For Immediate Release:
March 21, 2002
Rumble Productions in association with urban ink presents the premiere of
BURNING VISION
by Marie Clements
April 23 to May 11, 2002, 8:00 pm
2 for 1 Previews April 23, 24, 25
2 for 1 Matinees May 4 & 11
Firehall Arts Centre, 280 East Cordova Street
A See Seven Show - Tickets ($22/$16)
Direction: Peter Hinton
Featuring: Nathan Dubois, Marcus Hondro, Hiro Kanagawa, Margo Kane, Kevin Loring, Allan Morgan, Lisa C. Ravensbergen, Julie Tamiko Manning, Erin Wells
Design: Barb Clayden (costumes), Noah Drew (sound), Andreas Kahre (set), John Webber (lighting)
Stage Management: David Kerr
"A strange vision - I saw people going into a big hole in the ground - strange people, not Dene, white people. I thought they would harm my people .... the people they dropped this thing on looked like us, Dene." Dene Medecine Man, NWT, Quoted from the book When the World Was Now (Stories of the Sahtu Dene): George Blondin
In the late 1800's a Dene medicine man had a vision of a burning coming from the sky. The vision came true.
This new commission from internationally acclaimed playwright Marie Clements (The Unnatural and Accidental Women) traces the journey of uranium rock from its origins in Northern Canada - embedded in Sahtu Dene territory - through water, over land, and into fire: the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Both tragic and irreverent, Burning Vision weighs the burdens of our ancestors as they travel through time, across continents and in our genes to cast shadows on the present.
Moving back and forth and across time, from the personal to the universal, from realism to the symbolic, the sublime to the incidental, Burning Vision affirms the connections that exist between differing cultures and their shared histories. It is a play about the loss of innocence - how we continue to genetically carry the burdens of our ancestors and what impact this has on our own individual lives.
Marie Clements is a writer of remarkable ambition and artistry. Blending a wry sense of irony with an impassioned humanism, her plays question the assumptions of public record and celebrate the power of oral traditions to express the truth of private experience. Burning Vision has been developed in partnership with Playwrights' Workshop Montreal and the Banff playRites Colony.
Rumble Productions and urban ink gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, City of Vancouver - Office of Cultural Affairs, Leon and Theo Koerner Foundation, Hamber Foundation, ArtsFACT, Playwrights' Workshop Montreal, Banff playRites Colony and Capilano College.