bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
National Theatre / National Obsession
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Why have Canadian theatre critics been so obsessed with the absence of a national theatre? The question of what kind of national theatre might be most appropriate to this country has worried cultural pundits for a century, and occupies most of the deliberations on theatre in the Massey Report, the seminal document presented to Parliament in 1951 that shaped the development of the arts in Canada over the subsequent four decades. The Massey Report didn’t invent that obsession. Since the 1890s theatre critics in Canada have wrestled with what appeared to be a simple problem: if we have a Canadian nation, then a Canadian drama must be one of its proofs; therefore we must have a national theatre to advance the national drama.
Adjudicating the Dominion Drama Festival: Declarations of (In)Dependence
Authors: Salter Denis
Published: June 2023

The Dominion Drama Festival functioned as Canada’s national theatre from its much heralded inception in 1932 until its controversial reorganization as a non-competitive festival in 1971. Its founder, His Excellency the Right Honourable the Earl of Bessborough, Governor-General of Canada, conceived of the DDF in order to stimulate Canada’s cultural life and to help unite its diverse regions into the semblance of a single nation. From the start the DDF, despite its intended populist appeal, had an aura of aristocratic privilege, and single-mindedly devoted itself to an etiquette of high culture to which its competing amateur groups across the country were meant to aspire – even if they didn’t always know why or how they ought to do so.
Letters
Authors: Beauchamp Hélène
Published: June 2023

Il fafallait que je t’envoie une note pour te dire mon étonnement. En effet, il n’est nullement fait mention, dans “Three Approaches in Quebec ... ” (CTR 60) du nom de la maison d‘édition qui a publié les textes des trois pièces québécoises analysées, VLB, ni même du fait que ces pièces ont été publiées. Il me semble que les auteurs des compte-rendus traitent ces textes comme s’ils étaient “descendus du ciel” directement sur leur table de travail! Tu comprendras donc que je sois incapable de montrer ces textes à l‘édireur, et que je devrai excuser CTR auprès des auteurs et des compagnies qui ont produit ces textes.
From Salt Cod to Cod Filets
Authors: Peters Helen
Published: June 2023

In 1972, CODCO founding members Cathy Jones, Greg Malone, Dyan Olsen, Tommy Sexton, Mary Walsh, and Mary White were given $300 seed money by Paul Thompson of Theatre Passe Muraille. This money helped them to live in Toronto and write Cod on a Stick, which was produced as a full length play in Newfoundland in 1973. The play began with four sketches which ran twenty minutes and grew by accretion to its final form, eighteen scenes. This quintessentially Newfoundland troupe – as its members cheerfully admit – is beholden to the Canadian collective theatre movement for its early direction, form and being.
Words and Dance in Margie Gillis’s “Bloom”
Authors: Friesen Patrick
Published: June 2023

Nora loved the roar of lions near Jim’s grave in Zurich. She thought Jim would be happy with the sound. Nora, whom Joyce wrote into his books. Nora as the Liffey River flowing always to the sea. Nora accepting time and Jim and their daughter Lucia’s madness. Nora, who excited Jim with her body, her spirit, her talk and her letters. Nora as Molly Bloom.
Robert Desrosiers: Breaking Boundaries, Shaking Foundations
Authors: Rudakoff Judith
Published: June 2023

The work of the Desrosiers Dance Theatre is a mind-bending, breath-taking combination of dance, theatre, original music, mime, tai-chi, acrobatics, multi-media segments, elaborate sets, costumes and props and startling special effects. Based in Toronto, and housed in a new studio-office space in the East End of the city, the company has toured nationally and internationally during the first decade of its existence and now, as it prepares to enter the second daring decade, a New York City premiere (at the prestigious City Center) and a new full-length work this fall in Toronto loom large.
Katha Moygasin; Kwayus Phatsi: Don’t Mourn Me; Be Joyful
Authors: Preston Jennifer
Published: June 2023

I first met Rene Highway in October, 1989 at Weesageechak’s Gala – a Native Earth Performing Arts fundraiser for new play development. He was dressed in a sharp black tuxedo with a vivid blue stripe across his eyes. I approached him to find out if he spelled Rene with an acute or not; he laughed and replied that it depended on how fancy he felt on any particular day.
Dora: A Case of Hysteria
Authors: Morhssey Kim
Published: June 2023

Caution: © Kim Morrissey 1991. This play is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and all performances are subject to royalty. Change to the script is expressly forbidden without written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record, in whole or in part, in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by the author. Interested persons are requested to apply for permission and terms to: Kim Morrissey, c/o Playwrights Union of Canada, 54 Wolseley St. 2nd Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 1A5.
Bordertown Cafe; The Mail Order Bride; Lilly, Alta
Authors: Rebai Kelly , Clinton Robert , Dyba Kenneth , Skinner C.J.
Published: June 2023

These three plays have a lot in common: they are written by western Canadians, set in small prairie towns, and they look at family and community history as a way of coming to terms with personal direction. And they all have rather impressive production records.
The Other Side of the Dark
Authors: Thompson Judith , Nunn Robert
Published: June 2023

This text contains four plays by Judith Thompson: The Crackwalker (first produced in 1980); / Am Yours (1987); the radio play Tornado (first broadcast in 1987); and “Pink,” a brief monologue commissioned for the Arts Against Apartheid Benefit in Toronto (1986). It is her second published text in a decade to receive the Governor General’s Award for Drama (the first was for White Biting Dog in 1985).
Dance / Theatre
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

Historically, dance and theatre are related disciplines. Theatre historians seem to concur that in classical Greek theatre, for example, the rhythmic movements of the chorus would have had elements of dance. Indeed, the word “orchestra,” now used as a designation of seating in the theatre, originally means “dancing place.” It is easy enough to chart the historic inter-relation of dance and theatre – court masques, the ballet de com, pantomime and, in our century, the rise of the musical which often features extensive dance sequences. This issue of CTR is not concerned with dance in theatre but with dance which is related to theatre; in short, the practitioners featured in the articles (Robert Desrosiers, Margie Gillis, Bill James, Edouard Lock and Tedd Robinson) are trained as dancers, not as actors.
Funding on the Flatlands
Authors: Jackson Colin
Published: June 2023

The past three decades have been joyful, exhilarating and taxing for the artists, crafts people and administrators of theatre across Canada. In 30 years, the buildings have been constructed, the organizations invented and the audiences invited to share in the work. Perhaps most important, the notion of a life in the arts has become reasonable, even worthy.
Winnipeg Close-ups / 4, PRIMUS Theatre Training for Independence
Authors: Skene Rick
Published: June 2023

Founded in 1988, primus is one of several small theatre companies that have sprung up in Winnipeg. Fickle subscription audiences have made times tough for larger theatres, and recent cuts to arts funding have seen the Manitoba Arts Council cancel operations funding for three small companies: Agassiz Theatre, Forty Below Mime and the Manitoba Puppet Theatre. Although the mac claims that specific circumstances demanded the cuts in each case, we have not seen any new grants of operations funding awarded to small theatres since. Nonetheless, small companies continue to struggle into existence and provide essential artistic vitality to Winnipeg’s theatrical community.
Saskatoon Joins the Club, What I Learned from the Fringe
Authors: Kerr Don
Published: June 2023

What can you learn when you go to a Fringe? Saskatoon held its first Fringe this year, joining the network, five days, five venues, 34 plays, on- and off-Broadway, from August 2-6. At the first play I went to, Emotional Baggage, I learned again that what happens in theatre is a guy comes on pretending he’s somebody else. Then he has to keep us interested for an hour. The story he tells is a story we already know – about a man who wants to escape, go to New York, but he’s too timid and repressed and only when he casts off his emotional baggage is he free to make his journey. It’s a psychological exorcism, the therapy story. It’s set at a bus depot we can name the Art Bus Depot, a place that only art can occupy, and presented in a style of silent comedy and with expressionist props: a skull, a cross, a mask. It’s a Fringe play, a three-suitcase, twelve-folding-chair set, and it’s a play created by a performer, with a maximum of mime and a minimum of words. It wouldn’t make much sense published. That’s a lot to learn from a one-hour play. You learn it in bits and pieces and only later organize it. Is this paragraph as far from experience as the Art Bus Depot is from a real one?
Inventing the Prairies
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

This is the third issue in CTR’s sixteen-year history to focus on Prairie theatre. In 1974, CTR 4 focused on the Manitoba Theatre Centre as a paradigm of Western theatre,- more recently, in 1985, CTR 42 looked at the pluralism of Prairie theatre through the lens of regionalism. In this issue we return to Winnipeg (with excursions to Saskatoon and Alberta) to question the assumptions that have for too long displaced Prairie theatre to the margins of Canadian culture.
The Daniel Brooks Lectures
Authors: Sherman Jason
Published: June 2023

An early observer of Daniel Brooks’ artistic activities noted that “Daniel seems to enjoy any such activity for itself rather than for the end results.” The assessment was made by a counsellor at Camp Robin Hood; Brooks was four. A more recent observer, reviewing Red Tape, the play that Brooks created and performed with the Augusta Company in Toronto, concluded that: “Nothing has been resolved when the actors leave the stage … the play has an unfinished feeling about it, but that (it would seem) is part of [the company’s] style and intention.” The assessment was made by Ray Conlogue, critic at The Globe and Mail; Brooks was 31.
New Wave Clowns / 1: Toronto’s Zanies
Authors: Cashman Cheryl
Published: June 2023

The most exciting thing about writing this article about current Toronto Clowning is that there is so much to write about. A few years ago, Clowning as an art form in Engish-speaking Canada was in its beginnings. Now, here in Toronto, not only do fine solo, double, and company performances abound, but daring and sophisticated forays have been made into specific genres of Clowning – Buffon, Joey/Auguste, and Commedia foremost among them – and these genres have assumed a distinctly Canadian flavour, though initially derived from Clown traditions belonging to other cultures. There has also been a wonderful cross-fertilization occurring among many of the Toronto clown groups, giving rise to productions with a wonderful new energy.
L’Affaire Tartuffe, or, The Garrison Officers Rehearse Molière
Authors: Ackerman Marianne
Published: June 2023

L’Affaire Tartuffe was first produced by THEATRE 1774 at Centaur Theatre, 6–23 September, 1990, with the following cast:
Toronto Creating and Playing The Inspector General: An Interview with Vladimir Mirzoev
Authors: Adam Julie , Vitkin Marina
Published: June 2023

When I began attending Equity Showcase’s rehearsals for a productions of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, directed by Vladimir Mirzoev, a recent arrival from Moscow, I was fascinated by the creative and practical challenges the entire company, but especially the actors and the director, faced. Here was a play that, historically speaking, either did not please or did so for the wrong reason, not to mention a playwright who had been misunderstood for over 150 years, a director who risked not pleasing or pleasing for the wrong reason or being totally misunderstood, and a dedicated cast and staff who would have to deal with all this as well as – if I may be permitted such pragmatic considerations – logistics, red tane and lack of funds.
Strong and Soft: Excerpts from a Conversation with Muriel Miguel
Authors: Beaucage Marjorie
Published: June 2023

Spiderwoman Theater moves people. One is never neutral about it. Part of the reason for that is the energy and commitment of Muriel Miguel who is willing to descend into the abyss in order to break through in creation. Muriel talked to me about the approach to theatre that has been part of Spiderwoman over three decades. Spiderwoman Theater is vibrant and alive because the women who weave its stories are constantly challenging themselves to question and reassemble the way life is. Marjorie Beaucage
Autonomous Aboriginal High-Tech Teepee Trauma Mama
Authors: Belmore Rebecca
Published: June 2023

I have with me, the influence of my Kokum (grandmother) and my mother.

I can see their hands at work. Hands swimming through the water, moving earth and feeling sky: warm hands.

I can see their hands touching hide, cloth and bead creating colour beauty: work hands.
Allow Me to Introduce Myself
Authors: Luna James
Published: June 2023

The above is how I would probably introduce myself. This is very curious, did you know that? I don’t have to say that I’m an Indian artist, I am simply an Indian and an artist. I do not know when this happened; I can tell you that it didn’t happened recently, but it has taken me a long time to say that. For many of you this may seem trivial, but it isn’t! Some may say, “Now that he is successful he is not an Indian any more.” No, that is not what I said because I identified my tribe along with being an artist. What I’m really saying here is that I do not make “Indian art,” but that I’m an Indian who makes art and that, my friends, is a big difference ...
Excerpts: Diva Ojibway
Authors: Mason Tina
Published: June 2023

Diva Ojibway is a story of a beautiful Indian trapper woman who has dedicated her life to looking after her parents until they die. She happens to be obsessed with opera. Her parents are 104 and 94 years old. Patsy is content with her life until an anti-fur activist representative for the Natural Resources Ministry comes to Patsy’s trap-line. Sean Steamapple’s sale reason for coming to the trap-line is to stop the exploitation and killing of animals until he learns that Patsy has the most fabulous operatic voice he has ever heard. He himself is an opera singer from Montreal. Without realizing, Sean turns the tables around and exploits Patsy’s voice for his own gain even though he has to pretend to fall in love with her. He makes her break her promise to her parents by taking her to Montreal. In Montreal Patsy finds out what kind of person Sean really is.
Sacred Hearts, See Bob Run and Wild Abandon, Scientific Americans
Authors: Curran Colleen , MacIvor Daniel , Mighton John , Janes Heather
Published: June 2023

Read together, these three plays offer a cross sectional perspective of recent English-Canadian drama. Commissioned by Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, Colleen Curran’s Sacred Hearts was workshopped during The Blyth Festival Winter Writers’ Retreat of December 1987 and also at the Banff Playwrights’ Colony of May-June 1988, both venues once again showing their importance as fosterers of new mainstream Canadian playwrights and their work. On the other hand, Scientific Americans premièred for Contemporary Theatre in New York City in October of 1988 and had its first Canadian production at Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto, in November of 1988. And Daniel MacIvor’s two one-act plays suggest some of the directions that Toronto’s alterative theatre may be taking. Offering a considerable contrast to the styles and concerns of Curran’s and Mighton’s work, See Bob Run was first produced by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Da Da Kamera at the Poor Alex Theatre, Toronto, in 1987. Wild Abandon was first produced by Sword Theatre in association with Theatre Passe Muraille in 1988. Although their central characters are ostensibly in flight from yuppie-dom, Curran’s tale of a miracle born in a spiritual vacuum and Mighton’s portrait of the moral desiccation of scientific endeavour differ sharply from the bleak confessionalism of MacIvor’s underclass characters, Bob and Steve who, precisely because of such spiritual and moral malaise, live lives devoid of real choice, without the luxury of the comfy introspection of Curran’s Bridget or Mighton’s Jim.
Letters
Authors: Bernstein Mariam , Diamond David
Published: June 2023

In your recently published script of Selkirk Avenue my name was incorrectly printed in the cast list as “Miriam Bernstein”. The correct spelling is “Mariam Bernstein”. Darrell Baran’s name was also misspelled as “Darrel”. I would greatly appreciate a correction notice.
Playing New Words
Authors: Hamilton Patricia
Published: June 2023

I went to Drama School at Carnegie Mellon, then called Carnegie Tech, from 1956 to 1960. On entry we were handed a list of 400 plays from world literature that we were expected to have read by graduation. We were told that if we accomplished this, we would have a working knowledge of theatre history. As I recall, not a single one of these important plays in 3,000 years of world playwriting had been written by a woman. In addition, in four years in that school I never studied, saw or acted in a play by a woman. Playwriting was as firmly a masculine domain as sumo wrestling.
Maenadic Rites On Stage
Authors: Stone-Blackburn Susan
Published: June 2023

The Maenad Theatre Company is a collective that started with Fringe productions in Edmonton in the summers of 1987 and 1988. They incorporated in 1989 and have completed two seasons at Calgary’s Pumphouse Theatre. The three women at Maenad’s artistic core are playwright Rose Scollard, poet-playwright and actress Nancy Cullen, and Alexandria Patience, director and actress who has recently added playwriting to her repertoire. All the Maenad productions have been new Canadian plays written, directed and, for the most part, designed by women: the company’s mandate is “to promote the feminine vision through exciting and dynamic new works for the theatre.”
Pol Pelletier: Giving Birth To Herself
Authors: Bernstein Tamara
Published: June 2023

Last January, on the opening night of Normand Chaurette’s new play, Les Reines, the moment where the mute Anne Dexter breaks into speech – a coup de théâtre under any circumstances – was especially charged for many in the audience at Montreal’s Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui. Pol Pelletier, playing the role of Anne, was herself breaking a long silence that night, returning to the stage after an absence of almost six years.
Dog and Crow, Homeground, Duo for Obstinate Voices
Authors: Springate Michael , Edwards Caterina , Pelletier Maryse , Rittenhouse Jonathan
Published: June 2023

Guernica Editions of Montreal has recently published three plays in their new Drama Series. All three are handsomely and carefully printed and all are literate scripts. As befits Guernica’s interest in and concern with Italian culture, all plays also reproduce, in varying levels of significance, aspects of Italian culture.
Letters
Authors: Drennan Barbara
Published: June 2023

Thank you for publishing my article on Mump and Smoot ... and Wog in your Spring 1991 issue. I was grateful that I could share with your readers a new approach to theatrical criticism in conjunction with the admirable work of this trio.

My concern, however, is with a typographical error which changed the word “worn” (my original text] to the word “wrong” (published text, p. 351. Instead of strictly describing Smoot’s shorts, this slip conveyed an inappropriate value judgement regarding John Turner’s costume choice which was not intended.
Feminist Lesbian Aesthetics
Authors: Smith Jane Orion
Published: June 2023

What is scenography? Is there a feminist lesbian perspective in scenography? to begin with, feminist and lesbian approaches to theatre aren’t necessarily working in unision. Feminist theatre artists have frequently excluded or denigrated the lesbian artist and audience in text, the press, and in performance. Their homophobia seems reactionary: they fear being labelled “lesbian” by critics as if it’s the bubonic plague or it invalidates their work. Lesbian thespians, on the other hand, are not all feminist or are separatist, and this is often perceived as a betrayal of extremism. Yes, sisterhood is dysfunctional and, moreover, diverse. There is no common aesthetic approach in feminist/lesbian theatre but there are some shared attributes. As the only known feminist lesbian scenographer in captivity, I feel like a theatrical dodo.
Alanienouidet: Simultaneous Space and Action
Authors: Ackerman Marianne
Published: June 2023

Beginnings, middles and ends – those are the hard parts in theatre. In the case of Alanienouidet, co-written by myself and Robert Lepage, we began with a fairly sizzling moment of Quebec history, which I first learned about by reading Edgar Andrew Collard’s column, “All Our Yesteryears”, in the Montreal Gazette.
Susan Wright … A Personal Reflection
Authors: Kennedy Lorne
Published: June 2023

“Bozo-brain that I am, you know what I did? I was riding my bike home after a few smart cocktails, not a lot you know, I wasn’t stir-fried or anything, and I thought, ‘I know … I’ll take this other way because it’s got this big hill you can fly down and get going really fast before you shoot across the bridge over the river.’ Fast? Yes, well, holy-moly! There’s a bit of tonnage on this old broad and by the time I got near the bottom I was just a blur. It was like Large Marge going down a friggin’ ski-jump! Anyway, I was burning rubber, lost control, hit the curb, flew over the handlebars, hit a telephone pole and broke my bloody leg!
Columbus and the Neutral Mask
Authors: Allan Katherine
Published: June 2023

Clowning in Canada, and especially in Toronto, is presenting an increasingly exciting challenge to the North American tradition of banal figures with red noses or the equally innocuous image of the sentimental and powerless Pierrot. Instead, audiences are presented with wild and zany characters who break theatrical conventions and demand active critical consideration of what is taking place on stage. Much of this clowning has been influenced by training at L’Ecole Jaques Lecoq, including training in the concept of the neutral mask, and it is perhaps useful to examine, in the work of one important clown company, Toronto’s Theatre Columbus, the ways in which this training shapes their productions.
Sitting in the Dead Room: The Production of Radio Drama
Authors: Jansen Ann
Published: June 2023

That’s a excerpt from “Radio Napalm: Notes from the Dead Room”, a half-hour drama recently recorded for CBC Stereo’s “Studio ’92”. In it, playwright and performer David Craig tackles radio’s mixed messages through his persona, Napalm the Buffoon, a two-foot-high, legless grotesque who has appeared on a number of stages in Canada. Napalm alternately cajoles and rants, using shock tactics to make his audience sit up and listen. In this radio appearance, the “master of aliases” takes on a multitude of characters, from a stiff-upper-lip radio announcer to a Caribbean butler, and manipulates sound effects and ambiences. But most of the time he talks at us, first flattering, then insulting, questioning our assumptions about the ways we listen, the information we hear and believe, and the feelings we have about it all. It’s not an intellectual exercise: at one point he tells us that 1,500 children have died of malnutrition since the show began. Napalm tries to prod us into feeling our own pain.
Starters: A Theatre Program and its Audience
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

It is a truism in theatre studies that reading a play is fundamentally different from reading a poem or a work of prose because a play is not meant simply to be read but to be translated from the private realm of the reader’s imagination to the social forum of theatre. Although theatre scholars have long recognized theatre as a social form, and consequently have been interested in audiences, relatively little attention has been paid to the complex set of factors which draw people to the theatre and constitute them as an audience. The consequence of this evasion is that theatre programs are infrequently considered, except as sources of information. While an important feature of theatre programs is the information which they provide, it is also important that they direct an audience’s reception of the play, not only through notes, but through various graphic elements, as I hope to suggest in my consideration of the program for Theatre Plus’s 1991 production of Hamlet.
Culture, Communication and National Identity: The Case of Canadian Television
Authors: Collins Richard , Miller Mary Jane
Published: June 2023

Why is Richard Collins, a British social scientist who has also taught in Australia, interested in Canada? Because we have experienced decades of what is now a global experience, that is, the constant “spillover of American television”. Collins brings a breadth of research and, equally important, an outsider’s point of view to our nationalist debate. He challenges some of its most basic premises and sharpens our sense of its place in our rather belated study of the texts of our own popular culture. Moreover, he is the first academic to attempt consistently to look at programs, policies and critics in French and English.
Interrogating Theatrical Practice
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

Critics, reviewers, scholars – and even theatre practitioners – tend to analyse, review, discuss and compare scripts and productions as though they were the ahistorical products of the determinable intentions of playwrights and directors. Plays both on the page and in production are treated as though they emerged from a cultural and material vacuum, and “contain” inherent meanings that are accurately and objectively inter-pretable by any audience or reader, anywhere. Something similar can be said of the material conditions in and through which theatre is produced by practitioners and reproduced by audiences and critics – such things as theatre training, architecture, budgets, publicity, organizational and funding structures, and the processes and practices of directors, designers, administrators, actors, and technicians. These structures and practices are treated as the neutral and value-free “tools” of the trade, applicable with equal ease and appropriateness to any kind of theatre, and adaptable to any message or meaning, regardless of the time, place, or cultural context within which they are applied. But as many of the contributors to this issue demonstrate, such is not the case.
The Musical Coast / 1: Knowing What They Want
Authors: Johnston Denis
Published: June 2023

If music is truly the universal language, then musical theatre in Vancouver should be no different than in many other North American cities. And to a great degree this is true. Musical theatre has a way of obliterating cultural difference, as you would have seen the night you went to Phantom of the Opera. (We all went eventually, didn’t we.) In the international marketplace of the ’90s, there is plenty of cross-border shopping in musical theatre.
Nakai Theatre Ensemble
Authors: Flather Patti
Published: June 2023

Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t a contemporary theatre community to speak of in the Yukon Territory. In that time, Nakai Theatre Ensemble has evolved from a two-person improvisational road company to a professional theatre company still in the vanguard, emphasizing new Canadian plays, development of a northern theatre voice, and collaboration with aboriginal Yukoners.
Changes
Authors: Theatre Tunooniq
Published: June 2023

Changes was first performed at Expo ’86 in Vancouver, British Columbia and then toured Banff, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Greenland. In 1986 Tunooniq performed it at the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in Alaska. Throughout 1988 Changes toured with Search for a Friend, performing in Inuktitut, in Eskimo Point, Cape Dorset, Iqaluit, Fort Franklin, and Yellowknife. In 1989, Tunooniq went to Cambridge, England where they performed excerpts from Changes and Search for a Friend during the Arctic Song Festival.
Staging Post-Colonialism(s)
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

For a Canadian, a walk through the streets of an Australian city can be a disorienting experience. The memories of empire linger in both countries, and it comes as a shock to find that Melbourne, with its streetcars, Victorian buildings and streets named after empire builders and their battles, is more familiar than Chicago.
Used Words
Authors: Sidnell Michael J.
Published: June 2023

On stage and off, performance and signification are the two inextricable functions of words. The re-discovery of the generally performative functions of language gave rise to Speech Act Theory just a few decades ago but, on different terms, verbal performativeness has been known to poetics from antiquity. Since then, literature has usually been supposed to be a social practice that privileges the performative use of words in ways somewhat different from such non-literary performatives as contracts, threats, sales pitches, greetings, and so on. In non-literary usages, performances are the effects of words in their real world contexts. But in theatre, literature and other such “hollow” instances – as J.L. Austin calls them (Austin 1975, 22) – there is a secondary context in which words make things happen in a virtual world. But (pace Austin) the primary context is not thereby dissolved, and in it the more or less adept use of the verbal medium itself is a focus of attention and a potential source of pleasure. And when – as in the recital of poetry or the telling of jokes – the acoustic channel is used, the pleasure is twofold: not only in the linguistic play but also in its vocalization; and most acutely in the relation between these two aspects of utterance, as poor Eliza Doolittle is so harshly compelled to acknowledge – though scarcely to good effect. In plays in performance, not only are words supposed to make things happen in the fictive worlds they construct but they are also what we have come to hear: “a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation”, said Dr Johnson.
Vancouver Contradictions
Authors: Panych Morris
Published: June 2023

Owing to my contradictory nature, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t write about something I couldn’t care less about right now so that by the time I’m finished, I’ll have come around to being deeply passionate about the subject – whatever the subject is. Let’s say theoretical or ideological or performance theory approaches – for sake of argument; something which, frankly, I could care less about. Not because I don’t think it’s important; I’m certain, at least in the abstract, these things are. But to consciously consider dramatic theory when creating theatre would seem to me to create a gulf within the soul, a deep canyon which divides a thing from itself.
Toronto Ten Notes Towards a New Theatre
Authors: Waits Death
Published: June 2023

The following is a series of broad, poetic, indefensible, contradictory statements that attempt to suggest one possible path which might lead me towards a more exciting, vibrant, contemporary theatre. I publish them only to encourage discourse and incite originality.
In the Lobster Capital of the World, Opening Night, Homework and Curtains, The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine
Authors: Hannah Don , Foster Norm , Lazarus John , Morgan Robert , Ross Martha , Cherniak Leah , Westley Meg
Published: June 2023

These recent Playwrights Canada publications all deserve attention, and have been successfully produced in the theatre. Critically speaking, they demonstrate that stylistically conventional plays run the risk of being rather uninspiring, while those which are theatrically innovative tend to be more imaginative, creative,and hence compelling. Fortunately, more and more playwrights are choosing the innovative route.
Social Roles of the Stand-Up Comic
Authors: Stebbins Robert A.
Published: June 2023

Stand-up comedy is the art of humorous dialogue presented, typically by one person, before an audience. The talk itself is usually memorized and, today, expressed in a spontaneous conversational manner, as if the performer were speaking to friends. Moreover it tends to be one-sided, punctuated with occasional interaction between performer and audience, which the former does not always want. Although it has been traced to Mark Twain and the “humorous lectures” he gave as an after-dinner speaker in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Gribben 48), today’s stand-up comedy can be understood from a theatrical perspective as a commercialized offshoot of the satirical monologues of the Middle Ages and the stage-setting prologues of certain ancient Greek dramas (Stebbins, 1990: 5-7).
Montreal Neo-Classicism of the 1990s
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

The program for the fifth instalment of the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques, May 27 to June 12, was in sync with current trends of French-language theatre in Quebec where productions of Beckett, Ionesco, and Shakespeare, and other ancient and modern classics have tended to dominate the scene. This repertoire has rechannelled the energies that were previously invested in developing new plays into performative experimentation. Under the direction of Marie Hélène Falcon the Festival made a considerable contribution to this movement. Most of the sixteen productions comprising the Festival were of classic texts with intense preoccupation with performance.
Ottawa The Canadian Improv Games Finding (out) the Vision
Authors: Duchesne Scott
Published: June 2023

Ottawa 1974: two high school students crash an Improvisation workshop wearing loincloths and wielding cardboard spears. Ottawa, March 1993: the theatre of the National Arts Centre was filled to its nine-hundred-seat capacity with avid fans, alumni, and the merely curious, to witness the finals of the Canadian Improv Games. The event was given national coverage via YTV.
Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto’s Alternative Theatres, 1968-1975
Authors: Johnston Denis W. , Lane Harry
Published: June 2023

One of the most endearing qualities of Up the Mainstream is its rich collection of colourful anecdotes about the creators of Toronto’s alternative theatres in the late 60s and 70s. Some of the stories are merely trivial: in 1969 Chris Brookes’s company “blithely” cut a hole in the floor of Trinity Square Church Hall (53); for NDWT’s one-day performance of Reaney’s entire Donnelly trilogy in 1975, Mallory Gilbert “organized a huge gourmet lunch” (246). Some are merely fanciful: in summer 1969 “it seemed like everyone was falling in love” (61). But there is also useful detail about the early careers of key figures in Toronto’s alternative theatres, such as the account of the University of Western Ontario in the 1960s, where Paul Thompson, Martin Kinch, and Keith Turnbull began, and Jack Chambers painted scenery, and John Boyle acted (239). There is some gossip, such as hints about who caused the Festival of Underground Theatre’s deficit (73). But there is a storyteller’s fascination with personal charisma: when Jim Garrard left Theatre Passe Muraille in 1969, the actors treated him like “a departed god” (63); both Garrard and Louis Capson are credited with “messianic” qualities, though of rather different kinds (217); Bena Shuster is “dynamic and admittedly arrogant” (163); John Palmer is “tempestuous” (55) and projects a “manic power” (58). In a certain but limited sense the book’s colourful narrative helps one to feel that one was “there.”
Summerland
Authors: Ryga George , Kujundzic Ann , Hoffman James
Published: June 2023

George Ryga remains a presence. Two collections of his previously unavailable work have been published since his death six years ago, and there could be more. Future volumes, should they appear, could include some of his nine screenplays – such as what I believe to be one of the most powerful of all his works, A Storm in Yalta, a bittersweet portrait of Chekhov’s final days, written in the closing months of Ryga’s own life and full of autobiographical resonance. There are significant teleplays, such as Two Soldiers (1963) and Man Alive (1966), there is his poetry, and there is a lot of interesting correspondence. Although Talonbooks has finished its publishing of Ryga with Summerland, stating that this work “completes the publication project Talonbooks began in 1990, with ... The Athabasca Ryga”, these volumes must not be regarded as the final word from Ryga.
Confessions of a Puppet Manipulator
Authors: More Robert
Published: June 2023

Seven years of on-the-job training as a puppet manipulator in such plays as Woyzeck, Dream Play, and Brecht’s Happy End ... ten more years in various productions across the country – the Gallico series at The Grand with Robin Phillips (1983-4), Joy Coghill’s Song of This Space (Vancouver, 1987) ... and several shows at Young People’s Theatre with Peter Moss (1986-90) ... now, further explorations with Mermaid Theatre in Windsor, Nova Scotia ...
The Repère Cycles: From basic to continuous education
Authors: Beauchamp Hélène
Published: June 2023

After graduating from the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Québec in 1970, Lessard founded several groups for collective creation, between 1970 and 1978, and taught at the Collège de Lévis and at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Québec. By 1978 he had grown increasingly unhappy with the model for creative processes based solely on spontaneity as a guide to artistic process and began searching for more systematic ways of encouraging creativity in actors and guiding work in collectives. He left Quebec City to study with Anna Halprin at the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. In California he discovered the RSVP Cycles (resources, scores, evaluation, and performance) used by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin for architectural and urban planning.2 Lessard’s adaptation of Halprin’s four-part charting of the process of creative endeavour to work in the theatre as the repère cycles: resources, partition, évaluation, représentation. In 1980 he returned to Quebec City and founded Théâtre Repère with a group of young actors from the Conservatoire,3 amongst whom was Robert Lepage.4
House Humans, Homeward Bound, Democracy
Authors: Macivor Daniel , Hayes Elliott , Murrell John , Hall Lynda
Published: June 2023

Daniel MacIvor’s House Humans includes his performance work House, winner of the 1991 Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and Humans, a collection of fifteen brief prose pieces. The postmodern House resists genre labelling. Victor’s solo narrative performance (already a whirlwind, reality-defying palimpsest of nightmares, dreams, therapy sessions, and memories) is embellished with songs, dance, a voice on a positive thinking tape, and a bagpipe rendition of “Amazing Grace” which Victor creates by plugging his nose and banging on his throat. His self-reflexive monologues highlight the fragmented nature of existence.
Aboriginal Voices: Amerindian, Inuit, and Sami Theater
Authors: Brask Per , Morgan William , Appleford Robert
Published: June 2023

Apart from a few scattered articles, the area of contemporary Native theatre appears virtually untouched by substantial scholarly investigation. This is why Aboriginal Voices, the only (to my knowledge) full-length anthology devoted entirely to First Nations drama and performance, is so exciting. It indicates not only the great range of Native theatre (focusing on the far north but with additional material relating to other Native groups), but also of the problems encountered by those wishing to understand it and help foster it.
CTR and Canadian Theatre Criticism: Constructing the Discipline
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

In an article published in Theatre History in Canada (1990), and in his introduction to The CTR Anthology, Alan Filewod has analysed “The Canon According to CTR”, usefully examining the ways in which CTR constructed, and subsequently deconstructed, “Canadian Theatre”, and particularly Canadian drama, throughout the 1970s and 80s. Filewod was concerned primarily to explore the selection and publication of playscripts in the journal, and the ways in which the discourse of CTR has shifted over the years and over its first three editorial “regimes”, as he calls them, to become increasingly pluralistic, concerning itself less with building a national theatrical identity and dramatic canon, and more with decentring that canon.
Discursive Evolutions: Twenty years of opinions, rants, jargons and provocations from the annals of CTR
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Reading through the complete run of CTR is an exercise in cultural archaeology that uncovers layers of recurring argument, mixed with countless delights and forgotten controversies. In the process of preparing this anniversary issue, we thought it might prove useful (or at least fun) to dust off some of these artifacts and display them in our own discursive museum. What we found was that CTR offers more than a polemical history of Canadian theatre in the making; it also charts the changing vocabularies we use to understand the history we witness. This very personal selection of CTR “soundbites” is offered both as a reminder of the great changes our theatre has undergone in twenty short years, and as a case study of the way our discourse continues to evolve to express changing ideological and aesthetic priorities. This, then, is what we saw, what we said about it, and how we said it.
‘Show Boat’: The Past Revisits the Present
Authors: Breon Robin
Published: June 2023

This October a major revival of the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II musical, Show Boat, will open on Broadway. Based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 romantic novel about life on the Mississippi, the production is directed by Harold Prince and produced by Live Entertainment of Canada Inc.’s Garth Drabinsky. Show Boat will join LivEnt’s Tony Award-winning Kiss of the Spiderwoman which closed recently in London but is still playing in New York.
Remembrance of Things Past and Present
Authors: Hall Lynda , Murrell John
Published: June 2023

John Murrell is one of Canada’s most established and widely-produced playwrights. During his career he has worked as playwright-in-residence at Alberta Theatre Projects and Theatre Calgary, as an Associate Director of the Stratford Festival, Head of the Banff Playwrights Colony, and as Head of the Canada Council’s Theatre Section. His plays are frequently produced in Canada, the United States and Europe. They include Power in the Blood (winner of the Clifford E. Lee playwriting competition in 1975), A Great Noise, A Great Light, Waiting for the Parade, Memoir (which ran in Paris for three years), Farther West (Chalmers Award, 1986), New World, October, and Democracy. His most recent play, Far Away Nearby, premièred last April at the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska. His translations (including Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, The Master Builder, Oedipus Rex, Mandragola and Divorçons) have also been widely produced.
Ghost, of a Voice
Authors: Spencer Nigel , Biais Marie-Claire
Published: June 2023

At rise, th ere is background music on tile cello. A t times, it accompanies a man’s v oice. Occasiona lly, a w oman’s v oice is heard singing, far off, tho uqh ve nJ much present.

He: Everything is silent and peaceful on this mountain ... and you are near. ... Of course it has been hard sometimes, but never in all these years together have I felt you waver from me.... Why are you so quiet?
Ken McDougall: We Always Listened
Authors: Gilbert Sky
Published: June 2023

I met Ken McDougall in 1978. I was at the Drama Centre at the University of Toronto but very bored with academia. I auditioned for a role in Games to Play While Waiting for the Revolution, a collective creation with Ken Gass at the helm, to be produced at The Factory Theatre Lab. While rehearsing for Games to Play, I met Ken McDougall, who was also an actor in the piece.
Computers and Theatre: Mimesis, Simulation and Interconnectivity
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: June 2023

Theatre at the end of the twentieth century, like most other aspects of life in industrialized countries, relies heavily on computers. From the word processors on which playwrights compose texts and PR officers compose advertisements to the lighting boards which automatically recall hundreds of cues, to the ticket systems and automated telephone sales, to the accounting packages which finally chronicle the season, large and small theatres in Canada rely more and more on computer technology to manage and to shape their product. These “front of the house” uses of computer technologies have gradually entered theatre production in the same manner that computers have entered other aspects of daily life: as mechanisms to save time, reduce drudgery, or allow small staffs to perform more functions. In this sense, computers in theatre occupy the same register as computers in business: they are machines which arose historically from arithmetic computation.
Winnipeg Western Regionalism and the Prairie Theatre Exchange
Authors: Yales Sarah
Published: June 2023

To anyone nurtured on the myth of artist as outsider, the idea that an artist had a role in the community to evoke a sense of place, to create symbols that invoke identity, was radical. Regionalism posed that challenge twenty years ago.

Today technology and mass media have made us all citizens of the world. Does regionalism still have a role to play in the kind of art we make? Is it still a valid philosophy for Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange, a theatre nurtured on the homegrown?
Bad Girls Looking for Money - Maenad Making Feminist Theatre in Alberta
Authors: Bennett Susan , Patience Alexandria
Published: June 2023

It’s not as if we hadn’t always been bad girls; it was just that nobody really noticed until we brought an American bad girl in to play ... After two shows by New York lesbian performance artist Holly Hughes (6 and 7 June 1994), Kelley Charlebois, executive assistant to the Minister for Alberta Community Development, said: “I don’t think that’s something the Government wants to be funding” (Calgary Sun, 26 June 1994: 12). Charlebois’s comment came after several enraged Tory MLAs suggested that the provincial government pulled the $16 million annual arts budget if controversial shows continued to be funded. For Maenad Theatre, who in the last financial year received about 0.06% of this provincial arts funding allocation (and this was one of our more successful years!!), it was more than a little baffling to be perceived as a threat to family values. For Holly Hughes, this was tired news: she, after all, had been defunded in 1991 by the NEA since, as then-Chairman John E. Frohnmayer said, her work was “heavily of the lesbian genre” (Hughes, Village Voice, 21 June 1994: 7). What seems most telling in this story, however, is that when Maenad Theatre’s Exposure One and Two performance events were held up to public scrutiny, all they could see from the two nights, showcasing performances by ahdri zhina mandiela, Molly Chisakaay, Lori Weidenhammer, Nancy Cullen, Diane Kooch, Suzette Mayr, Laurie Montemurro and Alexandria Patience, was the only American – Holly Hughes.