Walker and The Ghost Dance: Plays

Dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate

On a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In Ghost Dance, first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion — Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents — into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history.

In Walker, an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.

Dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate

On a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In Ghost Dance, first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion — Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents — into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history.

In Walker, an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.

The Boston Globe - Seamus Heaney

The Walcott line is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by fine excess.

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986; his recent works are The Bounty and Tiepolo's Hound, illustrated with his own paintings. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.