Description
Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture examines how theatre has been used to make medicine, reconnecting individuals and communities, giving voice to the silenced and disappeared, staging ceremony, and honouring the ancestors. Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is just over thirty years old, if one begins counting from the premiere of Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell’s Jessica in Saskatoon and the establishment of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Since those contemporaneous events in 1982, the Canadian community of Indigenous theatre artists has grown and inspired one another. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture traces the work of a host of these artists over the past three decades, illuminating the connections, the artistic genealogy, and the development of a contemporary Indigenous theatre practice. Yvette Nolan is a playwright, dramaturg, and director. The book contains colour photographs and an extensive index.