Staging Coyote’s Dream, Vol. 3

On the twentieth anniversary of its first volume, Staging Coyote’s Dream Volume 3 is a curated collection of new works rooted in Indigenous values, aesthetics, and narrative structures. Inspired by their own dramaturgical practices and current conversations in contemporary theatre creation, co-editors Monique Mojica and Lindsay Lachance identify the invaluable and understudied ways that many Indigenous theatre artists are creating culturally specific dramaturgical processes and shifting the paradigm for what is considered ＂text.＂ By presenting models for relational theatre-making and land-based explorations outside the traditional ＂well-made-play＂ structure, Staging Coyote’s Dream Volume 3 is more than just a collection of plays; it offers some strategies and tools for how Indigenous artists can reimagine the structures of new-play development and performance on Turtle Island.

An anthology that identifies and highlights a vast array of anti-colonial performing arts processes, including reclamation, embodiment, and community-engaged work--to name only a few--Mojica and Lachance gather the works of artists leading these practices to not only honour how their plays are expanding dramaturgy, but to build Indigenous performance literacies for all practitioners creating on Turtle Island.

Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock nations) is an actor/playwright/dramaturg/artist-scholar spun from the family web of Spiderwoman Theater. Monique’s artistic practice mines stories embedded in the body in connection to land and place. She has created land-based, embodied dramaturgies and taught Indigenous theatre in theory, process, and practice throughout Canada, the US, Latin America, and Europe. She has most recently been seen on stage in the role of Wanda in My Sister’s Rage at Tarragon Theatre, Aunt Shady in The Unnatural and Accidental Women at the NAC and in Izzie M.: The Alchemy of Enfreakment, written by Monique with a diverse creative team. Monique has collaborated with Santee Smith as the dramaturg for Kaha: wi Dance Theatre’s tryptic Re-Quickening/Blood Tides/SKe: NEN and for Teneil Whiskeyjack’s Ayita for Edmonton’s SkirtsAfire Festival. She is a member of the newly formed Indigenous Dramaturgy Circle at Tarragon Theatre. Monique is the 2023 inaugural Wurlitzer Visiting Professor at the University of Victoria’s Theatre Department. Forthcoming publications include Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way: Mapping Embodied Indigenous Performance, written with Brenda Farnell (University of Michigan Press, 2023).

Lindsay Lachance (Algonquin Anishinaabe) has worked as a dramaturg for over a decade and is an Assistant Professor in the department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. Lindsay’s dramaturgical practice is influenced by her relationship with birch bark biting and the Gatineau River.