Publications
Quelemia Sparrow is a writer and performer of Skyborn: A Land Reclamation Odyssey, showing at The Cultch from January 23-February 1. 1) What motivates your work as an artist? Being Musqueam, our land, Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Joy. Aspirations to shake down false narratives with cheekiness, truth and humour...
Let’s all just agree to see everything that Lois Anderson directs from now on, okay? Two years ago, her reinvention of Pericles for Bard on the Beach was a revelation. And this year she has brought us a Lysistrata that’s so fresh I feel younger after seeing it. Lysistrata isn’t Shakespeare; it was written by Aristophanes in 411 B.C, and two thousand and twenty-nine years later, it’s still hilarious...
Pool-noodle dicks, toxic masculinity, and a powerful plea for decolonization—these are just some of the things going on in Bard on the Beach’s bold, brilliant, and joyfully bonkers production of Lysistrata. Aristophanes’ 2,400-year-old classic is about Greek women banding together to stop an endless civil war by occupying the treasury and withholding sex from men until peace is established. Jennifer Wise and Lois Anderson’s adaptation is refreshingly contemporary and relevant...
You think you understand kids, and then they surprise you – or at least they surprised me at Salmon Girl, presented at Young People’s Theatre and created by the folks at Raven Spirit Dance. While there were some mis-steps in the production, it has solid bones and there were parts of the show where my young companions, two enthusiastic second-graders, were literally motionless with interest and attention...
Salmon Girl shares a First Nations perspective on the importance of salmon. It tells the story of a young girl named Margie (Donna Soares) who loves to fish and is good at it. While fishing one day, she slips on rocks and falls into the river...
Writer/director Quelemia Sparrow has created a delightful, age appropriate, show full of music, dance, laughs, flowing costumes and cleverly fashioned puppets. If engaging the emotions and having fun is the way to help children internalize the need to honour our relationship with water, Salmon Girl will get the job done...
The 90-minute long, no intermission, presentation is part of the Cultch Fourth Annual Femme Series; a series of shows and events centered on presenting Indigenous women’s voices and personal journeys...
A soul canoe is a sacred vessel that no one else but you can travel in. The sacred vessel is what transports your immortal soul through eternity on a universal river made of stars. It can also retrieve it when it wanders during times of sickness or healing. Belief in this ancestral ritual is deeply held in the Musqueam culture. It isn’t typically shared publicly...
Directed by Kim Senklip Harvey, Skyborn: A Land Reclamation Odyssey is a one-woman play where actor Quelemia Sparrow acts out the characters of a granddaughter and her grandmother, with brief appearances as her mother, father, and sister. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it definitely had the potential to be. It’s a difficult feat, even for a highly talented actor, to convincingly pull off multiple characters in a live setting — but Sparrow manages to evoke different sensibilities in each one...
Politics, language, history: all play a part in playwright and actor Quelemia Sparrow’s Skyborn: A Land Reclamation Odyssey, but this innovative interdisciplinary undertaking began with time for quiet reflection, dreaming, and the act of putting pen to paper...
Shawn and Kristy during the Skyborn touch tour holding a paddle, decorated with abalone and carved with a wolf's head....
This season at the Stratford Festival is the final season for the Tom Patterson Theatre as it currently stands. It will be entirely rebuilt, starting this fall. The current space is going out with a bang, however, in terms of the diverse and exciting productions that can be seen on its stage this season. Each production is excellent, but the most exciting of all may well be Jillian Keiley's production of BAKKHAI. This play may not be for everyone, but if you appreciate good, exciting, and inventive theatre, and don't blush too easily at eroticism on stage, then I highly suggest you get your tickets immediately...
Perusing the 2017 Stratford Festival season, its focus on diversity is hard to miss: there are new plays about the Inuit in Canada’s North (The Breathing Hole) and another about a difficult episode in the history of East Indian immigration to Vancouver (The Komagata Maru Incident). Actors of colour are playing the twins in Twelfth Night (Sarah Afful and Michael Blake) and the future Elizabeth I of England (Bahia Watson in The Virgin Trial)...
Is that a deep red leaf painted onto the stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ont. … or is that what I think it is?...
A provocative and personal account of the ongoing cultural battles over pipelines in BC. Three actor writers—two Indigenous and one white—come together to create a play about the political conflicts surrounding Canada’s oil industry. This project sends each of them on a journey of self-reflection and discovery. They confront prejudices while wrestling with their own fossil fuel dependency, cultural heritage, and first world privilege...
Quelemia Sparrow is a First Nations writer/actor from the Musqueam Nation. She does her best to live gently on the land, consume modestly and eat thoughtfully: “I think about the pigs. But I LOVE bacon.” There’s the rub. Her philosophy? “Eat nothing that could be a pet.” Like the rest of us, she’s embarrassed by some of her choices...
Probably the best thing about The Pipeline Project is that it’s a sincere invitation to dialogue. In this age of social media, so many are so eager to establish their political bona fides—and superiority—that it’s often impossible to have a vulnerable, complicated conversation in public. It’s good to know that real, human interactions can take still take place in the theatre...
Artists are citizens, too. If you’re an artist with strong political convictions, you want to use your art to express them. The challenge is to find a form that best articulates your politics, allows your artistry to flourish, and engages or maybe even activates your audience...
