Ursa Major
by Robert Bringhurst

October 2003 | Poetry | $21.95 CAN | $21.95 US
1894031660 | 9781894031660 | Trade Paper

Out of Print

In March 2002, the Regina-based dance company New Dance Horizons performed Robert Bringhurst's Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers, a work that had been commissioned as part of an evening of modern performance and dance entitled Invisible Ceremonies. In Ursa Major, Bringhurst explores a polyphonic technique that allows multiple speakers – and multiple languages and traditions – to collaborate in the story's telling. The subject of the masque is Ursa Major, the great bear constellation, one of the most universal themes in world mythology. In setting the Cree tradition alongside the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome, Bringhurst demonstrates the richness of metaphor that North Americans have inherited. This publication is an attempt to express the masque's performance in typographic form.

Author Biography

Robert Bringhurst is a poet, typographer and linguist, well known for his award-winning translations of the Haida storytellers Skaay and Ghandl, and for his translations of the early Greek philosopher-poet Parmenides. His manual The Elements of Typographic Style has itself been translated into ten languages and is now one of the world’s most influential texts on typographic design. Among his most recent publications is a pair of essay collections, The Tree of Meaning (GP, 2006) and Everywhere Being is Dancing (GP, 2007). Bringhurst lives on Quadra Island, off the British Columbia coast.

Reviews

"This performance work – part original translations, part original poetry – merges Greek, Latin, Cree and English, literally, cascading and colliding together, voices and languages in a deft orchestration of polyphony." George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle Herald