bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Suicide Girls Live!
Authors: Scott Shelley
Published: June 2023

From 13 to 15 January 2005, the SuicideGirls Live! burlesque show appeared as part of the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, Alberta. Straddling the boundaries of feminism, popular culture and, indeed, definitions of performance art and theatre, the SuicideGirls performance highlights the diversity of the festival phenomenon in Canada. Performing any kind of work at a festival invites a contextual analysis. As Jill Dolan writes in Presence and Desire, in reference to heterosexual and lesbian spaces, “[C]ontexts make the terms of the performative exchange very different, even if the images used or roles played are the same” (127). In a Canadian context, festivals range from the populist Fringes to the high art Festival de Théâtre des Amériques to the venerable Stratford and Shaw to the brand new Magnetic North. Women’s work has a place at all of these to varying degrees, seldom in a major or central capacity. On the other hand, works by women in these contexts take on the attributes of the festival and are read as enacting the mandate of the curator, whoever she or he may be.
Riding the Rough: Calgary Artists Reflect on the High Performance Rodeo
Authors: Foreman Kathleen
Published: June 2023

Michael Green is no one-trick pony. He is judge, arena director and one of the Calgary artists who risks the wild ride that is One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo. In its early years, the young emerging artists — Green among them — were “riding the rough” like “ponies that had only been saddled a few times … turned out into an open field … allowed to buck or run as they pleased” (Knight 25). The Rodeo as a venue for creative risk and exploration has forever altered the cultural landscape of Calgary’s artistic community, and after twenty years, local artists have stories to tell and opinions to express shaped by the impact of the Rodeo on personal and community experience.
Rodeo off to a Great Start
Authors: Dugan James
Published: June 2023

This raucous evening has become an annual event in the High Performance Rodeo. Calgary’s Ground Zero Theatre has been organizing it for the last six years. The premise guarantees fun: eight local theatre companies are invited to participate. Each is given a prop and a quotation and twenty-four hours to devise a ten-minute play employing both. The artistic director of Ground Zero, Ryan Luhning, picks promising new companies every year to join the line-up.
King o’ the Rock: Andy Jones Goes West
Authors: Johnston Dawn
Published: June 2023

“Andy Jones? Is that Mary Walsh’s brother?” These are the first words I heard from the couple behind me while standing in line outside the Big Secret Theatre for Andy Jones’ Calgary performance of his latest one-man show, King o’ Fun. The reference wasn’t far off — often, the crowd from CODCO and This Hour Has 22 Minutes are perceived as interchangeable by “mainlanders.” Andy Jones is actually the brother of Cathy Jones, who is the sidekick of Mary Walsh in many of CODCO’s comedic endeavours — emphasizing the way-less-than-six degrees of separation between most Newfoundlanders across Canada.
A Servant in Mecca: One Playwright’s Experience of New York
Authors: Gale Lorena
Published: June 2023

I am sitting in a bar on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea. I am being interviewed by a writer for Time magazine. It is the middle of the day and I am drinking wine. He has coffee. I am being interviewed because I have written a play about slavery in Montreal that is about to open in New York and Detroit and I have the dubious honour of being not only the most produced Canadian playwright in the United States that month but one of the first black Canadian playwrights to be commercially produced off-Broadway. The interview is not going well, nor are the rehearsals for the New York run.
Change the World, One Play at a Time: Teesri Duniya Theatre and the Aesthetics of Social Action
Authors: Salter Denis , Varma Rahul , Little Ted , Guzder Jaswant
Published: June 2023

Teesri Duniya1 is a Montréal-based company with a mandate to produce socially engaged theatre that reflects and strengthens cultural diversity as an essential characteristic of Canadian and Québécois society.The company’s activities include mainstage productions, a new-play/new-form development series, community-engaged projects and the publication of alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage - a quarterly magazine focusing on intersections among politics, cultural plurality, social activism and the stage.
Expanding the Margins of Our Narrative: A Review
Authors: Bickis Heidi
Published: June 2023

The anthologies and plays reviewed here offer some exciting possibilities as to how theatre can deal with tragic historical events, interrogate fixed identities, open up new narratives and challenge audiences to look at Canadian theatre and Canada in a different way. Although the plays vary in subject and style, all, in one way or another, are indicative of how Canadian theatre is being influenced by what Northrop Frye refers to as “a post-national consciousness,” a notion Damiano Pietropaolo uses in his preface to Where Is Here? The Drama of Immigration. In this new collection, Pietropaolo has anthologized twelve original radio dramas commissioned by CBC’s national radio drama program, Sunday Showcase. The plays featured tell a wealth of different stories on the theme of immigration, all of which draw attention to the way place informs the immigrant experience and identity. A Terrible Truth, a two-volume anthology of Holocaust drama compiled by Irene Watts, which includes a significant Canadian representation, raises questions about how, and even if, theatre should respond to a tragedy as incomprehensible as the Holocaust. Contextualized in Kertzer’s thorough introduction, the varying plays featured in these two volumes touch on many different aspects of the Holocaust and challenge the audience with questions that seem unanswerable. In The Plum Tree, Mitch Miyagawa confronts the past in this play about the effects of the forced internment on several generations of a Japanese-Canadian family. Lastly, in China Doll, Marjorie Chan uses the tradition of foot-binding to bring to life the story of a young girl caught in the social and political changes taking place in early-twentieth-century China.
A Genius of OurTheatre: In Praise of Paul Bettis (1940-2005)
Authors: Bush Steven , Bettis Paul
Published: June 2023

Way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Paul Bettis and I were among the many engaged in the sometimes joyful, sometimes excruciating process of making original Canadian Theatre in Toronto. (Later, Paul would describe that era — dismissively? or with respect? — as “spadework.”) From 1974, when he first sounded me about working together, Paul and I supported, questioned and challenged each other, shared ideas and opinions, sometimes celebrated and, very often, commiserated over some alcoholic beverage.
Please Dress Warmly and Wear Sensible Shoes
Authors:   Bluemouth Inc. Presents
Published: June 2023

An individual brings in a piece of raw material to the group and it gets ground through the collective mill. Two hours, two minutes, two months too late it emerges more or less transformed.
Theatre for Small Audiences
Authors: Harvey Dustin
Published: June 2023

I am standing inside a beat-up camping trailer from the 1950s. This morning, the unit was towed to a secret location on Gottingen Street in Halifax. The interior of the trailer has been modified at one end, with a seating rake, consisting of two short rows that will accommodate a total of eight people. The section takes up nearly half the space. It is where the audience will sit for the first and only performance of Cowboy Show — the second production in the Theatre for Small Audiences series. The floor is littered with peanut shells. I am outfitting the rear wall with an American fag, when a young actress pokes her head in and abruptly and asks, “Is this the secret play?”I tell her it is. “1 won’t be able to make it,”she says. “When will you be putting it on again?”She doesn’t believe me when 1 tell her that it is one night only. What do you mean, she insists. Only eight people will ever get to see it?”The reaction is a familiar one. Finally, she muses, sighs and concludes, “All that work, all for nothing.
The Power of Site-Unspecificity
Authors: Stedman Sam
Published: June 2023

In its narrowest, modernist definition, site-specificity would seem to imply that the artistic work has some integral connection to the location in which it is situated; that “to move the work is to destroy the work” (Serra 194; qtd. in Kaye 2). In a climate, however, in which such reductive thinking has been repeatedly challenged — that is, each and every work can be seen to have an integral connection to its venue insofar as it is received in its particular context – what can be said of site-specificity? Or, of particular interest here, what can be said of site-unspecificity or site-generic-ity? By this, I do not mean work in theatre venues like black boxes that strive for an unspecific quality, for to do so would be to accede to the inherited notion that the stage is an empty space (“Empty of what?” one might ask, with a whimsical smirk), waiting to be filled with the transformative magic of theatrical illusion. Rather, I am referring to theatrical situations in which a venue’s generic everydayness has equal or greater interpretive impact upon reception than the specific narrative or cultural baggage by which the venue is marked.1
Archetypes, Urbanites and Bus Rides: How the “Here“ Becomes the “There“ in Bluemouth Inc.’s American Standard
Authors: Zaiontz Keren
Published: June 2023

The spinning red-and-white pole outside Pat’s Barber Shop on D’Arcy Street in Toronto carries all the promise of a “clean cut“ — flat-top, military cut or shave with a straight-edge razor — fast and cheap. Inside Pat’s shop, there is more talcum powder than oxygen, and the mise en scène, consisting of yellowed walls, worn chairs and a hat rack, appears like a deteriorating illusion nesting among city hospitals, university buildings and trendy restaurants. It is precisely this incongruous setting of small-town coiffeur and modernist architecture that first attracted Bluemouth Inc., an interdisciplinary, site-specific theatre collective based in Toronto and New York City, to mount their March 2005 production, American Standard, in Pat’s Barber Shop. Unfortunately, the shop’s landlord did not share the collective’s enthusiasm for turning a men’s grooming business into a performance site and abruptly denied them the use of the store one week before the production was scheduled to open. “It’s not uncommon for us to lose a space at the last minute,“ says core member and composer, Richard Windeyer (Personal interview). Fortunately, Zero Gravity Circus, an east-end movie theatre turned circus rehearsal hall, was made available to the collective, and spectators were bused from the original D’Arcy Street location to a simulated version of Pat’s Barber Shop that consisted of a lone barber chair, multimedia and some masking tape.
Bubonic Tourist and Yukon Arts Centre Lay Some Yukon PIPE: Project History
Authors: Moschopedis Eric
Published: June 2023

During the summer of 2005, Calgary’s Bubonic Tourist was commissioned by Yukon Arts Centre executive director Chris Dray to workshop and facilitate a group of eight emerging artists in Whitehorse. The objective was to create community through performance by providing Yukon artists with tools for creating original site-specific performance and by curating a Yukon PIPE (Performance in Peculiar Environments) Festival.
Documenting the Creative Process of Kendra Fanconi: The Force behind Freds
Authors: Strilchuk Amy Lynn
Published: June 2023

In January 2004, I met Vancouver-based playwright and site-specific artist, Kendra Fanconi. At the time, I had a dramaturgy internship with the Arts Club Theatre during their new plays in progress series, ReACT. During January, resident dramaturg, Rachel Ditor, works with playwrights as they develop their scripts and stage public readings at the Granville Island Stage. Under Rachel’s guidance, I worked closely on the initial phases of Kendra’s site-specific piece, Other Freds. Rachel recommended my involvement with the piece due its unique nature and the scope of the process that would ensue.
A Car Bomb at Yonge-Dundas Square
Authors: Bennett Melanie
Published: June 2023

Opening in the spring of 2003, Yonge-Dundas Square has become Toronto’s Times Square, bombarding pedestrians with flashy LED screens that promote a lifestyle beyond means and boasting TO TIX, a last-minute discount ticket vendor. With attractions such as Toronto Eaton Centre and Hard Rock Cafe, the intersection of Yonge and Dundas is Toronto’s number one visitor destination (see “History”). This location is the ideal setting for a car bomb; at least, that’s what Montreal artists and founders of ATSA, Pierre Allard and Annie Roy — with the cooperation of the Theatre Centre, Saw Video and Galerie Saw Gallery — envisioned when they staged a hyper-realistic performance art scene at the square last June.
The Actor as Sound Cyborg: An Interview with Marie Brassard
Authors: Halferty J. Paul
Published: June 2023

In Marie Brassard’s most recent play, Peepshow, there is a scene that, in my view, gives insight into the nature and the spirit of her theatrical process and of the work she creates. In this scene, a young girl describes an experience she has had in school. Her teacher shows a flashcard on which a word is written, and she is to determine whether the word is best categorized as a “person” or an “animal.” The word she is shown is “Dad.” The little girl decides that person is too simple and obvious and that this must be a trick question. The less obvious answer must be the right answer. “Maybe the teacher knows something I don’t and she’s going to show it to me,” the little girl muses. “Maybe she’s going to open a door to a world I don’t even know exists. And at the end of the day, I’ll be a better person.” With this in mind, the little girl responds, “Animal.” Disappointedly, her teacher tells her that she is wrong, and relegates her to the side of classroom reserved for “not-so-clever ones.” “The next day at school I understood the game,” she tells us, “and from then on, when I was asked a question, I’d answer the obvious answer. And everyone was happy, except for me. Because deep inside I knew I was right. I knew there must be a door somewhere” (Brassard 3–4).1
Unplugging the Evil Twin, the Dismantler, and the Singer of Songs: A De-mediatization of Video Art
Authors: Firth-Eagland Alissa
Published: June 2023

In March 2005, I curated Feats, might., an evening of live performances, for Fado Performance Inc. The evening was presented by Fado and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. I approached artists who had performed extensively but only on video and only in their own productions. I asked them each to perform “unplugged” in front of a live audience for the first time. Daniel Cockburn, Brian Joseph Davis and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay developed a new live work for a physically present and captive crowd at the historic Great Hall Centre in Toronto.
The Blur Street Project: Media Can Take You Where You Want to Go!
Authors: Irwin, Kathleen , Aronson Arnold , Knowles Rachelle Viader
Published: June 2023

For a long time now, I have become increasingly discontent with the stage as a place for compelling and relevant theatre. More and more, I agree with the sentiment that such staged theatre is moribund. I read avidly about the innovators who belie this sentiment, and occasionally, when I travel, I see theatre that still raises neck hairs. Looking for a new direction, a new venue perhaps, I have allowed my discontent to lead me, as a scenographer, away from the stage. I now employ non-conventional methods, experiment site-specifically and use interactive installations and web-based games to expand my portfolio. More and more, I find, my work is collaborative and reliant on technology.
PARC and Me and Middle Age
Authors: Munday Jenny
Published: June 2023

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre (PARC). This is also the year I will be celebrating a birthday that makes me fifty-something. In North America, we euphemistically refer to someone like me as middle-aged, even though we know that fifty-something is only middle-aged if you’re planning to live a very long time.
Mina’s Song and the Inventing of Mina Benson Hubbard
Authors: Grace Sherrill
Published: June 2023

It is the 28th of June 2005, roughly 6:30 p.m. as we take our seats at tables set, with wine glasses, for a special dinner. The room is full of cheerful greetings, earnest debates, discussions, whispers and children’s laughter — in short, noise of a kind that always accompanies a community gathering on a celebratory occasion. The community that I have joined — indeed, been warmly welcomed by — is North West River, Labrador, familiarly known as North West. The gathering of which I am a part is a symposium on Labrador exploration. But the celebratory occasion? Ah well, that is the point and why we are all here, those of us from North West, Happy Valley and St John’s, and those of us from away — as Jar away as Vancouver in Canada, and from the United States, England and Ireland.
The Season for Speech: A Review of Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, Vols. 1, 2, and 3
Authors: Elliott Erin
Published: June 2023

Aboriginal Drama and Theatre, African-Canadian Theatre and Judith Thompson are the first three books in the Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English series from Playwrights Canada Press. Under general editor Ric Knowles, these three collections serve to “facilitate the teaching of Canadian drama and theatre in schools, colleges, and universities across the country for years to come” (iii).
Still Ringing: Sounds Collaborative
Authors: Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

In CTR 126, I began a series of three linked articles that consider aspects of the relationship between theatricality and performativity in the work of the Toronto / New York intermedia performance ensemble, Bluemouth Inc. The first article explored the impact of the unanticipated relocation of the company’s 2005 recreation of American Standard from Pat’s Barber Shop on Toronto’s D’Arcy Street to the cavernous rehearsal space of Zero Gravity Circus in the same city’s industrial East End. The second article (in CTR 127) profiled Bluemouth Inc’.s 2005 reimaging of the performance Lenz in the evocative (indeed, provocative)Ye Olde Carleton Arms Hotel in New York City and, in particular, that production’s complex negotiation between mediation and madness. This third essay focuses specifically on Bluemouth Inc’.s soundscape artist, Richard Windeyer, and queries the relationship between his sound installation work and his contributions to the company’s collective, site-specific productions.
Into the Woods: Excavated Journal Entries from a Tent East of Peterborough
Authors: Balint Sue
Published: June 2023

R. Murray Schafer’s Patria Cycle is a twelve-part series of musical dramas that represents over thirty years of development and production. During the summer of 2006, I joined a group of artists and researchers in developing a rural site, where Asterion, one part of that cycle, will eventually be staged. Our work camp involved projects ranging from sculpture and gardening to trailblazing and straw bale construction. Living and working on that site,focused on Schafer’s attention to both the natural and composed sound environments, led to the thoughts collected here.1
Shared Histories and Collective Stories
Authors: Bickis Heidi
Published: June 2023

The assorted collection of individual plays reviewed here covers a range of subjects and styles. Despite their many differences, however, there are two significant and overlapping themes that provide a framework with which to work. The past is one theme that plays a crucial role in many of these plays. Journeys are taken back into history and memories of the past haunt the present; both of these emphasize the way history shapes multiple generations. Revisiting the past is a means of making amends or is an attempt at reconciliation with past horrors in order to make some sense of the world or of oneself. A secondary theme, which is certainly connected to the first, has more to do with the plays’ style. Several of the plays tell of shared histories or a community story and make use of an ensemble method of storytelling and performance to bring these collective narratives to the stage. For all these plays, the significance of sound is apparent. The addition of music and song and the incorporation of a range of sound effects both add multiple layers of meaning to the text and action onstage.
Gestures of the Dancing Voice: Reloading the Can(n)on under the Influence of Dub
Authors: Durm-I Broox Klyde
Published: June 2023

This presentation is a distinctly Canadian-cast version of an adjustable, performable, multilayered discourse of text and image woven into a “polynarrative” on the mystique and technique of dubpoetry. As the host and narrator, I will put images of my own gestures “upfront” and central. I have worked hard to animate this piece, and I do hope you find it engaging. It is an attempt to actually mount a dubpoetry performance on the page, to give voice to the gestures represented here and perhaps to break new ground and crack old ceilings “Under the Influence of dub.”
“Us” versus “Them”: Performing Youth Identity through Spoken Word
Authors: Ingalls Rebecca
Published: June 2023

While the following article is based on Rebecca Ingalls’s research on teen literacy practices in the United States, it reflects many issues at stake in the Canadian context. Reading Ingalls’s work, I felt a great deal of affinity with her research, as much of what she documents here resonates with my own experience of working with young spoken-word artists in Vancouver and Edmonton. My research on the practices of spoken-word artists in Canada indicates that most contemporary spoken-word artists get their first taste of the art form early in life. Many young artists are exposed to spoken word at school, via spoken word / performance poetry / storytelling outreach programs like the “Poets in the Schools” initiatives run by the League of Canadian Poets and the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, which have grown in popularity in recent years. The sense that spoken word is an accessible medium even (especially) for students who are not typically engaged by page poetry is pervasive in spoken-word scenes, and socially conscious spoken-word artists/ activists often use the medium as a way to encourage youth from marginalized communities and / or “at risk youth” to raise their voices and share their experiences. What is increasingly significant about the accessibility of the spoken-word scene in small and large Canadian cities is the relative ease with which young people can now take their work from their high school Writers’ Craft or Language Arts classrooms to an open mic in a cafe, to a poetry slam, to an all-ages show, to being hooked for other cabaret shows and/or producing their own shows. The fact that most cities now have an established spoken-word scene with a range of minor-friendly venues makes it possible for young people to easily participate and to create their own niches.
Intermedial Theatre: ± Technology?
Authors: Darroch Michael
Published: June 2023

Marie Brassard’s innovative use of sound technologies to alter her onstage voice raises the stakes for considerations of theatrical mediality in our present situation. Working with sound artist Alexander MacSween in her most recent productions, including her ongoing Peepshow, Brassard has employed digital sound and altered voice “as a natural extension of the body” (“Peepshow”), transforming herself into the site of multiple voices, multiple identities. In the early the twentieth century, new optic technologies took centre stage in conceptual innovations with theatrical practice. Movements as different as futurism, Dadaism and Bauhaus each emphasized the importance of visuality and visual space over that of sonority and acoustic space, largely drowning out human speech along the way. Until well after World War II, innovations in acoustic technologies nearly always took the backseat in onstage performance. As Christopher Baugh has noted, early twentieth-century developments in lighting techniques and filmic projections were perceived by audience members as “real,” as part of the experience of the “live” – after all, light perceived was light itself – but to the ear of a public not yet accustomed to new techniques of listening, early incarnations of sound reproduction seemed mere “imitations” and distinctly artificial (203).
The Eyes of Heaven
Authors: Cooper Beverley
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Beverley Cooper. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the authors. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. For performance rights, please contact Suzanne DePoe at CTIAM, 483 Euclid Ave, Toronto ON M6G 2T1; telephone: (416) 944-0475.
Dance and Space at the New World Stage
Authors: Knowles Ric
Published: June 2023

New World Stage, International Performance. Harbourfront Centre, Toronto. January-June 2007

New World Stage is the latest reincarnation of what used to be the DuMaurier World Stage festival held at Harbourfront every other spring, alternating with the Theatre Festival of the Americas in Montreal. Ever since the withdrawal of tobacco funding, Harbourfront has been struggling to reinvent the festival. Two years ago, as the World Stage Festival: Flying Solo, it economized while maintaining thematic focus by featuring solo work. Now it returns as a kind of serial festival, featuring seventeen shows (including one double-header) spread over six months rather than the usual two or three weeks and linking up with the Harbourfront Festival’s HATCH : Emerging Performance Projects and with Toronto’s new Luminato interdisciplinary arts festival in June.
Performing the Construction of Queer Spaces
Authors: Halferty J. Paul
Published: June 2023

The gay bars and clubs that emerged in Toronto and Montreal in the early 1960s have provided spaces for the articulation and performance of various contemporary gay, lesbian and transgender identities and sexualities.1 These early gay bars, especially gay-owned spaces, were important sites for political organization (Kinsman 228),2 as markers for gay, lesbian and queer existence at the street level, and as the building blocks of queer neighbourhoods.3 And although, today, one is able to find a diverse array of establishments providing goods and services to queer communities, the bar, in particular, represents an important and sexually charged site around which socially and politically effective gay, lesbian and trans communities have been spatially organized, recognized and experienced by queers themselves and by the broader community.
The Once and Future Ship
Authors: Peters Helen
Published: June 2023

The Ship Inn, situated in the east end of St. John’s, was, from 1977 to 2003, a bastion of food for the stomach, mind and spirit of artists of every persuasion. Musicians, actors, writers, poets, filmmakers, painters, photographers and friends ate and drank and worked and talked there. For over a quarter of a century, writers wrote books, plays, poems, songs and film scripts seated at tables in the Ship. Often they launched the resulting works there. We who were there have recollections of afternoon poetry and fiction readings attended by appreciative audiences while children (many of whom have become artists of the second generation) played under tables.
Metropolitan Mimesis
Authors: Eaket Chris
Published: June 2023

Theatre practitioners have often had a rather paradoxical relationship with performance spaces. On one hand, we tend to assert that performances can (and do) occur everywhere; yet, on the other hand, theatre buildings are seen as a privileged site: an artistic home, a place for “serious” works and often a visible indicator that a theatrical company has come into its own professionally. It is perhaps ironic that, at the very historical moment that theatrical tropes seem to be everywhere — in the marketing of the urban as a performative identity or in the new “experience economy,” where “work is theatre and every business a stage” (Pine and Gilmour) — the number of viable, affordable spaces for actual theatre productions and rehearsals has dwindled rapidly.
Assuming the Whore Position: Theatrical Performance and Prostitution
Authors: Schweitzer Marlis
Published: June 2023

Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society explores the long-standing and still-lingering association between theatrical performance and prostitution. Although theatre historians have explored this subject at some length, as seen most prominently in Tracy C. Davis’s Actresses as Working Women, Faye E. Dudden’s Actresses and Audiences, and Katie N. Johnson’s Sisters in Sin, the transnational and transhistorical scope of this engaging book makes it an exciting addition to the field. Indeed, what is perhaps most notable about Actresses and Whores is its methodology. Rather than attempt to write a definitive history of the actress/whore dynamic — a near-impossible and highly problematic project — Pullen offers a series of thoroughly researched “case histories.” Beginning in the Restoration period and continuing to the late twentieth century, she examines key “nodal moments” when public perceptions of the actress/whore figure were in flux and “when a new performance engendered new terms within discourse” (5).
Telling an Old Story in a New Way: One Reed Theatre Ensemble Devises an Alternative Perspective on a Conflicted History
Authors: Cleveland Janne
Published: June 2023

In the autumn of 2006 I was fortunate to be in the audience at Studio Léonard Beaulne at the University of Ottawa for a performance of Nor the Cavaliers Who Come With Us by One Reed Theatre Ensemble, winner of the Spotlight Award for outstanding achievement at Toronto’s Summer Works Festival earlier that year. I returned a second time, and then in the spring of 2007 attended a third performance, this time at the University of Toronto’s Glen Morris Studio Theatre. With each viewing I was struck by how notions of history inflect the piece, at the level of both form and contents: In other words, what gets told, by whom and how. What interested me most was how the piece offers an alternative perspective of a particular historical narrative while self-consciously experimenting with modes of performance. Under the direction of Daniel Mroz, assistant professor of Theatre at the University of Ottawa, this work is exemplary of the power of devised theatre to expand the theatrical experience for both actor and audience.
Dramaturging the Process
Authors: Nolan Yvette
Published: June 2023

In 2001, Michelle Olson and Lisa C. Ravensbergen founded the collective Cheyikwe Performance in Vancouver. Michelle and Lisa’s vision was to create new work from a distinctly female, First Nations perspective, integrating dance, theatre, storytelling, song and multimedia. They wanted “to develop an interdisciplinary language rooted in distinct art forms and in our First Nations cultures” (Cheyikwe). Furthermore, one of the guiding principles states that the work be “an organic, collaborative process with value equal to that of the finished work.”
Number Eleven, in Particular
Authors: Wells Ker , Grimes Varrick , Rucker Elizabeth , McLean Alex , Wells Jane
Published: June 2023

Ker Wells

In 1997 I left Primus, the theatre company I had co-founded eight years before, and with which I began to make theatre (“devising” was a term I had yet to encounter). I moved from Winnipeg, where Primus was based, to Toronto, with plans to continue making my own work, and spent a difficult year wondering if I had walked away from my true calling.
Icaria
Authors: Grimes Varrick , McLean Alex , Rucker Elizabeth , Wells Jane , Wells Ker
Published: June 2023

Production History

The first version of Icaria premiered in the turret room of the Khyber Arts Centre in Halifax from November 23 to 29, 1998. Icaria was created and performed by Varrick Grimes (as Pat), Sondra Haglund (Mother), Alex McLean (Thomas), and Elizabeth Rucker (Daphne), under the direction of Ker Wells.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

A good deal of dramaturgy is focused on content. A discussion of whether or not a production is successful will often revolve around the quality of the play: whether the premise, themes or characters are credible; or perhaps whether the story was worth the effort of production. If the focus shifts to the production, there may be conversation about the casting, acting, directing, or design. On rare occasions, serious consideration may be given to the program for the production or perhaps to how the show was promoted to the public. All of these are very good points of discussion about any performance in the theatre; however, there is rarely — if ever — any discussion about form: Why did this performance begin with a play? Or, why did the performers play characters? Why did a performance happen in a theatre, as opposed to some other place? Why perform for a live audience? All are possible questions that seem rarely asked, perhaps because they are considered beside the point… . But why? If we can agree that most theatre productions, on one level or another, are manifestations of the dreams of those who create them, and that, therefore, theatre is a space of public dreaming, it might be a really good idea to consider why our “dreams” assume the form they do.
MoMo on the Edge: Calgary and Mixed Ability Dance Theatre1
Authors: Johnston Kirsty
Published: June 2023

Calgary's MoMo Mixed Ability Dance Theatre imagines a particular role for itself within the city. The company takes its name from the eponymous heroine of Michael Ende's children's novel, Momo. She is a young girl with a gift for listening who lives in the ruin of an amphitheatre at the edge of a city. Momo understands reality from an unusual perspective and sense of time. This affords her a strength that she uses to rescue the city from the men in grey suits who are bent on overtaking it. Her struggle against convention and her commitment to her place and time suggest also MoMo Mixed Ability Dance Theatre's aim of challenging Calgary audiences and unsettling a city best known for its recent economic growth and conservatism. MoMo's artistic director, Pamela Boyd, has described the company as “a model to the rest of society, of a truly just and diverse community” (“Your Face Here”). The kind of community that MoMo models builds upon rather than obliterates diversity: “We as a company are artists by using and exploring differences in order to create” (Boyd; qtd. in Campbell 46).
Fifty Years of Walterdale
Authors: Sharplin Scott
Published: June 2023

The rest of the cast seemed less incongruous: the pedantic Gloucester was a retired English teacher; warlike Goneril, a security guard at a local conference centre; and dependable Kent, a rural doctor who drove two hours both ways for each rehearsal. Then there were the cast members who identified themselves as actors, even if they didn't always make a living doing it: Edmund had trained in classical theatre at Dalhousie, and Cordelia was an experienced bilingual actress whose perennial work with L'UniThéâtre seemed somehow appropriate, considering that the character spends most of the play banished to France.
Translating Alberta
Authors: Ouchi Mieko
Published: June 2023

I first met the remarkable Toyoshi (Yoshi) Yoshihara in Calgary in 2003, as my first play The Red Priest (Eight Ways to Say Goodbye) was debuting at Alberta Theatre Project's playRites Festival. Born and raised in Tokyo, Yoshihara formally studied Russian language and literature at Waseda University while informally getting involved in theatre after hours in a student club. After a successful career in business, Yoshihara returned to his first love, theatre, and has become Japan's foremost translator of Canadian work. He has translated an astonishing list of Canuck playwrights, from Anne Chislett to Daniel McIvor. Even more interestingly, he has translated the plays of many Albertan playwrights, including John Murrell, Sharon Pollock, Frank Moher and, in recent years, myself. Yoshihara received an honorary doctorate (D. Litt.) from McMaster University in recognition of his introducing Canadian theatre to Japan, and last year, the Playwrights Guild of Canada honoured him with a lifetime membership to recognize his contribution to Canadian playwriting. I spoke with Yoshi from the Banff playRites Colony about his work as a translator and his long-standing connections with Alberta.
Edmonton Theatre Practitioners Give Voice to the Less Heard: A Report on Edmonton as Cultural Capital of Canada 2007
Authors: Grignard Christopher
Published: June 2023

The federal government created Cultural Capitals of Canada in 2002. According to its Web site, the national program was created to “recognize and support Canadian municipalities for special activities that harness the many benefits of arts and culture in community life.” Each year, Canadian municipalities compete to be the nation's Cultural Capital; there are three categories, determined by population, for which they can apply. In 2007, Edmonton was chosen as Cultural Capital in the category of population over 125,000. Since the program's inception, cities awarded Cultural Capital status in this category have included Vancouver, Regina, Toronto and Saskatoon. Being named Cultural Capital comes with the challenging task of fulfilling a long list of objectives devised in response to the program's specific criteria related to arts and culture. The city that receives the award has to create a number of events to promote and celebrate the arts and to generate funding opportunities that fulfil one of the program's primary goals: to integrate arts and culture into community planning.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

It Is By Performing That We Think

Hegel remarks somewhere that “It is by naming that we think”; postmarxism would reply to this that “In naming, we construct a social formation which is eminently re-cognisable; and, in this re-cognisability there lies a fundamental ‘identity principle’ which is inimical to thinking as such: naming is the contradiction of thought”. This principle not only “identifies” the world (as phenomenal Object), but also “identifies” its thinker (as its stable and authoritative subject). Thomas Docherty
A Review of Ironic to Ironic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars
Authors: Wark Jayne
Published: June 2023

The literature on performance art in Canada is finally developing into something that looks like the beginning of a critical mass.1 One notable recent contribution to this field was Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Canadian Women Performance Artists (2004), co-edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, both of whom have highly regarded reputations as performance artists, teachers and generators of contemporary arts culture in Canada. Mars herself is now the much-deserving subject of Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars (2008). This anthology was published by Fado Performance Inc., an artist-run centre in Toronto devoted to the support of performance art activities, and was edited by its founder and former artistic director, Paul Couillard. Couillard intended this as the second in what he conceived over ten years ago as an annual publication series called Canadian Performance Art Legends but which, so far, has only resulted in one other publication.2 Couillard’s original optimism may have derived from the frenetically paced model of exhibition catalogues, which, in Canada, has remained the principle form of publications on contemporary art and artists. As Couillard discovered, however, the process of publishing a standalone book, whether a single- authored monograph or an edited anthology, is a much more complex and elaborate project, typically undertaken without institutional staff supports and thus relying on do-it-yourself initiatives.
Where Puppets Collide: Tradition and Innovation in Manigan

S

es, Festival international des arts de la marionnette
Authors: Fournier Katharine
Published: June 2023

ManiganSes, a biennial, week-long puppet festival in Saguenay, Quebec, seeks to foster an appreciation for puppet arts — a broad theatrical tradition. With ten editions to its credit, it balances the passionate commitment to the art apparent in its mandate with the realities of sustaining a festival in Canada. It is overseen by a board of directors, though programming is entirely in the hands of the festival director. Denise Lavoie, general director for the past seven years, imagines a festival that encourages puppet arts but is also interested in what ManiganSes has to offer to the local community; festivals have enormous potential as educational centres, and ManiganSes is no exception. “This great festival is about the living art of the marionette,” says Lavoie. “It is fertile soil for traditions and ancient craft, for imagination and creativity, for assertions and reinventions” (ManiganSes 5).
The Corner
Authors: Maghanoy Jason
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Jason Maghanoy. This script is protected under the Copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For performance rights, please contact Rena Zimmerman, Great North Artists Management Inc, Toronto, Ontario, M5R 1V9. CANADA. 1-416-925-2051 < info@gnaminc.com >
Creating Artful Dialogues: David Diamond’s Theatre for Living
Authors: Rollie Emily
Published: June 2023

Written by David Diamond, artistic director of Vancouver-based Headlines Theatre, Theatre for Living articulates Diamond’s philosophy of creating community-based, forum theatre. Influenced significantly by Theatre of the Oppressed pioneer Augusto Boal, Diamond recognizes the need to develop the language of Theatre of the Oppressed beyond the strict designations of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Acknowledging the diversity of the communities in which he works, Diamond combines systems theory and theatre as a way to “understand [his] own evolving work better” and to “stimulate discussion about the central role that storytelling and art play in creating and living in healthy communities” (23). Part resource book, part memoir and part theoretical exploration, Theatre for Living eloquently articulates Diamond’s modification of Boal’s techniques and contributes both to the scholarly and the practical development of Theatre of the Oppressed. Through straightforward writing and illustrative examples, Diamond’s text offers theatre scholars and practitioners, or anyone interested in theatre’s potential for social change, a new perspective on Boal-based techniques.
Women’s Auto/biographical Theatre: Affirmation, Preservation and Intercultural Communication
Authors: Couture Selena
Published: June 2023

Auto/biography has gained new respect through theory written by feminist scholars. People have produced autobiographies for many years, but they have generally been considered either instructive, as when great leaders explain how they became who they are, or merely the product of a self-absorbed person. As Sherrill Grace explains in her introduction to Theatre and AutoBiography, “Until fairly recently, the anti-personal bias of modernism dismissed the auto/biographical as self-indulgent, effeminate, and thus as a failure of art itself” (“Theatre” 20). By focusing on ideas of gender oppression as well as on the lives of women, feminist theatre theory and practice have participated in the societal discourse that has encouraged women to write their own work. This increasingly positive atmosphere has had results. There has been a 23% increase in women playwrights being produced in Canada in the twenty years since Fraticelli’s report on the status of women in Canadian theatre (Burton 21). Auto/biographical theatre is a natural outcome of this work. Women feel stronger in their lives; they are aware that their voices matter (and that they will be listened to carefully) and therefore are compelled to present themselves:

[T]he autobiographical voice and eye/l are available to minorities and to groups, such as women, who have been excluded from the dominant discourse and whose stories have been dismissed as worthless … [A] desire for agency, voice, visibility, and subjectivity has surfaced, clamouring for attention and seeking ways to create meaningful identity .. . While this predilection for AutoBiography no doubt satisfies a basic voyeuristic impulse (and does well in the marketplace), it also represents a crucial site for inscribing and preserving cultural memory. (Grace, “Theatre” 14-5)
Cultural Diversity in Play
Authors: Barlizo Marie-Leofeli R.
Published: June 2023

Once upon a time, it was almost impossible for a person of colour to get produced on Canada’s main stages. After all, it was only a few years ago (2006) when Djanet Sears made history at the Stratford Festival. Her play Harlem Duet was not only the first Black work produced in Stratford’s fifty-four-year history; it was also the first play directed by a Black woman (Sears herself) and the first all-Black cast. I, too, understand what it means to be the first of firsts. In 2002, I was the first member of a visible minority to graduate from the National Theatre School’s (NTS) Playwriting Program – a program that has been in existence since 1982.
Multi/Inter-cultural Collective: The MT Space’s The Last Fifteen Seconds
Authors: Chang Dongshin
Published: June 2023

The Last Fifteen Seconds by the MT (Multicultural Theatre) Space, which premiered in October 2008 as a “collective creation-in-progress” (Poster),1 imagines and dramatizes the possible dialogues and confrontations between Moustapha Akkad (1930–2005), a Syrian-American film-maker, and Rawad Jassem Mohammed Abed (1982–2005), a suicide bomber, as they meet at and revisit each other’s lives after their fatal encounter in November 2005. In its process of creation and stage presentation, The Last Fifteen Seconds continues the collective working method and movement-based style that have characterized the works of MT Space under the leadership of its artistic director Majdi Bou-Matar. Its scenes are episodic and non-linear in structure, often presented as filmic montages, with flashbacks, slow motions and close-ups that appear to have taken inspiration from and paid tribute to Akkad’s career.