Introduction: Marie Clements

Abstract

Marie Clements is a complex and fascinating theatre artist: dramatist, actor, and director. Her plays are intellectually provocative and challenging, presenting Aboriginal and feminist issues in a highly “painterly” style; her website describes Copper Thunderbird as a “two-act play on canvas.” As Brenda Leadlay, Artistic Director of Presentation House Theatre, comments, the work is consistently “poetic, imaginative and moving.” Mixing western theatrical practice with techniques of Aboriginal storytelling and ritual, Clements interrogates specific historical events (as, for example, the serial murders of Aboriginal women, the development of the atom bomb, the reductive depictions of “The Indian Musicale”) and individual memories (as, for example, of domestic abuse, the traumatic residue of Residential school, and the repression of “The System Chorus”). As I have elsewhere argued at greater length, her vision is never simple. Typically, she considers a number of overlapping themes at the same time, simultaneously locating both the differences and the links among these political, racial, and gender strands in a layered semiosis (“Shine”). She combines visual and sound patterns,2 physical movement, and the fluidity of dreamscapes moving through time and space with hard, urban diction and apparently realistic plots (“Profile”). Her stylistic palate is equally complex: she embraces and—again—queries both the Western and Aboriginal modalities she employs, appropriates, re-appropriates, and revises (within the complexity of allusion in her early plays and more directly in her most recent work). Such hybridity and reference make her work compelling and invite examination; her work also presents a problem for analysis.