BOOK REVIEWS

|BURNING VISION|

A PLAY BY

MARIE CLEMENTS

In Burning Vision, Canadian Métis playwright and actor—Marie Clements, unmasks the great lies of the imperialist power-elite and the seemingly small rationalizations and accommodations people of all cultures construct to make their personal circumstances yield the greatest benefit to themselves for the least amount of effort or change on their part. 

Burning Vision, National Theatre School of Canada 2019

When a Dene medicine man prophesizes a burning vision that will come a long time in the future, nobody but his people believe him. But the Dene medicine man’s vision turns out to be the atomic bombs that devastated Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Uranium, the source of those bombs, came from the bowel of the Sahtu Dene territory in the Northwest Territories of Turtle Island. Tracing the journey of Uranium, Clements uses it as a metaphor for the poisonous effects that results from constructing our lives on foundations so terribly out of synch with nature.

Burning Vision, Rumble Theatre and Urban Ink Productions, 2018

Furthermore, Clements attacks the “public apology” stipulated in the United Nations Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, portraying such reparations as yet another mask and manipulative device which always seeks to conceal the maintenance and furtherance of the self-interest of its wearer.

Burning Vision is one play that affirms the connections and struggles that exist between differing cultures and their shared histories.