Daphne Marlatt’s West Coast Work with Noh

• Published in: Modern Drama
• Main Author: Knutson, Susan
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2019
• Subjects: Literature and Literary Theory; First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/md.0914r; https://moderndrama.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0914r

Although best known for her poetry and fiction, Daphne Marlatt has also authored dramatic works, including The Gull, an award-winning Noh drama created in intercultural collaboration with Japanese artists and premiered in Richmond, British Columbia, in 2006, and the libretto for Shadow Catch, a Noh-inspired chamber opera set in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and premiered there in 2011. Marlatt’s engagement with Noh illuminates her feminist, antiracist, Buddhist ecopoetics, inflected by scholarship and respect for Noh tradition. Her work attends carefully to place, the particular situations of women, and the cultural authority of Pacific Coast First Nations, and it illustrates the practice of intercultural humanist philology as discussed by Edward Said in his preface to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Orientalism.