For Io’takeratenion Beaton, storytelling amounts to a vocation. 

We familiarly call you Jayden in rehearsal, but you go by your traditional name on the stage. Has it always been your practice to go by your traditional name as an actor?
Not until the last few years in theatre school, where I felt a connection between the traditional storytelling of my culture and modern-day theatre. I’ve always loved my native name, my Mohawk name, so I decided that maybe I should start using that instead. It means “The seasons are changing”, because I was born in 1998 at the tail end of the Quebec ice storm.

What is the importance of being a storyteller?
I find it extremely important, especially with the themes in modern day theatre. In Mohawk culture, we didn’t write our language, everything was always spoken, things were told to us, never read. You learned history or folklore from the previous generation and then you passed that on to the new generation. I find that extremely interesting, especially in theatre.

Has traditional storytelling impacted how you act in some way?
I think it has in bits and pieces, depending on the show. I don’t think you can always implement what it used to be, like the way your grandmother tells a story.
There was a show I did at John Abbott called FifteenDogs, adapted from a book. In this adaptation, we had narrators go on stage to explain certain parts of the story and then other parts would be told through acting the actual scene. Storytelling was very prevalent there, especially how our director had us do it: total involvement of our physicality and vocal range.
How did you get into acting?
It’s a weird story. When I was a kid I always used to love film and TV and all that stuff, so when I was maybe seven or eight I thought about maybe doing the acting thing one day, but I never took a class or anything.
Then one day in high school my drama teacher gave me and a friend a scene to act out. We ended up going hog wild with our characters. We gave them names (which they didn’t have) and back stories, not even thinking about any kind of process, we were just fooling around. After we did the scene for that teacher he said,”OK you have to do this now, this is you, you were made to do this”. As I got closer to graduation he said “What do you want to do?” Originally I wanted to be a police officer. But he said, “No there’s too many police officers, there’s not enough actors”. I was like, “Are you sure about that?” But he sat me down on his computer in his office and made me write out my applications to various acting programs and luckily I was accepted at John Abbot.
Do you have other artistic pursuits and ambitions than acting?
I started a company with my friend Dusty and we’ll be producing a show at Fringe this coming summer. We always had the idea to start some sort of theatre company or some production company to make short films and that kind of stuff. We figure the best way to start is Fringe. We used to think we should hold off until we’re older and have experience, but we’ve decided the best time is now.

It’s called Tewakaratónnions Productions, which basically means “We are storytellers”. I tried to make it as generic as possible. I wanted to name it The Theatre Company, but there is no word for theatre in Mohawk. The closest thing is storytelling.
What kind of stories do you want to tell?
We principally want to have shows that share experiences of people’s lives that connect that with other people and the audience, everyday experiences that anyone can directly relate to. That’s why I was drawn to theatre – relating with the characters.