Canadian writer
Marie Clements (born January 10, 1962)[1] is a Canadian Métis playwright, performer, director, producer and screenwriter. She was the founding artistic director of Urban Ink Productions, and is currently[when?] co-artistic director of Red Diva Projects, and director of her new film company Working Pajama Lab Entertainment.[2] Clements lives on Galiano Island, British Columbia. As a writer she has worked in a variety of media including theatre, performance, film, multi-media, radio and television.[3][4][5]
Early life
Clements was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. Early in her life she studied dance, speech, singing, piano and music, but she dreamed of being a foreign correspondent. She studied journalism at Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta.[1]
Career
During the 1980s, Clements worked as a radio news reporter[6] and is still a freelance contributor to CBC radio.[7] She has also worked in the writing department of the television series Da Vinci's Inquest[7] which had a plot line similar to The Unnatural and Accidental Women which is based on the murders of several Indigenous women in Vancouver's Skid Row district.
She has been a playwright in residence at the National Theatre School of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Firehall Arts Centre and the National Arts Centre. She has been writer-in-residence at several Canadian universities, including Simon Fraser University[8] and University of British Columbia[9]
Theatre Research in Canada dedicated a special issue of the journal to the celebration of Clements's contribution to Canadian theatre.[5]
In 2010, Clements founded Working Pajama Lab, which specializes in the development, creation and strategic weaving of story across film, TV, digital media and live performance.[9] She also founded Red Diva Project the same year when she was commissioned to create the Aboriginal Pavilion's closing performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
Clements's plays often consider several overlapping themes, such as the themes of racism, sexism and violence explored in The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Her theatrical style is a blending of Aboriginal storytelling, ritual and western theatrical conventions.[5] As a playwright, director and dramaturge, she "explores important issues of women, aboriginals, and the realities of the urban core in innovative, highly theatrical stagings".[1]
While touring the Canadian north, Clements wrote her first play, Age of Iron (1993). She says it was "sheer cold boredom and a serious desire to understand and integrate the elemental connections between Greek mythology and Native thought" that inspired her to write it.[1]
Clements's plays often "reframe...authorized Western histories" to encourage spectators acknowledgement of alternative histories and critically engage with the process of historiography. Both Burning Vision (staged by Tom Bentley-Fisher for The Barcelona International Grec Festival) and The Unnatural and Accidental Women engage with elements of Canadian history that are pushed to the periphery and press issues of "counter-hegemonic remembrance practices".[10]
Her importance as a Canadian playwright is reflected in the number of award nominations, the numerous translations of her works and the number of scholarly articles dedicated to her plays.[11]
