous theatre to express a strong and positive self-image of entire communities. He believed that the dramatization of situations would demonstrate possible alternatives to existing social, economic, and political problems” (NEPA, “Native Theatre”). Buller’s vision has remained at the core of ANDPVA, which “foresaw Indigenous people driving social change through the arts” (“History”). One of ANDPVA’s main achievements is also its greatest contribution to the Indigenous Theatre community in Canada: the creation of the Native Theatre School (NTS), which was started “under ANDPVA’s umbrella” (Mumford 72). NTS has since been reorganized and renamed, now known as the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, also operating from Toronto. Through the creation of NTS, ANDPVA was able to secure public funding which is still holds today by advocating “on the behalf of Indigenous artists to establish a Native arts organization when the then Ontario Ministry of Culture launched funding support for twenty new Ontario arts service organizations in Toronto in 1972” (41).

Buller’s vision for Indigenous theatre as a robust genre that provided education and mentorship for emerging Indigenous theatre artists was made possible by ANDPVA’s contributions. Bolstered by his previous work with ANDPVA, Buller also went on to “found the World Indigenous Theatre Festival” which was first “held in 1980 and again in 1982, at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario” (Preston 137).

ANDPVA’s contributions to Toronto’s Indigenous theatre scene extend beyond the city limits. They helped support the yearly theatre training workshops that NTS ran every summer, promoted and supported productions by Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA), organizing groups to watch NEPA productions like Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and Daniel David Moses’s Coyote City (Johnston, “Association”). ANDPVA has also been a supporter of the activist potential of theatre, bringing Indigenous productions into Indigenous communities. After a series of suicide attempts and deaths in late 1990 by Indigenous woman in the Prison for Woman in Kingston, Ontario prison, in 1990, ANDPVA sent Margo Kane’s one-woman play Moonlodge to the prison (Johnston, “Association”), produced by Kane, Maria Campbell, Maryanne Cheesequay, and Marrie Mumford. Maria Campbell “led a workshop sharing the healing power of writing, and the understandings that are given and received when we share our stories with each other” (Johnston, “Association”).

ANDPVA hosted the first Native Music and Dance Conference in Thunder Bay, Ontario in 1975, as well as held a foundational “Conference on Native Theatre” that same year (NEPA, “A discussion”). They also undertook a research series in the early 1980s, culminating in a 1984 report offering a survey of the “artistic situation among Native people in Ontario” where “one hundred people [were] interviewed in one hundred communities” (NEPA, “A discussion”).

Works Cited:

“A Discussion Paper for the Development of a Professional Native Performance Company (1984).” NEPA XZ1 MS A880, Box 3, File 5. Native Earth Performing Arts Fonds, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON. Accessed 10 October 2024.

“Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts, [1990-1991].” Box 20, Fond 11. Basil H. Johnston Fonds, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON. Accessed 19 January 2023.

“History.” Association for Native Development in the Performing Arts, 2025. https://andpva.ca/history/. Accessed 3 February 2025.

Mumford, Marrie. “Kippmoojikewin: The Things We Carry With Us.” Performing Indigeneity: New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Edited by Yvette Nolan and Ric Knowles, vol. 6, Playwrights Canada Press, 2016, pp. 66-86.

“Native Theatre School (1986).” NEPA XZ1 MS A880, Box 4, File 11. Native Earth Performing Arts Fonds, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON. Accessed 10 October 2024.

Preston, Jennifer. “Weesageechak Begins to Dance: Native Earth Performing Arts Inc.”, The Drama Review, vol 36, no. 1, 1992, pp 135-159.

Profile by Raphaela Pavlakos, McMaster University.

Last updated 2025-04-23