GEORGE RYGA
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Who is George Ryga?George Ryga (1931-87) is the author of Canada’s best known English-language play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first produced in 1967. He was one of Canada’s most prolific authors – he maintained a taxing work program as a short story writer, novelist, radio and television dramatist, poet and film scenarist, not to mention ventures into the world of ballet and opera. In a period of 14 years he produced 190 plays, two cantatas, five screenplays, two long-playing albums, three novels, and a book of poetry, as well as a considerable body of unpublished and unproduced work.
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Honouring George Ryga: Our Mission
George Ryga's most famous character is Rita Joe, and her place in our world is obvious and damning still. Many real world examples informed his writing of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, including the story of a young boy taken from his home in northern Ontario to a residential school. He was found during a helicopter search for truants and taken by helicopter to the school. From the air he saw the train tracks that could lead him back to his community. When he could, he followed those tracks and died, frozen, beside them.
We take our name from Ryga, a political writer, to honour his commitment to his art and to his world. His legacy is this: he was a human living in a community and that community was living in a nation, that nation in a world. He wrote without nostalgia about the world that lived around him. He believed the artist had a responsibility to write counter-narratives, to treat the marginalized among us fairly, to challenge the formal boundaries of his art without losing the humanity of the characters that drive it. These characters live and move according to a complex, tentative political agreement that must not be taken as natural, but must be interrogated in every way.
We take our name from Ryga, a political writer, to honour his commitment to his art and to his world. His legacy is this: he was a human living in a community and that community was living in a nation, that nation in a world. He wrote without nostalgia about the world that lived around him. He believed the artist had a responsibility to write counter-narratives, to treat the marginalized among us fairly, to challenge the formal boundaries of his art without losing the humanity of the characters that drive it. These characters live and move according to a complex, tentative political agreement that must not be taken as natural, but must be interrogated in every way.
