bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Piece of String and a Little Imagination: An Interview with Chris Wheeler
Authors: McDonald Gavin
Published: June 2023

When I started working at the Stratford Festival in 2003, one of the blessings of the organization that was pointed out to me early on was that we had our own MacGyver. Chris Wheeler (a.k.a. “Wheeler” or “Wheels”) held and still holds the singular position of Electronics Technologist. In this capacity, he is the go-to man when the director, the set designer or lighting designer wants something magical to happen onstage that requires some kind of electrical wizardry. He is also an in-house software programmer. Our lighting inventory is filled with “Wheeler” strobe lights, “Wheeler Brains” for remote dimmers and effects and scores of random lighting toys, all with a “Wheels” or “Wheeler” prefix, unique creations that he’s been building for decades. As an assistant lighting designer, one of my primary responsibilities was to keep Wheeler in the loop for what tricks each show needs: how many dimmable lanterns in each show? how long are they on for? how many lighting effects are built into the set? does the radio light up? how many channels of DMX control is the monkey puppet going to need? and when is everything needed by? Most of that work happens in his shop in the Festival Theatre complex, where I sat down with Chris on a snow-covered January day in Stratford to have a chat.
The Canadian Opera Company’s Wozzeck Fourteen Years Later
Authors: Feheley David
Published: June 2023

Thinking about the impact of new technology on production values, I thought it would be interesting to see the particular opportunities and challenges that these new tools provide. For the most part it is the larger, more affluent companies that are able to make use of the latest and greatest gizmos. When I contacted David Feheley, technical director of the Canadian Opera Company, he offered a perfect case study. The Opera was planning to remount its own 1992 production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Here, Dave considers how certain staging effects were translated into 2006. —JS
Return of the Cabinet of Curiosities: A Tour of the Niagara Falls Museum
Authors: Johnson Stephen
Published: June 2023

I have a vivid recollection of my first visit to a “real” museum – the Royal Ontario Museum – when I was somewhere around ten years old. I was awestruck at the sight of glass-cased stuffed leopards, open-casketed mummies, massive Asian stone carvings and towering dinosaur skeletons in (to my eyes) cavernous halls. Well, of course. It was my first experience of the sublime. Three impressions stand out now, however, with the passage of time and the changes we have all seen in museum culture. The first is that, as I remember, we touched the bones of the dinosaur, clambered over the Asian stone statuary, roamed freely among and between the exhibits in what seems now either curatorial sacrilege or the roots of “please touch” exhibits. I may misremember, but I have it in my head that a large part of my wonder was predicated on being able to use my sense of touch in a profligate manner throughout the museum. I recollect, as well, being overwhelmed by the number of objects on display, in a disordered chaos of materiality – a Noah’s ark of artefacts. No doubt there was a structure, room by room, and there were descriptive labels; but my child’s-eye view received it otherwise. There was, finally, a deep sense of wonder at the age of things – and a knowledge that these “things” were indeed “old,” reinforced and given credence by the fact that they were covered with a layer of dust. They must have been of great age (I thought) because they had been in this ancient building for so long, unmoved and unchanging. I had, then, at the age of ten, in every respect confused the setting with the artefact. This is evidence of my own naivete, though I suspect the error is entirely normal.
One Little Goat’s Ritter, Dene, Voss
Authors: Kiebuzinska Christine
Published: June 2023

On a brief visit to Toronto, I had the pleasure of attending the English-language premiere of Thomas Bernhard’s Ritter, Dene, Voss, directed by Adam Seelig and presented by his One Little Goat company. I came to the performance somewhat sceptical about the ability of anyone outside of Austria and Germany to direct Bernhard, but Seelig’s production impressed and delighted me from the first. Bernhard wrote the text in 1984 as a tribute to “three intelligent actors.” The play is also about Bernhard’s ongoing reflections on Paul Wittgenstein’s madness (previously explored in his novel Wittgenstein’s Neffe [1982]) and his continuing fascination with the Wittgensteins’ reclusiveness, particularly Ludwig’s obsessive revising of his writings, his general misanthropy and his “Germanophobia,” a trait exploited by Bernhard in all his texts as a continuous diatribe against Austria, a nation “of six and a half million idiots living in a country rotting away . . .”
Dispelling the Myth of Equality: A Report on the Status of Women in Canadian Theatre
Authors: Burton Rebecca
Published: June 2023

In 2003, the Women’s Caucus of the Playwrights Guild of Canada partnered with Nightwood Theatre to support a new study on the status of women in Canadian theatre. The discouraging findings of preliminary investigations, the passionate responses encountered at community events, the added involvement of organizations like the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) and the support of the Canada Council for the Arts led to the launch, in the following year, of Equity in Canadian Theatre: The Women’s Initiative. Modelling its efforts on Rina Fraticelli’s landmark report, “The Status of Women in the Canadian Theatre” (1982), the Initiative developed a two-fold mandate: to assess the status of women in Canadian theatre and to create social action plans to help eliminate remaining obstacles. To gather the necessary information, in the summer of 2005, the Initiative sent a survey on employment and production practices to Canadian theatres, the results of which form the backbone of the research study, posted on line in the final report, “Adding It Up: The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre” (2006).1
Tributes of Another Order
Authors: Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

Between 2005 and 2006, I had the privilege of participating in the organizing committee for what ultimately became the Canadian Women Playmakers: Triumphs and Tribulations (CWP) conference (held 25—7 May 2006 at the University of Toronto). My credentials for the position no doubt included my (equally privileged) position on faculty at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama (U of T) and my experience co-chairing a conference on Atlantic Canadian Theatre the year before. However, I also knew and, in various capacities, had worked with many of the others on the organizing committee, and from the outset, I felt that my contributions were not merely welcome but sought out, carefully considered and, when helpful, acted upon. I was also one of only two men on the eleven-member committee1 – a significant factor on a number of levels and the position from which I offer the following observations.
Down In Adoration Falling
Authors: Murphy Colleen
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Colleen Murphy. 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 Michael Petrasek, Kensington Literary Representation, 54 Wolseley Street, Toronto, ON M5T 1A5; phone: (416) 979—0187; e-mail: kensingtonlit@rogers.com
Building a Shared Legacy: Exploring the Roots of Lesbian Drama in Canada
Authors: Schweitzer Marlis
Published: June 2023

Rosalind Kerr’s volume of eleven ground-breaking Canadian plays by lesbian or queer-identified playwrights is a long-overdue contribution to theatre studies in Canada as well as to the broader world of LGBTQ studies. Although collections such as Don Shewey’s Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays (Grove Press, 1988), Eric Lane and Nina Shengold’s The Actor’s Book of Gay and Lesbian Plays (Penguin, 1995) and Ben Hodges’s Forbidden Acts: Pioneering Gay and Lesbian Plays of the 20th Century (Applause, 2003) have already alerted readers to some of the most important plays by British and American authors, works by gay and lesbian Canadians have been largely overlooked. With Kerr’s Lesbian Plays: Coming of Age in Canada and Sky Gilbert’s complementary volume, Perfectly Abnormal: Seven Gay Plays (2006), Playwrights Canada Press has clearly set out to give queer Canadian playwrights the profile they deserve.
Required Reading
Authors: Renders Kim
Published: June 2023

Rebecca Burton informs us in the introductory paragraph that her report comes twenty-five years after the ratification of the United Nation’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, thirty-six years after the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada and almost twenty-five years after the release of Rina Fraticelli’s germinal report, “The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre” (1982). After a quarter of a century, one might be tempted to question the necessity of yet another report on the status of women in theatre in Canada. Surely, the situation has changed for the better. Burton herself states, “Many people still argue that gender parity has been achieved in the Canadian theatre industry and that women currently enjoy the same opportunities as men” (95). Echoing that sentiment, a male colleague and fellow theatre artist made the comment to me, “Is there even a point to this? Haven’t the gals pretty much taken over????”
Children as Drama-Makers
Authors: Booth David
Published: June 2023

“Why don’t you make up a play about your dreams?” their teacher said. “Yes! Yes!” the kids cried. Everybody except Eddy. The kids fixed the curtain for the theatre. “I am the DREAM MASTER!“ said Federico. “Get a costume … the play is beginning!” “DREAM MASTER! Ha, Ha!” laughed Eddy. Eddy laughed at Michaela and Shawn and Trisha. “You look stupid in those costumes.” Federico called, “Anyone who wants to dream, go inside the curtain!” “Come on, Eddy,” said Shamika. —Eddy’s Dream by Miriam Cohen
This Must Be a Punchline: Directing a Theatre Production for 230 Young People with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Learning Disabilities, Non-verbal Learning Disorders and Asperger Syndrome
Authors: Hanson Nicholas
Published: June 2023

For endless hours, I endure the cacophony of piercing young voices, shuffling metal chairs and shrieking speaker feedback. I accept that one of the microphones mysteriously shattered, that an important light shines in the wrong direction and that the knob fell off the main entrance door. I tolerate the countless antics: Louis now wants to be a firefighter and not a police officer, Becky is being picked up hours too early by her parents and six-year-old Matthew declares that he will not perform if Christopher looks at him. My composure erodes when I discover Roxanne, one of the principal characters, loudly weeping in the corner, proclaiming that she never would have agreed to all this if it meant not getting to see her “boyfriend” for the session’s closing days. Appreciative of the fact that one instant of rest is one instant too long for anything not inscribed in the rigid schedule for the day, I walk outside into the midday sun. I lean over a rustic bridge’s wooden railing, letting a cool breeze from the lake sooth my exhausted body. Thin birch trees sway restlessly back and forth. The outdoor scenery — so stereotypical of northern Ontario in the warm months — provides a moment of calm solace. My friends are lounging on patios, playing softball or tramping Europe. I, on the other hand, have spent virtually every minute in the past month at a summer camp, frantically directing a theatre production, which is less than two days from being presented to a packed audience. The experience begins to sound like the set-up for a joke when I contemplate the fact that the cast includes the entire camp community of 230 young people. In case the situation is not overwhelmingly comic enough, the punchline comes when I appreciate that this is not any summer camp, but Camp Kodiak, a place that features a program for young people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Learning Disabilities, Non-verbal Learning Disorders and Asperger Syndrome.
Three Worlds, Three Scales
Authors: Zimmer Jacob
Published: June 2023

The theatre is a special place when it comes to scale. Traditionally and basically, it is of a “human scale,” more or less the same size as us: the literal stage objects have to be visible to our unassisted eyes and they have to, more or less, fit on the stage. The performers are more or less the same size as us. Due to these traditional and basic parameters, many of the great moments in the art form have come through pushing or breaking the scale of the event. Vast outdoor spectacles, living-room plays, Opera houses and black boxes have always pushed or pulled scale towards the extremes.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

The review section in this issue features five exciting new books by scholars working in Canada or working on the subject of Canadian performance. The books represent some of the most important recent developments in the international field of theatre and performance studies and attest to the rich and vibrant conversations about performance that are currently taking place in Canada. In order to showcase emerging voices within the discipline, each book selected for review is either written by a junior scholar (pre-tenure faculty) or is based on an author’s PhD dissertation. The reviewers, correspondingly, are a group of emerging scholars, who have lent their own expertise in specific areas of performance scholarship to contextualize these new books and reflect on their contributions to the field.
Crossing the River: Zuppa Circus’s Penny Dreadful
Authors: Barker Roberta
Published: June 2023

In a kitchen in Victorian Halifax, young gentleman Harold Linden (Stewart Legere) enchants scullery maid Addy (Susan Leblanc-Crawford) with an account of his dangerous voyage across a mighty African river. Dour groundskeeper Charlie (Ben Stone) objects to ‘Harry’s’ use of the kitchen table as a bridge: “We have to eat off that!” But Addy ignores her companion’s complaints, gazing with adventure-starved eyes as Harry transforms the site of her everyday labours into the territory of her dreams. At the end of her journey through Zuppa Circus Theatre’s Penny Dreadful (2007), directed by Alex McLean, she will remember this moment. She will contemplate “the stuff in [people] that makes them wanna cross the river,” and her eyes will light up for the last time as she herself lowers the table, now her path to the gallows.
Fear and Bon-Bons: Devising Pinocchio with The Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Authors: Porteous Vanessa
Published: June 2023

In December 1999 a group of old friends retreated to a ranch outside Calgary to sit out the millennial New Year. They vowed that if the world didn’t end in aY2K meltdown, they would call themselves The Old Trout Puppet Workshop and create a puppet show. Three months of carving, philosophizing, and mucking out of stables led to an ineffable production called The Unlikely Birth of Istvan. It premiered in a barn for an audience of Hutterites and ranch hands before transferring to One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo, where it met with acclaim. It then embarked on an extensive tour.
Devising Quality: A Playwright’s Perspective A Director’s Perspective
Authors: Avila Elaine , Weiss Kathleen
Published: June 2023

A playwright devises work in her room alone, shares it with a company/close collaborator, and then lets the world, space, production and visions of the directors, producers and actors affect her. Although I imagine my plays being done in a theatre, they almost never are. Innovative companies and directors, including Kathleen Weiss and Amiel Gladstone, have produced most of my work.
Please Return to the Deer Head Café: How Kelowna’s Community was Lost and Found
Authors: Bennett Melanie
Published: June 2023

“Most of the work I’m doing currently comes, I think, from the realization that we’re living in a state of emergency … I feel that more than ever we must step outside the strictly art arena. It is not enough to make art” (Guillermo Gomez-Pena in Gablik 75).
Creation Explosion in Central Alberta
Authors: Adams Lynda
Published: June 2023

2005 sometime, somewhere in Alberta — two artists (Mieko Ouchi and myself) were discussing the fact that a creation explosion was taking place — specifically, in a smallish city in central Alberta, where art galleries displaying exceptional art by local artists were springing up all over, new theatre companies were creating edgy work, local film artists were making award-winning films and documentaries, numerous writers were writing in many forms and getting published and progressive musicians were composing brave and unique new music for distribution. Where exactly was this creation explosion happening? In red-neck Red Deer, where the population is reputedly ultra-conservative. In Red Deer, conveniently situated on the corridor (QE II highway), half-way between Edmonton and Calgary, artists were actively creating new work and weaving their patterns into the tapestry of the Alberta arts community.
Interview with Playwright Ron Chambers1
Authors: Scott Shelley
Published: June 2023

Ron Chambers and I are colleagues in the Department of Theatre and Dramatic Arts at the University of Lethbridge. Ron's most recent play, The Knowing Bird, was produced at the Alberta Theatre Projects’ Pan-Canadian playRites Festival in February 2007. The Knowing Bird was a finalist in the 2005 Herman Voaden Playwrighting Competition and had been developed during a residency at the Banff playRites Colony in 2006, the latest in a number of residencies at Banff. I sat down to interview Ron in the fall of 2007, to ask about his experiences with and perceptions of various theatres, of the play-development and dramaturgical process and of being a playwright in Alberta. The following is an abridged and edited transcription of our conversation.
Intimate Interventions: An Interview with Diane Borsato
Authors: Halferty J. Paul
Published: June 2023

J. Paul Halferty: Speaking in an interview about your (non-)performance piece I Didn’t Squeeze the Cat, in which you do not squeeze the cat, you said, “I was thinking about Yves Klein’s famous ‘Leap Into the Void’ and that not leaping into the void seemed as much a gesture” (Osbourne). Would you talk about feats and risk in your works, and about their relationships to performance art history?
Living the Image
Authors: Tuer Dot , Liliefeldt Louise
Published: June 2023

Dot Tuer: To begin this conversation about your work as a performance artist, I would like to ask about your approach to the art form. Are your performances scripted? Or do you react to the environment around you as you are performing? Is there an iconic performance that has become a signature style for you?
Nesting Instinct: Re-imagining Alutiiq and Domesticity in Tanya Lukin-Linklater’s Performance Work
Authors: Frey Heather Fitzsimrnons
Published: June 2023

The first time I saw Tanya Lukin-Linklater perform, she ground up red clay, mixed it with water into a paste and spread it on her body. She made twig nests; she sang what seemed to be a lullaby; she made guttural sounds and repeated “suk suk.” At one point, she “became” bird woman, and when the performance settled into quietness, she entered the audience, and, speaking in words I did not understand, she seemed to bless each spectator individually with a smudge of clay paste — even my unborn child. I felt warm, welcome and like I had been a part of something significant. The vivid images were powerful, but I felt ill-equipped to interpret them.
Behind the Glitter: Miss Velveeta Spandexxx’s Drag School
Authors: Spandexxx Miss Velveeta
Published: June 2023

Hey darlings, how y’all doin’? Miss Velveeta is sittin’ at her desk writin’ this li’l ol’ essay since y’all want to know more about drag and ‘specially ‘bout drag in Montreal. Now one thing first you gotta know right away, Miss Velveeta is a refugee drag queen living in Montreal. She barely escaped George W. Bush’s war against anyone and everything that ain’t a pasty-white normal straight patriotic Amur’can (that’s how Bush says “American”; for real girlfriend, he talks like that!) Montreal’s been really good to Miss Velveeta, having recently accepted her birth to the public with open arms and placed her on its top ten drag queens list! But more about me later.
Performing Outside of the Box
Authors: Levin Laura , Schweitzer Marlis , Solga Kim , Stephenson Jenn , Zatzman Belarie
Published: June 2023

Intimate and emotional as a confessional, a doctor’s office or a romantic table for two, Theatre Replacement’s installation, BioBoxes, radically reduces the space of theatrical performance to its absolute minimum. Each ten-minute performance piece is housed in a miniature theatre, with a single chair for the lone audience member and a box resting on the shoulders of the performer forming the stage. The visceral experience of sitting knee-to-knee, making direct eye contact, in shared isolation fosters a unique communion between actor and audience. Some boxes also invite active participation; audience members are asked to hold and look at photographs, write in a journal, light incense or eat a chocolate. In this profoundly engaging environment, the actors relate stories gleaned from biographical interviews with six first-generation Canadians. Audience members can decide whether they wish to hear the story of a given box in English or in the language that represents the cultural heritage of its biographical subject: French, Italian, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, German or Cantonese. Created by the actors themselves, the boxes are richly designed, making enchantingly innovative scenographic use of the limited space.
Creating a Communicable Pedagogy: The Bubonic Tourist as Cultural Secret Agent
Authors: Moschopedis Eric
Published: June 2023

Since the late 1990s, I have been actively involved in composing a critical and creative character that I call the bubonic tourist. As an everyday relational and communicable figure, the bubonic tourist intimately transfers information, experience and intelligence by way of performance. The realm of the marginal, the aesthetic and the social are the bubonic tourist’s jurisdiction. When borders are crossed, identity becomes a trajectory, making the project of the bubonic tourist, in part, smuggling passports and granting self-citizenship. While the theoretical composition of the bubonic tourist considers notions of space, identity, affect and liberating pedagogy, it is the latter and its relationship to theatre and performance art that I will address. It is my intention to relate early feminist performance art and contemporary relational practices, as a pedagogical model, to my own personal narrative and subsequent development of the bubonic tourist. I realize that my course of reasoning runs the risk of polarizing what I understand to mean “theatre” and “performance art,” but this is not my intention. Instead, I share my story, in brief, knowing that it is hardly unique, but also knowing — to borrow from the lexicon of radical feminist and pedagogical discourses — the personal is political, and the political as performative is pedagogical. And so I begin.
A Review of Antigone: Insurgency
Authors: Apostolides Marianne
Published: June 2023

Adam Seelig’s reinterpretation of Antigone is subtitled “A Radical Post-9/11 Reworking of an Ancient Masterpiece.” Seelig, the artistic director of the experimental theatre company One Little Goat, has not merely reworked Sophocles’ play, however; instead, he’s also reworked the concept of what a political play is — how it functions effectively at engaging its audience in the creation of art which critically examines the contemporary world. Antigone: Insurgency is meta-theatre married to classical tragedy; it works, on the whole, very well.
“Festivalizing” Performance: Community and Aesthetics through the Lens of Three Festival Experiences
Authors: Van Belle David
Published: June 2023

Although the history of Canadian theatre has been greatly shaped by the existence of the long-established Stratford and Shaw Festivals, a new creative energy is coming from a crop of alternatives to them. These newer festivals are an increasingly important part of the Canadian performance landscape, in part precipitated by a renaissance in performance-creation work by independent artists and performance collectives who eschew the “season and theatre building” model of performance. Instead, these creators favour fluid creation methodologies and presentation arrangements that are well suited to the fluidity of a new festival model of presentation. Over the past decade, a whole network of festivals has been set up across the country to embrace such work, anchored by now venerable festivals such as One Yellow Rabbit’s twenty-three-year-old High Performance Rodeo. Some of these festivals are high profile; Vancouver’s PuSh Festival and the National Arts Centre’s Magnetic North Festival have provided important national stages for new work. Others, like Calgary’s Mutton Busting Festival and Toronto’s RED Festival, happen on a smaller scale and in local settings. Although these smaller festivals tend to be more temporary in nature (both the festivals just mentioned are now defunct), they provide necessary opportunities for new and adventurous work to be developed and seen.
Weesageechak Begins to Dance: Toward a Pedagogy of Performance and the Possibilities for Decolonizing the Stage
Authors: Dénommé-Weleh Spy
Published: June 2023

Having marked its twenty-fifth anniversary during the 2007/8 season, Toronto-based Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA) continues to operate as Canada’s oldest Aboriginal theatre company. NEPA has been active as a creative collective in the Toronto theatre scene since the early eighties and formally became a theatre company in 1982. Then, with its production of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters in 1986, NEPA expanded into a fully professional theatre company, producing works by prominent and emerging Aboriginal artists and giving Aboriginal and Indigenous voices, which historically have been silenced or under-represented, opportunities to speak.
A Master Playwright Festival? In Winnipeg?
Authors: Johnson Chris , Kerr Bill
Published: June 2023

Every January for the past eight years, Winnipeg theatre-goers have been offered twelve to fifteen different productions of plays by a major twentieth-century playwright, staged by as many different theatre companies, over a period of about two weeks. Ticket sales remain steady at about 10,000, in a city of 650,000. Beckett was the subject of the first festival, in 2001; festivals that followed were devoted to the works of Brecht, Pinter, Albee, Tremblay, O’Neill, Stoppard, and Mamet. In 2009, it’s Miller. “The audiences are fascinating,” says festival founder Bertram Schneider. “They’re groupies. It’s thirty below. January. Little dark theatres. It’s astounding.”
dust
Authors: Maghanoy Jason
Published: June 2023

dust was first presented as a solo show in February 2005 at the National Theatre School of Canada. This production was directed by Leah Cherniak and featured the playwright. It was subsequently presented in August 2005 by the Carlos Bulosan Theatre as part of Jeepney and Other Stories. This production was directed by Brett Christopher and featured Nicco Lorenzo Garcia. dust was workshopped and presented as a two-hander during the CrossCurrents New Play Festival at Factory Theatre, Toronto, on 6 April 2006, dramaturged and directed by Philip Akin, with Byron Abalos and Jennifer Villaverde. It was subsequently presented on 6 May 2008, as part of the ReCurrents Program: The Directors Cut at the 2008 CrossCurrents Festival at the Factory Theatre. This workshop was directed by Michael Murphy and featured Noa Mae Dorn and Ted Neal. dust was produced from 8 to 16 August 2008 by JSquared Theatre, as part of the Summer Works Theatre Festival, with the following cast.
Epitaph for George
Authors: Winter Jack
Published: June 2023

My father first saw Ten LostYears2 in Montreal on the final leg of its second cross-Canada tour in 1976. The play was two years and many many performances old, and he was seventy-three. “What do you want to do a play about a time like that?” he growled. “Who wants to remember a time like that? It was a terrible time. Of course, lots of people weren’t but we were all right because we had a candy store. Of course, nobody bought nothing so we changed the date on the stuff that spoils. Of course, me and your mother, we ate a lot of our candy.”
Views and Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

Jean-François Lyotard is probably best known as a philosopher with an abiding concern with the power of universals – governing stories or metanarratives – and, in particular, how such universals enact certain kinds of controls on our lives. Lyotard has been fiercely critical of the universalist claims inherited by western societies from Enlightenment thinking, and many of his writings serve to undermine the foundational principles that support such thinking. After graduation, Lyotard spent his early years teaching philosophy at the University of Constantine, in French East Algeria, and it was this experience that significantly contributed to his approach to thinking through the problems of interculturalism. Lyotard’s work can offer a useful perspective on intercultural theatre practice because his approach to political philosophy is concerned with the translation of language across cultures, and his focus is less on theory and more on the pragmatics of language; that is, the dramaturgy and performance of language as it becomes crucial to judgement and thought.
De/Constructing Queer Representation on the Rez
Authors: Schwartz Shira
Published: June 2023

“Am I making you a little bit uncomfortable?” Unfortunately, Jake, no. You’re not. Or, at least, no more uncomfortable than we ought to be.

This was my reaction at the end of Waawaate Fobister’s solo show when ref1ecting on the protagonist’s key question. While visually and theatrically impressive, never once did Fobister’s performance make me stir, fidget or squirm in my seat, leading me to call into question the extent to which this production pushes social and political boundaries in a significant way.
Inter•Cultural•Performance
Authors: Knowles Ric
Published: June 2023

When Canadian Theatre Review published its special issue on Chinese Canadian Theatre in 2002, Jean Yoon opened her leadoff article with “Gee, you know, I’m not Chinese. I’m Korean.” Situating herself within “an Asian Canadian arts scene – one that is fluid, vibrant, and inclusive” (emphasis in original), Yoon criticized CTR for focusing so narrowly on a single, atomized community in Canada, potentially ghettoizing it and fragmenting fragile intercultural solidarities within a no longer first-generation Asian Canadian community that neither remembered nor cared about ancient histories of tension between the homelands. She called for a look, first, at “the bigger picture” (5). Since then, one play has been produced in Toronto that focuses on the potentially divisive topic of the Nanking Holocaust of the Chinese by the Japanese in 1937 (Marjorie Chan’s a nanking winter), and another (Diana Tso’s Red Snow) is in development. Seven years later, neither seems controversial or threatens solidarities within an Asian Canadian theatrical community that is now, perhaps not incidentally, well represented through the efforts of fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company, founded in 2002 – the year Yoon’s article appeared.
Making the Grade: Professional Association of Canadian Theatres Web Site Assessment Research Project
Authors: Prendergast Monica
Published: June 2023

In the twenty-first-century world of theatre-going, an audience member’s first point of contact with a theatre company is more and more likely to be the company’s web site. This small-scale research project was interested in surveying the web sites of the 106 full members of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres [PACT]. (Affiliate members who might not have full seasons or operating budgets for web site development and upkeep were excluded.) The dual purposes of this survey were the following:

to assess PACT members’ web sites based on a list of twenty-five yes/no questions ranging from information available on current and past seasons to ticket sales, media resources, educational resources and other evaluative criteria, as seen in the results presented below. to pay attention to how much interactivity was in evidence on each site; that is, to how PACT members’ web sites invite potential and/or actual audience members to engage with their productions, artists, administrations; that is, what spaces or places are made available for theatre-goers to find out more about or respond to a company, its season, or a particular show?
The Honest Audience
Authors: MacInnis Allen , Fulford-Winsor Mary , Smith Margaret , Greenberg Jessica
Published: June 2023

Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People is Canada’s oldest and largest theatre for young audiences. In this article, Artistic Director Allen MacInnis, Head of Wardrobe Mary Fulford-Winsor, Front of House Manager Margaret Smith, and Actor Jessica Greenberg respond to questions about creating theatre for the most demanding audience — children.
“Cosmopolitanizing” Australia: Asian and Aboriginal Performance in Context
Authors: Harrower Natalie
Published: June 2023

The central aim of this excellent, timely and theoretically precise book is to deploy the concept of “cosmopolitanism” as a critical tool for investigating a range of cross-cultural performances in Australia. To set the stage for the main focus of their study, which examines the ways in which indigenization and Asianization have been “instrumental in forging Australian theatre’s current cosmopolitan credentials” (18) over the last two decades, the authors survey the history of racially inflected performance in Australia from the 1830s through to the late 1960s.
At Home in Exile
Authors: Pero Allan
Published: June 2023

This study attempts an important incursion into a dynamic and under-theorized dimension of drama and performance studies: the chiastic spaces of politics, memory and representation within and without the Australian stage. Tompkins’s task is to explore how contemporary drama and performance work toward a re-imagining or unsettling of the ways in which particular ideas of “Australia” have been mapped, constituted, defended and perpetuated by discourses of colonization and white privilege. As a result, she asks us, in her refinement of the concepts in Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs’s volume Land/ Scape/ Theater, to remain attentive to ideas of space, place and landscape as intellectually and politically contested sites. Such a request is germane to a Canadian context not only because we share with Australia a historical relation to the British Empire and Commonwealth but also because Australia has adopted and adapted Canada’s policy of multiculturalism to suit its own purposes. In this respect, Australia’s imbrications of the postcolonial have some uncanny similarities to those experienced here in Canada.
The Lost Boy Homosexuality in B-Movie
Authors: Lawson Robert
Published: June 2023

At the suggestion of a number of my friends, I went to see the phenomenally successful Toronto production of Tom Woods’ comedy, B-Movie, the Play. When the house lights dimmed and the play started, I was glad that I took their advice: the play was funny. During the intermission, as I thought about the play, I became aware of a certain disappointment. Something was missing. What was more, I could see that many other people shared my feelings. I suspect that most of them, like me, were gay. This unpleasant gut reaction, which became more pronounced during the second act of the play, is difficult to define.
Demande de travail sur les nébuleuses
Authors: Marchessault Jovette , Picard Anne-Marie
Published: June 2023

Le chiffre magique de cette septième pièce de Jovette Marchessault dessine dans l’espace-temps de la scène du théâtre d’Aujourd’hui (en cinq tableaux et quinze scènes) une cartographie des mouvements de l’âme humaine comme s’il s’agissait d’une cosmologie.
1837: The Farmers’ Revolt
Authors: Salutin Rick ,   Theatre Passe Muraille
Published: June 2023

1837 was first produced at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, in January, 1972. 1837, The Farmers’ Revolt, was a major reworking — amounting to a new play — of the original. It was produced in the spring, summer and fall of 1974 — first in the auction barns of southwestern Ontario, then in the Victoria Playhouse in Petrolia, Ontario, and then in Toronto.
Two Perspectives / 1: Censored… Schools’ reaction to Theatre Direct’s Shows
Authors: Serran Susan
Published: June 2023

Artists and educators are still rigorously debating the antiquated notion that “theatre for young people should/must serve the curriculum.” Creating theatre that will resonate in the mind and heart requires a freedom of artistic expression that is not traditionally welcomed – especially in the corridors of our educational system.
Two Perspectives / 2: Filling the Silence The curriculum in the schools
Authors: Barnieh Zina
Published: June 2023

In theatre we partly fill the silence with characters’words. The question is, how do students learn this rich and enigmatic art in schools. In an examination of English Canadian drama curriculum guides, I have found a range of perspectives on the teaching of playwriting. The approaches range from teaching collective creation, adaptation of literature (Manitoba, 1988), to a full course in Directing and Scriptwriting 12 (British Columbia, 1988). This latter course is reminiscent of great director/playwright partnerships like Brassard/Tremblay and Stanislavsky/Chekov.
Collaborations / 2: Teaching From Experience
Authors: Markle Richard
Published: June 2023

When I told a colleague that I was about to initiate a Basic Level theatre program at Sutton District High School, his first reaction was to shudder. Then, he shook my hand and wished me luck. He made it clear that I would need it.
Toronto Serious, Yes; Theatre Fountainhead
Authors: Smith Winston
Published: June 2023

Theatre Fountainhead is one of only two professional black theatre companies still operating in Canada; Black Theatre Workshop in Montreal is the other. Which is not to say that there are no other black theatres here; in Toronto, during recent years, we have seen large-scale independent productions mounted by people such as Devon Haughton and Jones and Jones productions. And while black audiences have turned out in droves for Big Yard and other such productions, they are the best kept secret in Canadian theatre. The audience? The plays? Both. The former are Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible” men and women, writ large.
Skin & Liars: two plays
Authors: Foon Dennis , Gibson Sarah
Published: June 2023

Canadian playwright Dennis Foon has devoted hundreds of hours to an unusual occupation: he talks to teenagers. He has discovered that beneath their predilection for Sony Walkmans, Seventeen magazine and punk haircuts, adolescents are struggling with a number of complex, seemingly insoluble problems. In his recently published pair of one-act plays, Skin et Liars, written for Vancouver’s Green Thumb Theatre for Young People and performed for thousands of high-school students across Canada, Foon gives voice to these concerns.
Adolescents and Theatre
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

The desire to bring theatre to marginalized groups in contemporary society has often encouraged the development of theatrical forms especially adapted to specific audiences. Thus, feminist theatre explores the situations of women in society by confronting audiences, more or less assertively, with the physical female presences on stage, and various kinds of forum theatre invite audience participation in order to articulate the collective concerns of politically, economically or culturally suppressed peoples. In such cases theory and practice have evolved together, but a group which has been addressed by theatre without the accompaniment of much theoretical discussion is the adolescent one – as both audience and participants.
Around the Festivals / 2: Rescuing History: La Negra Esther
Authors: Sagaris Lake
Published: June 2023

In the cool dusk of the Chilean summer, thousands flocked to a circus tent last January to see a new kind of theatre. Part vaudeville, part street theatre, part melodrama, part music, La Negra Esther sets Romeo and Juliet in a brothel and carries it off with its own peculiarly Chilean sense of language and fun.
Around the Festivals / 3: Bread and Butter: Productive Contradictions
Authors: DiCenzo Maria
Published: June 2023

Let’s open with a warm-up exercise. What words come to mind when you think about theatre festivals? Sitting on the floor with my legs crossed after joining parts of my body with those of people I have never met before (yearning for a chair somewhere in a corner where I don’t have to introduce myself yet again), I might suggest “stimulating,” “overwhelming,” “hectic,” and most importantly, “choices.”
Newhouse
Authors: Rose Richard , Kugler D. D.
Published: June 2023

Newhouse is a speculation about possible, but avoidable, future events – the political and social effects a sexually transmitted disease, at epidemic levels, could have on the individual and society.

Any plague, but especially a sex plague, is a catalyst for radical change in human behaviour. Unfortunately, the fear and ignorance surrounding such a plague can be manipulated by political parties and religious groups to re-shape society. Fortunately, many organizations exist to inform the public, and their efforts not only abate the spread of the disease, but undercut the hysteria.
Surviving in Vancouver / 1: The New Play Centre: Twenty Years On
Authors: Johnston Denis , Wasserman Jerry
Published: June 2023

As Vancouver’s New Play Centre (NPC) celebrates its twentieth anniversary, western Canada’s premier play development organization can’t decide whether to revel in its substantial accomplishments or worry about its ongoing identity crisis. On the plus side it has plenty to celebrate. Two decades of script development and, to a lesser extent, new play production have helped nurture a thriving theatrical culture in British Columbia, and given first exposure to plays and playwrights of national reputation.
Moo, Toronto, Mississippi and Jewel
Authors: Clark Sally , Macleod Joan , Gilbert Reid
Published: June 2023

In Moo, Sally Clark assembles a series of short narrative scenes which move forward from a startling and emblematic prologue in which the female protagonist is shot by a man who later marries her, through the events of her life to a closing scene in which she is shot by him again. At the same time, monologues, which appear out of time - but actually fit in the linear biography - comment upon the history and upon the self-perceptions of the characters. In the published text, this episodic structure is not satisfying: individual scenes appear undeveloped, and, while minor characters are succinctly drawn, the deterioration of the central character, Moo, seems forced. Attempting to sketch her protagonist’s entire life from 1919 to after 1960, Clark presents Moo at sixty and, one scene later, at sixty-five; she introduces Moo’s son as a child and, in the next scene, as a sixteen-year-old; she moves location from Seattle to Vancouver to Montserrat to “Banyu Wangi” in instant shifts. In production, however, this structure adds a rhythm to the play, balancing the often hectic comic action with introspective asides, creating a pastiche in which the rather didactic discussion of obsessive behaviour is both discussed and acted out. Unity of a disturbing kind is provided by the recurrent images of asylums and nursing homes in which Moo repeatedly finds herself confined - even strapped into a straitjacket - by the physical and mental crippling inflicted by the man Harry whom she “loves to hate,” and without whom she is unable to find a locus. Extending this image of women bound by men, by “the cads, rotters and bounders” to whom the play is dedicated, Clark shows three generations of women who, while observing Moo’s compulsive searching for Harry and the self-destruction it brings, themselves fall into similar emotional traps. Moo’s grand-niece, Susan, discloses her own involvement with a married man who “doesn’t love his wife,” although he hasn’t “exactly told [Susan] that.” She is confident that it is “only a matter of time before he leaves [the wife],” but the history of Moo and Harry suggests that whether he does or not, he will have destroyed the wife’s life and will destroy Susan’s.
Image and Imagination: The Concept of Electronic Theatre
Authors: Kirkley Richard Bruce
Published: June 2023

During the past decade, the proliferation of program choices on television created by the rapid expansion of the cable, pay television and video-cassette industries has led to an increasing fragmentation of the total viewing audience. In response, there has been a growing interest on the part of producers and advertisers in the concept of narrowcasting: the orientation of programming towards a select rather than mass audience. In Canada, this trend is reflected by two recently launched projects dedicated to the translation of stage plays and performances for television.
Montreal Intimate Universe
Authors: Salter Denis
Published: June 2023

There are surprisingly few English translations of Quebec dramatic texts. The translated canon does include Gelinas, Barbeau, Gurik, Laberge, Tremblay, of course, and, more recently, Dubois; but this gives a skewed impression of the range of styles and themes found in contemporary Quebec dramaturgy. To open up the repertoire and to challenge outdated ideas, in March Playwrights Workshop Montreal hosted “Intimate Universe / Univers intime,” a special three-evening event. Several mostly young Quebec playwrights read translated excerpts from their recent works and discussed their ideas about the status of theatre in a dangerously politicised society. The English-speaking audience had the pleasure of listening to new voices dramatising a new configuration of political and cultural issues; the playwrights had the unsettling experience of listening to their voices translated into a “foreign” idiom. In fact, translation – not just between languages, but between the different value-systems which language creates – became the recurring theme of the entire event, and added support to the idea that translation is probably the dominant theme and metaphor in the history of both Quebec and Canadian playwriting.
Transformations: Mediating the Arts Through Theatre
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

This issue is conceived as an exploration of “translation” in Canadian theatre, with the understanding that this encompasses more than simply linguistic activity. So we use the term “transformations” to indicate a whole range of mediations between theatre and other arts. Perhaps it has never been more important than at the present time to recognize different kinds of theatrical (and non-theatrical) processes by which the cultures of Canada continually translate themselves in this broad sense.