'Fancy Dance' star Lily Gladstone and director Erica Tremblay talk about crafting a mother-daughter story by way of auntie and niece, and bringing that powwow scene to the screen: 'I cry every single time I see it.'
The Academy Award nominee and director talk bringing that powerful scene to screen and their hopes for the future of Native storytelling.Jessica is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly, where she covers TV, movies, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in Bustle, NYLON, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, and more. She lives in California with her dog.Just across the way from her childhood home on the Blackfoot Reservation in Browning, Mont.
“I wanted to tell a mother-daughter story by way of an auntie and niece, which is such a central relationship in my community,” says Tremblay, a member of Seneca-Cayuga Nation whose most vivid powwow memories involve scouring bleachers for loose change for snow cones and fry bread. In her native Cayuga tongue, she says, "The way you translate the word auntie is 'little mother,' so aunts are literally your mother.
Gladstone was blown away when she first read the script but wasn't sure if she was right for the part. "I immediately doubted that I was the right actor to carry her the way that she deserved,” she admits of Jax. “I was terrified that I was going to drop the ball. But when I heard Jax’s voice come out of my mouth in that first take, I was like, ‘Oh, there she is.’ It was one of those rare and incredible moments where the character just takes over.
“Our very first run at it, I ran straight to Isabel and we held each other and cried,” Gladstone recalls of filming. “We knew where we were at in each character's journey. The way that choreography adapted to the scene, I felt the auntie instinct to carve out space for my niece to move as freely as she could. We started in the same step, but I found myself moving backwards and mirroring what she was doing as she was moving forward."that moment," she says.
In an industry that still feels inhospitable to inclusion, is she hopeful about the future of Indigenous storytelling? “When you're navigating a world steeped in patriarchy and white supremacy, the only way to move forward in this deep sludge that we're all in is to have hope,” Tremblay offers. “I look around at my family, who literally generation after generation has survived an ongoing genocide that is meant to eradicate them off the face of the earth.
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