Urban Tattoo is a performance work that combines a radical approach to storytelling, incorporating multi-media and music. It takes the themes of identity, displacement and survival and redesigns them into an urban context. Urban Tattoo was workshopped at The Native Earth’s Performing Arts Weesageechuck Festival in Toronto with dramaturge and director Margo Kane. It was given a work in progress performance with Maenad Theatre in Calgary in early 1996 and a staged reading at The Native Voices Festival  in New York, directed by Randy Reinholz, at the American Indian Community House. In 1997, Urban Tattoo was presented at The University Leeds, in England. Later, it was workshopped with Peter Hinton and Chapelle Jaffe at The Playwright’s Theatre Centre in Vancouver, and premiered a workshop production at the 1998 Women in View Festival in collaboration with Lynda Hill, Terri Snelgrove, and DB Boyko.

Urban Tattoo has since toured to festivals and theatres across Canada and the US. Most recently, it was presented at last year’s prestigious Festival of the Americas in Montreal. Written and performed by Marie Clements.  Urban Tattoo is published by UCLA Press and Ribsause, a book/cd by Vehicle Press.

“… bold and sassy… Urban Tattoo filled with wit.”  – Calgary Herald

“Urban Tattoo offers what Virginia Woolf described as those emotionally charged ‘moments of being’ in life It emits the lingering emotional resonace of a good poem.” – City Life, Victoria

“Melding dreams with reality, Clements’ vocal control, fluid movements and emotional range make for a moving tribute to warrior women everywhere.” – LA Weekly