Indigenous Playwrights

Dram303 is a course about reading plays, and listening to, through their work, a collection of dynamic, challenging, often hilarious, inspiring, provocative, and brilliant indigenous playwrights and theatre artists. Your job as a student is to let the work of these writers affect you, critically as student-scholars, but also creatively, emotionally, intellectually, and intimately as people. You will be asked to read these plays, engage with the ideas and stories you encounter in them, and then respond thoughtfully, intelligently, and with generosity of spirit in your own writing.

Some First Nations commentators say these plays are part of the fulfillment of Louis Riel’s prophecy: “My people will sleep for one hundred years. When they awake, it will be the artists that give them back their spirit.” Others take John Ralston Saul’s conception, in A Fair Country, of an indigenously inflected Canadian identity to heart. However interpreted, this body of work represents an alternative Canadian artistic theatre practice focused through traditions of storytelling, traditional beliefs, political articulation and activism, social rescue, cultural survivance, and reconstruction. Through these plays and other writings by these playwrights, students will encounter alternative ways of seeing the world, and variant means of interpreting our place within it.

Note: Check with the institution regarding start/end dates, prices, and delivery method. These may vary according to program, section, and/or semester.