Description
Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show is a flamboyant epic, constructed as a series of tableaux of the Métis in the Canadian West. It is a multilayered and entertaining saga loosely based on Buffalo Bill’s outdoor travelling show. In 1885, following the hanging of his friend Louis Riel, bison hunter Gabriel Dumont fled to the United States. There he was recruited by Buffalo Bill, founder of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a gigantic outdoor travelling show that re-enacted life in the American West. The creative team behind Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show – including ten authors, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, French- and English-speaking men and women – is an adaption of the theatrical version of Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show presented by the National Arts Centre was one of a number of exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter initiative. The authors include: Jean Marc Dalpé, David Granger, Laura Lussier, Alexis Martin, Andrea Menard (Métis), Yvette Nolan (Algonquin-Irish), Gilles Poulin-Denis, Paula-Jean Prudat (born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory and is a proud Half-Breed of Cree, Saulteaux, Scandinavian, French and Métis Nation (ancestral to Batoche and Red River) blood.), Mansel Robinson, and Kenneth T. Williams (Cree playwright from the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan’s Treaty 4 territory).