bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Jeff, A Play, 'Suggested by Stephen Leacock'
Authors: Lawrence Robert G.
Published: December 2020

Few readers of Leacock's prose will now immediately associate him with a four act play called Jeff. To my knowledge, it has never been published, but it is a part of Canadian literary and theatre history, and provides a few mysteries.
Change in Vancouver Theatre, 1963-80
Authors: Page Malcolm
Published: December 2020

The four events which were to be the key to growth in theatre in Vancouver took place in a few months in 1963-64, though one should note that the city established a Festival as early as 1958, which introduced international culture for a few summer weeks and was last held in 1968.
Bouquet for M. Roque (Montreal 1810)
Authors: Nichols Glen
Published: December 2020

[293] For the name-day feast of M. Jacques Roque, director of the Petit-Séminaire de Montréal, July 25, 1810.
Yvan Bienvenue and the Conte Urbain
Authors: Moss Jane
Published: December 2020

This article explores the conte urbain as practiced by Yvan Bienvenue, winner of the Governor General's Award for 1997. This new hybrid dramatic form combines the monologue and the traditional oral tale, using a mixture of popular language and poetic speech. Although marked by their dark vision, obscenities, graphic sexuality, and nightmarish violence, these contes urbains carry clear messages about social values and appropriate human behaviour. By using different linguistic registers, he underscores the tensions that arise when everyday language fails to express inner needs and aspirations. Yvan Bienvenue's work reminds us that popular language--with its vulgarity, anglicisms, grammatical incorrectness, and impoverished vocabulary--reflects the failures of contemporary society and the longing for personal happiness.
Canada's Daughters, America's Sweethearts: The Careers of Canadian 'Footlight Favorites' in the United States
Authors: Sperdakos Paula
Published: December 2020

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, before Canada had developed its own indigenous theatrical tradition, a substantial number of Canadian-born or -raised performers enriched the theatres of the United States and England: most of these were women. This article focuses on those female performers born during the 19th century who pursued successful careers in the United States. One purpose of the article is simply to call the roll of names that have never been gathered together before. Among its other aims is a consideration of these expatriate performers' attitudes toward Canada, and Canada's toward them.
La Pertinence de l'Herméneutique au Théâtre: Réflexion sur l'Herméneutique Théâtrale, à Travers une Analyse Critique du Livre Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice de Willmar Sauter et Jacqueline Martin
Authors: Agiman Denise
Published: December 2020

L'autorisation de verser le texte intégral de cet article n'a pas été accordée par l'auteur / Permission for full text reproduction not granted by author
Age of Iron Adaptation and the Matter of Troy in Clements’s Indigenous Urban Drama
Authors: Rabillard Sheila
Published: December 2020

In Age of Iron, Clements freely adapts Euripides’s Trojan Women. In Hutcheon’s terms, she “indigenizes,” drawing on the ancient play selectively and localizing it. Her localization is unusual because she creates a double setting and a palimpsest of Trojan and Indigenous referents. The action occurs in a place which is both contemporary Vancouver and ancient Troy; the fall of Troy is also the conquest of BC’s Aboriginal peoples. This duality allows Clements to lament historical suffering even as she insists that conquest is happening now on the streets of Vancouver. The superimposition of different frames of reference politicizes the gesture of adaptation: Clements’s transformative art implies that past patterns of oppression can be re-shaped. Yet adaptation of a classical text is an ironic gesture, given that the play stages the destructive imposition of European culture. The layered ironies of the play derive, as well, from Clements’s appropriation of the “matter of Troy.” Exposing the instability of national mythologies, she rejects the mythic descent of Britons from exiled Trojans, and claims Troy for her Aboriginal-identified characters. She revises British triumphalism, and instead of prophesying Troy reborn uses setting, set, and performance to dramatize the exilic present of “Trojans” in their homeland.
The Murmuring-In-Between: Eco-centric Politics in The Girl Who Swam Forever
Authors: Gray Nelson
Published: December 2020

Viewing one of Clements’s earliest plays through an eco-critical lens reveals how this playwright manages to situate her postcolonial politics within a vision of the world that is unequivocally eco-centric. After detailing how Clements incorporated three primary sources in the conception and development of The Girl Who Swam Forever, this paper (employing Tim Ingold, Christopher Manes, Val Plumwood, Akira Lippit, Thomas King, and Jeanette Armstrong ) shows how the animist assumptions that inform the play’s action are fundamentally distinct from conventional Western ways of seeing. The paper then concludes by arguing that it is precisely this animist sensibility that provides Clements’s female protagonist with what Deleuze and Guattari have called “a line of escape” from the repressive constraints of human-centred thought, enabling her to imagine a world beyond the racist one that threatens to undermine her agency, well-being and self-respect.
The Casting and Makeup of Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies in Canada: A Report on the Discipline by the Numbers (and Letters)
Authors: Whittaker Robin C.
Published: December 2020

Are we poised at the outset of a faculty hiring crisis in Drama, Theatre, and Performance (DTP) studies at Canadian universities? The question has been raised before, and perhaps at no time more frequently than in recent years as more students are entering graduate school and completing their degrees following the worst financial downturn in seventy-five years. Reactions range from malaise (“It was bad twenty years ago too”) or comparativism (“It’s bad in other disciplines, and in other countries too”) to economic determinism (“As the stock market goes, so too university hiring; things will get better”) and even panic (“After years of sending out job applications I’d be a fool to stay on the job market any longer”). But what do we really know about DTP graduation and hiring rates in this country? This quantitative report updates and deepens past attempts to analyze perceptions about DTP education by offering aggregated “personnel flow” and “student flow” statistics generated from current Canadian university tenure-stream DTP faculty and graduate student population data. Faculty data were gathered primarily from university DTP and English department websites, and graduate student data were gathered primarily from records held at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, the largest single source of DTP faculty in Canada.
Michel Tremblay adaptateur de pièces françaises : le cas de Les Trompettes de la Mort
Authors: Rao Sathya
Published: December 2020

Romancier et dramaturge bien connu, Michel Tremblay est également l’auteur de nombreuses traductions et adaptations encore peu étudiées par les critiques. Dans ce large corpus d’adaptations, l’on note la présence pour le moins surprenante de cinq pièces françaises dont Les Trompettes de la mort écrite par Tilly. Comment comprendre le choix de Michel Tremblay d’adapter des pièces françaises ? Faut-il y voir la manifestation de la tendance ethnocentriste des années 1970-80 mise en évidence par Annie Brisset ? À travers l’analyse de l’adaptation québécoise de la pièce Les Trompettes de la mort, cet article se propose de questionner la pratique de l’adaptation de Michel Tremblay.
Girls in “White” Dresses, Pretend Fathers: Interracial Sexuality and Intercultural Community in the Canadian Arctic
Authors: Davis-Fisch Heather
Published: December 2020

In 1903-04, men and officers of the Era and the Neptune and local Inuit socialized extensively while the two ships wintered near Fullerton Harbour (Nunavut). Square dances, the most popular shipboard events, functioned as sites where racial differences were manipulated and enacted through social performance. Examining Inuit women’s choice to wear “white” clothing to these dances allows one to see a specific way that costuming and social performance facilitated intercultural sociability and interracial sexual relationships. Providing clothing that made Inuit women appear more “white” and teaching them square dances allowed whalers to contain, ostensibly, the threat posed by “going native” through miscegenation; however, the clothing also highlighted the women’s racial alterity. Non-Inuit men also produced social performances to facilitate interracial sexual liaisons: the relationships that whalers developed with Inuit women resembled the spousal exchanges practiced in many Inuit communities and their behaviour toward Inuit children mimicked the traditional behaviour of Inuit men toward their families. The sexual and social performances produced by Inuit women and non-Inuit men were recognized as “pretend” by those who witnessed and participated in them, but they also created an actual sense of intercultural community among whalers and Inuit. Considering the community as constituted through performance locates it as a specific site at which ethnicity, like gender, emerges as a performative rather than expressive marker of identity, demonstrating how racial and ethnic identities are “tenuously constituted in time [. . .] instituted through a stylized repetition of acts [. . .] through the stylization of the body” (Butler 519).
Walking the Edge of the Stage in Theory; Or, Janet Cardiff’s Sensorium for Intermedial Bodies
Authors: Derkson Carmen
Published: December 2020

This article examines Janet Cardiff ’s site-specific art, and in particular, the 2005 audio walk, Her Long Black Hair, as a possible site of refusal or an alternative to the panoptic docile, disciplined Foucaultian body. This paper investigates Cardiff ’s sound-based collaboration, often performed with artist Georges Bures Miller, as a sensorial, chorographic, and intermedial practice that challenges discourses of representation, such as conformist, dominant fixed perceptions of identity and scripted subjectivity. Cardiff ’s work demonstrates the process of intermediality and how the intermedial body disrupts linear and visual narratives or sites that fix identity through the constructs of the historical and cultural. The article forwards critical questions about the conditioned human desire for bodily fixity, surveillance, and panoptical structures promoting normative, disciplinary hierarchies, especially through nostalgia for narratological closure. Cardiff ’s work, her performance and artistic strategies, offer other avenues for inhabitation of the radical sensorium, the body as palimpsestuous, inner theatre, wherein she invites us to participate differently—to listen and see, to experience differently. The article also takes up an intermedial, palimpsestic form with spaces created for moments of pause and reflection: an enacting of the site-specific intermedial and palimpsestic body.
Le processus systématique du développement dramaturgique de La Troupe du Jour
Authors: Théberge Mariette , Chaîné Francine
Published: December 2020

Cet article a comme objectif de réfléchir à la manière dont La Troupe du Jour planifie et encadre le développement dramaturgique qui donne lieu à l’émergence, la mise en chantier et la mise en scène de pièces inédites et écrites par des auteurs de la Saskatchewan. Sur le plan théorique, il met en parallèle la conception de ce développement dramaturgique avec le modèle proposé par Gosselin et al. Une représentation de la création à la fois comme un processus et comme une dynamique (qui comprend trois phases : une phase d’ouverture, une phase d’action productive et une phase de séparation qui sont animées par des mouvements interactifs et récurrents : l’inspiration, l’élaboration et la distanciation). Le principal dispositif de collecte de données est l’entrevue individuelle semi-dirigée réalisée auprès de neuf participants dont deux conseillers dramaturgiques, cinq dramaturges ainsi que les directeurs artistique et administratif de La Troupe du Jour. L’analyse de ces témoignages permet de saisir la manière dont le processus encadre la dynamique de création au sein du Cercle des écrivains, de laboratoires d’écriture et lors de la production. Cette analyse permet également de qualifier de « systémique » le processus de développement dramaturgique mis en place par cette compagnie de théâtre
La Maculée de Madeleine Blais-Dahlem : une écriture dramaturgique véridique, ludique et transgressive
Authors: Forsyth Louise
Published: December 2020

La Maculée (2011), pièce récente de la dramaturge fransaskoise Madeleine Blais-Dahlem, dramatise la condition difcile et pénible d’une jeune femme francophone qui s’est installée avec son nouveau mari à la campagne saskatchewanaise vers 1920. Sa peine provient des abus de son mari, de la difculté de préserver sa foi catholique, et de la vague galopante d’anglicisation dans l’Ouest canadien, anglicisation qui amène avec elle les couches culturelles et les institutions aliénantes d’une société moderne capitaliste, y compris un protestantisme agressivement évangélisant. La richesse et l’originalité des langages théâtraux employés par Blais-Dahlem exploitent pleinement la potentialité esthétique du bilinguisme et, en même temps, exposent l’actualité d’une thématique à la fois particulière et universelle : la solitude, l’exil, la peur, la perte de la foi et de la langue, la misère, la misogynie, la violence faite aux femmes. La politique soutenue de la compagnie théâtrale professionnelle, La Troupe du Jour de Saskatoon, qui accorde une priorité à l’encouragement de la dramaturgie fransaskoise a joué un rôle capital dans le succès artistique de La Maculée. C’est une politique centrée sur les activités du Cercle des écrivains, des ateliers et des lectures dramatiques, au sein desquelles se trouve une équipe de collègues qui partagent leur énergie créatrice.
Monodrame, récit de vie et théâtre post-identitaire de l'Ouest canadien
Authors: Nolette Nicole
Published: December 2020

Aux drames familiaux et aux spectacles à grand déploiement des communautés francophones de l’Est canadien s’opposent, à l’Ouest, une grande fréquence de monodrames. Si le monodrame semble se faire la forme d’expression théâtrale privilégiée par les artistes francophones de l’Ouest, c’est que l’exiguïté particulière de cette région s’inscrit triplement dans les conditions de production, dans la thématique et dans la forme du monodrame. Les modalités de cette exiguïté sont négociées intimement entre l’artiste et les communautés des spectateurs. Si la thématique évolue avec le passage du théâtre identitaire au théâtre post-identitaire, la forme monodramatique elle-même continue à prédominer comme trace ultime de l’exiguïté.
Canadian Performances / Global Redefinitions
Authors: Gilbert Reid , Maufort Marc
Published: December 2020

From the last decades of the twentieth century to the present, new structures of globalization have increasingly characterized our world. From an economic point of view, the influence of such institutional and regulatory structures as NAFTA and the IMF has deeply affected relationships between countries on various continents. From a cultural perspective, the internet and social media have contributed to quick knowledge dissemination across national boundaries and both a growing similarity among developed nations and an increasing sense of disenfranchisement in developing nations. As a fraught issue, globalization has generated new forms of critical discourse in various fields, including literature and theatre studies. While its advocates praise it for its ability to develop new connections between different world cultures, its detractors underscore its tendency to favour cultural sameness on a global scale. As Dan Rebellato reminds us, the phenomenon of globalization can be understood in many ways. Already heralded by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century as an inevitable process leading to productive dialogues between nations, globalization gained special significance towards the end of the twentieth century (Rebellato 14). Broadly speaking, globalization now designates the manifold political, cultural, and economic exchanges between the world’s contemporary nationstates. This process stands in marked constrast to the insularities of nineteenth century nationalisms (4-12). More specifically, Rebellato regards globalization as “the rise of global capitalism operating under neoliberal policy conditions,” by which he means the non-protectionist economic conditions typical of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (12). Similarly, in this special issue, globalization is understood as a phenomenon closely linked with these recent phases of capitalism. The articles collected here foreground the ways in which Canadian artists engaged in theatre and performance negotiate the cross-cultural advantages and homogenizing pitfalls of such globalization.
Constellation Translation: A Canadian Noh
Authors: Halebsky Judith
Published: December 2020

Daphne Marlatt’s play, The Gull, explores the form and structure of traditional Japanese Noh theatre to expand the possibilities of translating Noh for a Canadian audience. Marlatt developed the play out of her 1974 collection of poems, Steveston, which touches on the experience of Japanese-Canadian residents of the fishing community of Steveston, BC, who were evacuated and interned during World War II. In 2006, under the direction of Heidi Specht, Pangaea Arts staged The Gull through collaboration among Japanese Noh master Akira Matsui, Noh professionals from Tokyo, and Canadian actors. This research demonstrates that the emphasis on maintaining traditional structures of Noh disrupted the potential for a well-balanced collaboration and in important ways othered the Canadian actors. At the same time, Marlatt’s script, the emotions it explored, and the aesthetic sophistication of the performance allowed for an expansive liminality of identity and location. This essay examines issues of formal and cultural translation for the stage and builds on the scholarship of Susan Bassnett and Jean-Michel Déprats. To the existing conceptions of translation as divided between acculturation and foreignization, this research proposes a constellation translation that enables the cultural locations of translator, actors, artists, and audiences to shape the production.
Théâtre Canadien et Redéfinitions Planétaires
Authors: Gilbert Reid , Maufort Marc
Published: December 2020

Des dernières décennies du vingtième siècle jusqu’à nos jours, notre monde a été de plus en plus marqué par les nouvelles structures mondialisantes. Sur le plan économique, les rapports entre pays sur divers continents ont été très marqués par l’influence qu’ont pu avoir des institutions et des structures de réglementation comme l’ALENA et le FMI. Sur le plan culturel, Internet et les médias sociaux ont aidé à diffuser rapidement des connaissances au-delà des frontières nationales et ont mené à la fois à une similitude de plus en plus grande entre nations dévelopées et à un sentiment accru, dans les pays en voie de développement, d’être privé de droits. La question de la mondialisation, source de tensions, a donné naissance à de nouvelles formes d’analyse critique dans divers domaines; c’est le cas, par exemple, en littérature et en études théâtrales. Si les défenseurs de la mondialisation louent sa capacité à tisser de nouveaux liens entre diverses cultures du monde, ses détracteurs soulignent sa tendance à favoriser l’uniformité culturelle à l’échelle de la planète. Comme nous le rappelle Dan Rebellato, notre lecture du phénomène peut varier. Déjà annoncée au dix-neuvième siècle par Karl Marx comme un processus inévitable qui mènerait à un dialogue productif entre nations; la mondialisation gagna en importance vers la fin du vingtième siècle (Rebellato 14). D’une façon générale, la mondialisation désigne à présent les divers échanges politiques, culturels et économiques entre États-nations contemporains. Le processus se démarque clairement de l’insularité des nationalismes du dix-neuvième siècle (Rebellato 4-12). Plus particulièrement, Rebellato considère le phénomène de la mondialisation comme « la montée du capitalisme mondial sous des conditions politiques néolibérales », c’est-à-dire des conditions économiques dépourvues de protectionisme caractérisant la fin du vingtième siècle et le début du vingt-et-unième (12, traduction libre). De même, les contributeurs à ce numéro thématique conçoivent la mondialisation comme étant étroitement liée à ces périodes récentes du mouvement capitaliste. Leurs articles mettent au premier plan la façon dont les artistes de la scène canadienne négocient les avantages transculturels et le piège de l’homogénéisation de la mondialisation.
Editorial Note from the Incoming Editor
Authors: Schweitzer Marlis
Published: December 2020

This issue of Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada marks the official changing of the editorial guard. For the last seven years, Glen Nichols has shown exemplary leadership as General Editor, overseeing the publication of sophisticated, award-winning, discipline-shifting articles and theme issues on such topics as intermedial performance, intercultural performance, and francophone theatre in western Canada. Needless to say, I have some rather large shoes to fill and so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Glen for his kindness, patience, and support throughout the transition period. I am also grateful to Stephen Johnson, Barry Freeman, Erin Hurley, Louise Ladouceur, Kelsy Vivash, and Shelley Liebembuk for their encouragement and hard work in the past year.
"Looka Me, I'm the Force o'Wisdom and Progress!": Un-Crowning the Classic Text Through Carnivalesque Dramaturgy
Authors: McKinnon James
Published: December 2020

Adaptation scholarship often laments the anti-adaptation biases that infuse what they call “fidelity discourse” (criticism based on the assumption that adaptations can and should be assessed only on the basis of their fidelity to the source). However, few scholars have acknowledged that since adaptors themselves are well-aware of fidelity discourse, they must somehow negotiate it; this can involve pre-empting, evading, or challenging it. This essay explores how playwright Michael O’Brien negotiates and even exploits commonplace prejudices about adaptation—especially comic adaptations—in Mad Boy Chronicle, his 1995 travesty of Hamlet. The essay examines both the carnivalesque dramaturgy of Mad Boy Chronicle, to illustrate how its ostensibly dumb comedy is really in pursuit of serious knowledge, and O’Brien’s paratextual strategies for guiding the audience’s reception of the play. While the play itself presents the generic conventions of a “stoopid” parody, O’Brien takes pains to frame it in program notes, interviews, prefaces, and other publicity material, not as a comic desecration of a masterpiece, but as an earnest attempt to resurrect the original source of that so-called masterpiece. These framing tactics serve to destabilize the assumed superiority of the “original” by revealing that Hamlet itself is only an adaptation. Thus, while the adaptation relies on and confirms the prestige of the canonical source, it also forces us to reconsider it.
North-South Theatre Exchanges: Sistren’s Tours of Canada in the 1980s and Early 1990s
Authors: Smith Karina
Published: December 2020

This article explores the relationship between Canadian development agency funding and popular theatre during the 1980s and early 1990s, the period when Canada was particularly focused on promoting itself internationally as a benevolent nation. Sistren Theatre Collective of Jamaica is used as a case study to demonstrate that popular theatre was seen as an important way for engaging with communities and for disseminating development education in both Canada and the global South. Sistren was funded by a number of Canadian development agencies and toured Canada three times during the 1980s and early 1990s. Its work was seen as a model of grassroots outreach because it was using Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed—among other theatre techniques—and Jamaica’s oral tradition to devise feminist theatre. In the same period, Canadian popular theatre workers/companies were also funded by Canadian development agencies to produce theatre with community groups. With development agency funding, Canadian popular theatre workers/companies formed the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance, which held festivals of popular theatre every two years. The festivals brought together popular theatre groups from Canada and the global South to exchange skills. Sistren attended the festival held in 1987 in Sydney, Nova Scotia, which was criticised for its focus on the needs of development educators rather than popular theatre workers. This article will argue that the increasing involvement of development agencies in popular theatre during the 1980s turned what started as a genuine attempt to exchange theatre skills between groups from the global North and South into an opportunity to parade funding recipients through development networks.
Merrill Denison: The Political and Modernist Writer at 120
Authors: Lindgren Allana C.
Published: December 2020

June 23, 2013 marks 120 years since the birth of Merrill Denison, a playwright, radio dramatist, essayist, journalist, environmental advocate, and writer of corporate histories. 2 His embrace of Canadian subjects as well as his success in crafting a living for himself as a professional writer during the early twentieth century set him apart from many of his contemporaries. Despite his numerous accomplishments, Denison has arguably receded from our collective memory. 3 It is possible that time has not been kind to him because he was a populist who strove to achieve commercial success. However, to dismiss Denison for a presumed lack of artistic gravitas is to ignore the political and aesthetic importance of his work. The social issues he addressed, including transnational citizenship, rural poverty, women’s rights, and the environment, remain timely. In addition, he was a writer at the vanguard of the Little Theatre Movement in Canada, and one of the early innovators of literary genres such as radio drama and creative non-fiction. Within this context, the brief overview of Denison’s career that follows is intended not only to celebrate the birth of this prolific writer, but also to highlight some of the ways his work resonates today.
Gender and Empire: Performing Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Canada
Authors: Schweitzer Marlis , Johnson Stephen
Published: December 2020

This issue of Theatre Research in Canada responds to a challenging question posed by Jerry Wasserman at the 2010 meeting of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. During one of the sessions, Jerry commented on what he perceived as the relative absence of panels addressing Canadian theatre and performance history, especially pre-twentieth-century topics; he queried whether this was representative of recent developments in the field. My first thought was “No, of course not. Many of us are working on historical projects.” But I realized that Jerry had a point. At that time, it was quite rare to see an entire CATR panel of papers on pre-twentieth century material. In the days that followed, I approached several colleagues about developing a session for the following year’s conference with the express goal of demonstrating that pre-twentieth century performance scholarship was alive and well in Canada. After some discussion, we decided to build the panel around explorations of empire and masculinity in the pre-Confederation period; this topic struck us as both important and timely in light of Canada’s post-9/11 involvement in neo-imperialist projects.
Genre et empire: la masculinité en jeu dans le Canada du dix-neuvième siècle
Authors: Schweitzer Marlis , Johnson Stephen
Published: December 2020

Le présent numéro de Recherches théâtrales au Canada se veut une réponse à une question difficile posée par Jerry Wasserman lors du colloque de l’Association canadienne de la recherche théâtrale (ACRT) en 2010. Pendant une des séances, Jerry constatait que très peu de tables rondes portaient sur l’histoire du théâtre et de la performance au Canada, encore moins sur la période précédant le vingtième siècle, et il se demandait si cela reflétait la tendance actuelle dans le domaine. Ma première réaction fut : « Non, mais non, plusieurs d’entre nous travaillent sur des projets historiques ». Mais j’ai vu que Jerry n’avait pas tort. À ce moment-là, il était assez rare qu’une table ronde au colloque de l’ACRT porte entièrement sur des sujets antérieurs au vingtième siècle. Dans les jours qui ont suivi la séance, j’ai lancé à plusieurs collègues l’idée d’organiser une séance l’année suivante pour démontrer que la recherche sur le théâtre pré-vingtième siècle se porte bien au Canada. Après en avoir discuté un peu, nous avons décidé de monter une table ronde sur le thème de l’empire et de la masculinité avant la Confédération. Le sujet nous semblait à la fois important et opportun vu la participation du Canada aux projets néo-impérialistes après les attentats du 11 septembre.
Thea Fitz-James: Gendered Boundaries, Durational Performance, and the Art of Holding It In
Authors: Vivash Kelsy
Published: December 2020

On 20 October 2013, the LINK & PIN performance art series was inaugurated with an event titled FEMINIST FIBRES, which hosted four artists in their embodied explorations of the intersections of feminism(s), textiles, and performance. The initial piece of the day was a durational undertaking by Toronto artist Thea Fitz-Jame , who sat naked in the centre of the intimate performance space of Toronto’s hub14 creating a pair of men’s pants using a traditional method and pattern. Of particular interest to my own research on the aestheticization of bodily fluids within the contemporary performative frame was my corporeal response not only to the performance itself, but also to the way in which the performance collaborated with the space. More specifically, because the performance began at 8:00 a.m. and continued, uninterrupted, for six hours, I found myself overwhelmed simultaneously with a need to use the washroom, with embarrassment and trepidation at the prospect of disturbing the silence of the space in order to do so, and with an insistent curiosity as to whether Fitz-James would ever break the stoicism of her performance to make her own trip to the washroom.
Perception is Participation
Authors: Cherney Niomi Anna
Published: December 2020

This is an essay about vulnerability. This is a vulnerable essay. This is a piece of writing that is tied to a particular event, though arbitrarily so because it is me—my voice, my words, my perspective—that does so: this writing could be a record of anything. I could tether my memory, and by extension the written record of this memory, to any event that I could think of. In this essay I want to describe the experience of performance in terms of empathy and sympathy but I might not get there. I have not watched that TedTalk that went viral by scholar Brené Brown on the subject, but I hear it is good.
Towards Anti-Disciplinarity: the (messy) hermeneutics of self-violent performance art
Authors: Disman Adriana
Published: December 2020

They need broken glass. And lots of it. At first, I don’t give it much thought. Anyone who has organized performance art events knows that gathering strange materials is an integral part of the job. I add glass to the list, right after “bags of soil,” “wood to make a coffin,” and “a human-sized rolling cart.” It’s not until the middle of their performance that I begin to question how I will know.
“This Beer Festival Has a Theatre Problem!”: The Evolution and Rebranding of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival
Authors: Batchelor Brian
Published: December 2020

The Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival was founded in 1981 on the premise that a nonadjudicated, first-come first-served structure combined with bare minimum administrative and financial backing could offer artists and companies a degree of creative freedom not previously seen in Canada. This first festival sold about 7,500 tickets to its forty-five different productions (Brown 88). In 2011, the Edmonton Fringe celebrated its thirtieth anniversary; this iteration of the festival sold 104,142 tickets to its 140 indoor shows (Nicholls, “Fringe Director Exits”). Brian Batchelor examines and traces the first thirty years of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival through the concept of branding. In particular, he considers how the Edmonton Fringe differentiates itself from other forms of Edmontonian and Canadian theatre; how the Fringe functions as a festival within Edmonton’s arts ecology and urban imaginaries to influence the city’s civic brand, and to attract funding and sponsorships; and how artists within the festival brand themselves and their theatrical products. Batchelor then locates and describes the festival’s beer tents as spaces that illustrate how the Fringe itself has become a theatre ecology colonized by globalized capitalism, producing a creative and economic model that ultimately promotes not just a safer, commercial(ized), and non-innovative theatrical aesthetic but also in fact affirms a neoliberal, entrepreneurial form of theatre practice.
Théâtre et immigration: de la Loi sur le multiculturalisme jusqu’aux lieux de l’imaginaire national1
Authors: Meerzon Yana
Published: December 2020

Au Canada anglais, la Loi canadienne sur le multiculturalisme de 1988 a ouvert la voie à l’étude des pratiques théâtrales dites ethniques, multiculturelles et interculturelles.2 Au Québec, la Loi 101 de 1977, ou Charte de la langue française, qui statua des droits linguistiques fondamentaux de la population du Québec et devint « le fer de lance de la lutte pour la reconnaissance de la culture et de nation québécoises », circonscrit de semblables questions théoriques et artistiques (Knowles et Mündel XVI). Aujourd’hui, toutefois, avec le flux croissant d’immigrants tant au Canada anglais qu’au Québec, le public urbain tend aussi à se diversifier de façon croissante et les productions théâtrales des artistes immigrés « n’ont plus à viser le public blanc de classe moyenne fréquentant traditionnellement les grandes salles [. . .] ou les communautés strictement définies par leur culture ou leurs champs d’intérêts » (XVII). Le présent numéro thématique entend analyser, voire remettre en question, cette déclaration sous l’angle de la production culturelle, personnelle et artistique des praticiens du théâtre issus de l’immigration, mais faisant partie des communautés théâtrales canadienne et québécoise depuis plusieurs décennies.
Le temps de l’immigré dans Silences, Addolorata
Authors: Martinez Manuel Garcia
Published: December 2020

Works by immigrant writers have been analyzed on the basis of their linguistic aspects and their ways of defining identity. This article deals with another dimension of immigration, namely the temporal experiences of Italian immigrants in Canada dramatized by Marco Micone in Silences (2004), a second version of Gens du silence (1982), Addolorata (1984), and Déjà l’agonie (1988). Largely autobiographical in nature, Micone’s trilogy deals with the experiences of first-generation Italian immigrants following World War II. Left to face a difficult situation, these men and women from rural areas share certain experiences common to first-generation immigrants: the need to find continuity with their pre-immigration past; an often traumatic process; feeling that everyday life is marked by circular time; being stuck in an eternal present, as though time were suspended and perhaps even broken. Their situation modifies— and often inhibits—their temporal perspectives and their ability to project into the future. Such experiences can be read through the words, attitudes, and actions of characters in relation to their integration, and can be seen through a series of episodes from the past (memories the characters cannot avoid) that intrude into present-time, disrupting the chronological order of events. In this article, García Martínez analyzes problematic temporalities mainly through the scope of psychoanalytical studies and through the lens of psychotherapy.
Between Je and Moi: Staging the Heteroglossia of Immigrant Autobiography1
Authors: Meerzon Yana
Published: December 2020

In his work on discourse in the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin defines the aesthetic value of literature as arising from the dialogical interdependence of two equal and separate consciousness: that of the author and that of the character, each taking on a distinct spatial/temporal form (“Author” 87). The device of heteroglossia—a conflicted co-existence of distinct narrative voices within a unified literary utterance— makes this tension of author/character relationships visible. Characterized by “a diversity of social speech types” and “a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized,” heteroglossia defines the authorial utterance and the character`s speech as a territory for many voices to interfere and compete within (Bakthin, “Discourse” 262). By analogy, Meerzon argues, Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia and his view of the author/character interdependence can illuminate the complexity of an authorial utterance in the immigrant solo performance, in which the voice of the author, the voice of the performer, and the voice(s) of the character(s) are simultaneously diversified and intertwined. The product of a certain social and cultural environment, such performance reflects the “internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence” (263); yet through the performative gesture of telling one’s personal story on stage, a delicate balance between the performer’s identity and her artistic work is suggested. As her example, Meerzon turns to the work of Mani Soleymanlou, a Quebecois theatre artist of Iranian origin, Trois. Un spectacle de Mani Soleymanlou, which traces the ontological and fictional difference between the immigrant author, character, and performer on stage.
The Tongue Play: An Auto-Ethnography
Authors: Ashperger Cynthia
Published: December 2020

When I made the decision to marry a Canadian and move to Toronto, the thought that I would be working with an accent did cross my mind. “It is a bilingual country and also a country of immigrants. Surely they are used to it,” was my reasoning. My future husband, a veteran of the TV industry, assured me that it would “be fine.” This was wishful thinking on both of our parts. I didn’t realize how naïve I was to think that my career depended only on Canadians being used to immigrants. I didn’t factor in that I was not used to being one!
Le Tour du monde en 80 jours: Entretien avec Hugo Bélanger
Authors: de Viveiros Geneviève
Published: December 2020

L’œuvre de Jules Verne figure parmi les best-sellers du XIXe siècle. S’il est surtout connu aujourd’hui comme romancier, il faut rappeler que Jules Verne était passionné de la scène et que ses romans les plus célèbres furent aussi transformés en pièce de théâtre. Sur ce plan, Le Tour du monde en 80 jours figure parmi les adaptations théâtrales de Verne ayant obtenu le plus de succès à la fin du XIXe siècle.
Intention artistique et horizons d’attente en jeu: témoignage d’une expérience colingue
Authors: Beddows Joël
Published: December 2020

En 2005, Paul Lefebvre, directeur artistique de la biennale Zones théâtrales (ZT), Mary Vingoe, directrice artistique du Magnetic North Theatre Festival (MNTF), et moi-même avons décidé de créer une production à grand déploiement ayant comme sujet la ville d’Ottawa. Au fil des discussions, nous avons adopté l’idée d’un spectacle ambulatoire; une production où les publics seraient appelés à circuler entre différents lieux selon un horaire prédéterminé. Notre création voulait proposer aux spectateurs anglophones et francophones une expérience colingue puisque les pièces seraient jouées dans la langue originale du texte.1 Aussi, nous voulions proposer des récits qui remettraient en question les lectures officielles de lieux publics dans une ville où le protocole gouvernemental prend souvent une place prépondérante. C’est ainsi qu’est né le Projet Rideau Project.
Bilinguisme et création… to escape various limitations
Authors: Ladouceur Louise
Published: December 2020

Résidant dans l’Ouest canadien depuis plusieurs années, j’ai vu s’y développer une pratique et une esthétique théâtrales audacieuses, qui mettent à profit le bilinguisme des francophones en situation minoritaire. No more the source of an identity predicament, the bilingualism of Western French-Canadians has become a creative material to explore in order to not only reflect their daily reality on their stages but also to generate new practices and a new theatrical aesthetics. Chez Marc Prescott, par exemple, les nombreuses alternances de codes dans Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains servent à élaborer des jeux de mots, des équivoques et des quiproquos que seuls les spectateurs bilingues peuvent saisir, ce qui met en relief les avantages que procure leur bilinguisme. With Prescott, the code switching is not always reproducing reality, it is sometimes an innovative aesthetic device as in the « Bob Burns/Robert Brulé » monologue (in Mes shorts) in which the francophone and anglophone voices of the sole narrator compete to tell the same story but from a different point of view. Mettant leur bilinguisme à profit, les artistes franco-canadiens de l’Ouest présentent leurs spectacles avec surtitres anglais depuis 2007. English surtitles allow French-Canadian theatres west of Quebec to reach the large English-speaking audience that surrounds them while keeping intact the language and the visual aesthetics of their French or bilingual productions. In Western Canada, only Francophone theatres use surtitles, which is an indication of the asymmetrical power relations between Canada’s official languages.
Un blanc… Drawing a blank
Authors: Leroux Louis Patrick
Published: December 2020

A few years ago, in Victoria, at the CATR conference, colleagues drawing on Joseph Roach’s and Diana Taylor’s respective theoretical explorations into the archive and the repertoire offered their own “Canadian Performance Genealogies” using key words as triggers to recalibrate Canadian theatre history from its traditional grand narrative and usual temporality. They sought to address intercultural performances and to interrogate historical biases. It was exciting, rich, lively, playful, and allowed for an essential reconfiguration of the historical narratives of Canadian drama by a generation of highly theorized scholars, comfortable with their theatre history and the current theoretical trends emerging from America.1
“How’s Work?” Tackling the Issues of Academic Labour One Scholar at a Time
Authors: Shawyer Susanne
Published: December 2020

“How’s work?” I ask the theatre scholar who hesitates in front of my table. She surveys the cue cards arranged before me, each one filled with question prompts created by the American Society for Theatre Research’s Working Conditions Task Force with the goal of gathering information on the current reality of academic labour. We’ve set up a booth in a hotel hallway in Dallas at the annual ASTR conference, hoping to encourage organization members to address questions of working conditions, graduate training, and the academic marketplace. I’ve volunteered over six hours of my conference time to engage in dialogue about these issues with theatre artists, graduate students, and performance scholars from across North America and around the globe.
Thinking a Public University
Authors: Salisbury Jenny
Published: December 2020

On Friday, March 27, 2015, a headline for The Globe and Mail announced, “[b]inding arbitration means U of T strike is over, but issues are not resolved” (Chiose). By the time the article was published, I had been back in the classroom for a full day, exhausted from walking (dancing, marching, jumping, singing) on the picket line since March 2. As I write now, the strike, and the ideological and political discourse that surrounds it, remain an open question, especially as the results of binding arbitration are still over a month away. Whatever the result, the debate surrounding higher education, wealth, and the rise of neo-liberal corporate structures within our public institutions will linger.
Introduction: Taking Time
Authors: Schweitzer Marlis
Published: December 2020

One of the challenges (dare I say frustrations?) of academic publishing is how glacially slow it seems when compared with the immediacy of Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, Wordpress blogs, Instagram updates, and related digital media platforms. Although the TRIC/RTAC editorial team does its best to move promising articles through the peer review process quickly and efficiently, the time between submission and publication is often twelve months (or longer), depending on reviewers’ comments and authors’ commitments, not to mention the idiosyncrasies of the publication schedule and related considerations. Why publish then? For me, one of the most important features of academic publishing is the way it allows ideas to grow over time—to become richer, deeper, sharper through the processes of peer review and revision. Like wine (or beer, depending on your tastes), thought often improves through fermentation. As an academic journal, our goal is not to pump out streams of information into the perpetually hungry mediasphere but rather to publish compelling, rigorously researched, and persuasively argued articles that advance the discipline of theatre and performance studies. And this takes time. Time, of course, is many things: ticking, relentless, linear, non-linear, looping, transformative, destructive, political, precious. In the interests of time, then, I hope that you will grant us some of yours and indulge in a few hours of reading (or more).
Introduction: Prendre le temps
Authors: Schweitzer Marlis
Published: December 2020

L’un des défis (oserai-je parler de frustration?) du milieu de l’édition savante, c’est la lenteur glaciaire avec laquelle les choses se déroulent à côté de l’instantanéité des fils Twitter, des pages Facebook, des blogues WordPress et d’autres plateformes numériques. L’équipe de rédaction de RTaC fait de son mieux pour que les articles retenus franchissent rapidement les étapes de l’évaluation par les pairs. Or, il n’est pas rare qu’il s’écoule douze mois (ou plus) entre le moment où les articles sont soumis et celui où nous passons sous presse; tout cela dépend des commentaires des évaluateurs et de l’emploi du temps des auteurs, sans parler des particularités de l’horaire d’impression et d’autres facteurs du même genre. Dans ce cas, pourquoi publier? Pour moi, l’un des plus grands atouts de l’édition savante est qu’elle permet à des idées de croître avec le temps, de s’enrichir, de s’approfondir, de se préciser grâce au processus d’évaluation par les pairs et la révision. Comme le vin (ou la bière, si vous préférez), la réflexion s’améliore quand on laisse fermenter les idées. Notre objectif, en tant que revue savante, n’est pas de déverser des flux d’informations dans la médiasphère sans cesse assoiffée de nouveauté. Nous souhaitons plutôt publier des articles de recherche captivants, convaincants et rigoureusement documentés qui font progresser le domaine des études du théâtre et de la performance. Tout cela prend du temps. Le temps, bien sûr, est complexe : il est incessant, linéaire, non linéaire, circulaire, transformateur, destructeur, politique, précieux. Parlant de temps, donc, j’espère que vous nous accorderez un peu du vôtre et que vous passerez quelques heures (ou plus) à nous lire.