Walker and Ghost Dance: Plays

By Derek Walcott

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374528144
• ISBN13: 9780374528140
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.4" x 10.2"