Keilani Elizabeth Rose is a quadruple threat. The actor, dancer, filmmaker and DJ lives between Vancouver and Los Angeles, but recently she's spent a lot of time in Sudbury, Ontario filming the Crave original Shoresy, the sequel to Canadian cult-favourite Letterkenny.
Now that the show is fully released and the initial reviews are starting to roll in she shares that it's all "pretty surreal."
The six-episode hockey comedy follows in Letterkenny's foul-mouthed chirp-serving footsteps but with a representative script that portrays the diversity of small-town Canada without placing the weight of representation on just one character. As Rose puts it, the show puts Indigenous characters at centre ice.
Rose has intersectional Indigenous ancestry from Lheidli T’enneh (The People Where the Two Rivers Flow Together), and Kānaka
Mamao (Native Hawai’ian diaspora) and plays Miigwan, one of the two protégées who shadow the GM of the Bulldogs team, Nat. Her counterpart Ziigwan is played by Blair Lamora.
"I'm really grateful," Rose tells Vancouver Is Awesome. "It was such a ride and such a journey with the cast and the crew, it's really wonderful to see the work come out and see people receiving it well."
"I can come to the table in our artistic community as a leader"
The role in Shoresy is one of her largest to date but Rose has been honing her skills on deeply meaningful short films and working with her friends since she started acting in 2013. One of her recent shorts Within the Silence, which took home two awards at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival for Best Fantasy and
Best Choreography, was particularly dear to Rose because it was written and directed by her friend Jade Tailor and gave Rose the opportunity to learn and grow as a multifaceted artist.
"It was really amazing to be part of it, because not only was I able to act in it, but she also trusted me with choreographing it," says Rose. "She really took me under her wing.
I got exposed to so much more than just the acting side, it was really eye-opening to see what we can do and what we can make and how I can come to the table in our artistic community as a leader and really dabble in all aspects of what we do, from acting to choreographing, to writing to producing and shadowing her as a director as well," she recalls.
Within the Silence tells the story of a deaf protagonist (although that isn't revealed right away) and has no dialogue. Instead, other senses are explored and the cast was given the opportunity to learn American Sign Language. Both Tailor and Rose cared about inclusion and representation and endeavoured to do right by the disabled community. Rose says the accolades that the project received was "a magical push to keep going" and told her she was on the right path.
"We used to see Indigenous culture represented so one-dimensionally in Hollywood"
She continued on her path with the lessons she learned on the set in her back pocket. "I think a lot of what I get to carry forward from Within the Silence into the rest of my journey is looking at how material represents us and making sure that I engage in a way that feels like it's coming from a place of integrity," she explains.
Her classical dance background also allows her to tap into another form of communication that is inseparable from acting. "[Dance] allows me to access different types of body language in a way that becomes so useful when I'm acting. And vice versa," she says. "Understanding super clearly what the story is that you want to tell from an acting and writing perspective, translating that into movement when I'm dancing, it just goes hand in hand."
As projects and acting opportunities start to find Rose, she is noticing that many of them are tackling heavy topics such as racism in the healthcare system (in the case of her upcoming CBC/Paramount show Skymed) but that they are increasingly talking about representation among indigenous communities in a much more robust way. "It's nice to not be put inside a box anymore," she says. "We used to see Indigenous culture represented so one-dimensionally in Hollywood, you know, like Indian in the Cupboard, or Pocahontas, that was really all we had."
Nowadays she feels that Indigenous representation is being explored in a more fulsome way with characters being given more vibrance and complexity. She references Reservation Dogs and adds that "exciting things that I love watching are making waves in the industry right now."
She can't reveal too much about her future projects but Rose does share that a few really special auditions have come her way recently that are touching on topics such as missing and murdered Indigenous women, the fight for justice, land sovereignty and the land back movement.
"Filmmaking, I feel like is a modern-day version of ceremony"
She touches on similar themes in her own filmmaking. As the founder and executive director of Two Rivers and a Rose Filmworks, Rose is engaging with her identity and culture in a contemporary medium. "Filmmaking, I feel like is a modern-day version of ceremony," she says. "In indigenous culture, dance, music and storytelling are very sacred because that is how we passed down knowledge. That is how we pass down culture. That is how we pass down history."
She says she is honoured to be a filmmaker but also feels a huge sense of responsibility. "In Hawaiian, the word for responsibility is kuleana and I carry that with me every day when I'm working."
Much of Rose's approach to her art, is reflective, thankful, and full of grace. She finds herself going inward a lot to acknowledge the importance and impact of her work, the responsibility that each of her projects holds and honours where they come from. And sometimes when things get too heavy she turns to the land to help keep her grounded.
She uses the app Whose Land as a tool to reconnect and perpetuate reconciliation, "so that I know that I'm honouring the relationship with those people in those lands no matter where I am," she says.
"Carrying that gratitude and that idea of reciprocity, and just that importance of these relationships to our lands. It's really grounding no matter where I am, if I'm working on set in Sudbury, versus if I'm working in L.A., just kind of checking in with myself, checking in with the territory that I'm on to give thanks for that relationship."
