Peter Birnie from theVancouver Sun interviews Kevin Loring about Where the Blood Mixes:

You can't get more current than Where the Blood Mixes. Kevin Loring's new work "about loss and redemption in the heart of the Fraser Canyon" will have its world premiere at Toronto's Luminato Festival just days before it's presented here at Magnetic North.

Loring's story started out as a 15-minute monologue, delivered for his solo show while a student at Langara College's Studio 58. Titled The Ballad of Floyd, it focused on a first nations father trying to come to grips with the mistakes he's made. The playwright/performer then presented his monologue at the Talking Stick Cabaret (predecessor to the Talking Stick Festival) and started to explore a bigger project."I had a 30-page draft," Loring recalls, "and the thought that maybe this will be the play that really taught me how to write a play."

Indeed it was, but not in the way Loring expected. The Ballad of Floyd was workshopped in Vancouver, then accepted for a workshop and staged reading in 2004 at the CrossCurrents Festival in Toronto.The playwright felt privileged to have veteran first nations actor Gary Farmer join the workshop. But, on the first day of rehearsals, Farmer took the script and slammed it down on a table.

"Thirty five years in the business and I'm still playing a drunk Indian in the bar," Farmer declared. "So what?". The rest of the workshop went well enough, but Loring knew the comment was correct."I never touched the play for two years after that," he recalls. "I walked away not knowing what to do with it, because I knew he was right. But I also knew that there was still something there. I just didn't know what to do with it."

When Loring met in Calgary with legendary playwright Sharon Pollock (Blood Relations, One Tiger to a Hill), he had already started a thorough rewrite of what would become Where the Blood Mixes. A poem he'd written and then lost to a computer crash resurfaced, becoming the bridge to carry his story to the banks of a river."It got the play out of that bar," he says.

Now, as outgoing Playhouse Theatre Company artistic director Glynis Leyshon directs the new piece for its double debut in B.C. and Toronto, Loring reflects on being a bridge between cultures.
"I think I've been that my whole life," he says. "I'm the child of a mixed marriage. My mom was native, my dad was white, and I grew up in a native/white community where there was this big politicizing event."

The town was Lytton and the flashpoint was the logging of the Stein Valley. Loring's dad was a logger and his mom "a kind of a quiet naturalist, and at the age of 12 I had to figure out where I stood. I couldn't make a clear decision; I couldn't just be on the native side, I couldn't just be on the white side, I was always in the middle. So I've always had to articulate both views, at least to myself and then to other people - even on the playground."

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