bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Politicization of the Artist: The Artist As Citizen
Authors: Gomez Henry
Published: June 2023

In February 1995, during the trade forum titled “Recipes For Change”, sponsored by the Toronto Theatre Alliance and Buddies in Bad Times, I had the privilege of being a panellist on a segment titled “The Politicization of The Artist”. At that time I spoke of my own politicization through re-education, the awakening of the consciousness and the impact I could have with others in and out of the artistic arena. Today, I will expand on this theme as I take a look at where we are now as a society, how we got here and how we may move beyond.
Black Community Submission... Montreal – Quebec into the 1990s
Authors: Bayne Clarence S.
Published: June 2023

Excerpt from the Black Community Submission To The Committee On Culture Public Hearing on the Proposition de Politique de la Culture et des Arts

Submitted to the National Assembly Secretaire de la Commission de la Culture

Prepared by Dr Clarence S. Bayne for

The Black Theatre Workshop of Montreal, Carifete, Afro-Festival of The Black Community Council of Montreal, Rhythme du Monde and The Foundation for the Minority Arts and Culture.1
The Drama That Is Mas’
Authors: Pierre Anthony
Published: June 2023

On the surface, Toronto’s Caribana Parade would seem to have little or nothing to do with theatre. For 8 to 12 hours, thousands of costumed revellers swirl by, a riot of colour energized by a cacophony of Caribbean and Latin American rhythms, in what looks like an almost endless outdoor party. If one takes the time, however, to peer through the layers of feathers, sequins, glitter dust and sometimes mud, intriguing facets emerge.
“Who’s In Rabbit’s House?” Theatre for Children
Authors: Scarlett Vivine
Published: June 2023

On the continent of Africa, story-telling has always been as a form of documenting one’s history. These stories would be presented through theatre, song, music and dance. In keeping with that tradition, Who’s In Rabbit’s House? was developed and created to share an old African story with a young audience.
Wolfville Doing It Right: Bawtree’s Atlantic Theatre Festival
Authors: Cottreau Deborah
Published: June 2023

Overlooking the Bay of Fundy, situated in the quaint university town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, stands a steel-supported wooden ‘O’, a proposed 514-seat skating-rink-turned-theatre, soon-to-be home of the Atlantic Theatre Festival. The brainchild of Artistic Director Michael Bawtree and associates, ATF stands as proof positive that local initiative and grass-roots collaboration are the key to Canada’s cultural future. Other than local residents and area politicians, further contributors include some of Canada’s finest theatrical talent: Christopher Plummer is ATF’s Honourary Fundraising Chairman; Michael Shamata, recently-appointed Artistic Director for London’s Grand Theatre, offers ATF invaluable advice on the daily running of, and casting for, a repertory company; Stratford lighting designer Michael Whitfield provided ATF with their initial requirements for stage lighting. He continues to advise project architect Michael Harvey (Halifax), on the theatre’s structural design. Former Artistic Director of Canada’s Stratford Festival, Michael Langham, is the festival’s Associate Director. On 16 June, 1995, ATF will launch its inaugural season with Langham’s mise en scène of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Rural Roots: A Theatre Memoir
Authors: Amos Janet
Published: June 2023

The theatre has always been a part of my life. I had my first drama lessons with Dora Mavor Moore at the New Play Society in Toronto. As a kid, I saw Toby Robins play Peter Pan at the Eaton Auditorium. My mother, the actress Beth Amos, took me to the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto to see The King and I with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner. I found the music annoying because it interrupted the story. I remember sitting at the back of Prudhomme’s Theatre in Vineland (near St Catharines) when I was about nine watching my mother in a matinee of For Love or Money. But I was never stage-struck and I did not harbour any theatrical ambitions for myself. My brief stint as an apprentice at the Red Barn Theatre on Lake Simcoe, doing eight shows in nine weeks, convinced me this was no way to make a living, and I wisely decided to go to university and study Chinese.
A Personal Attempt to Introduce Canadian Theatre to Japan
Authors: (Yoshi) Yoshihara Toyoshi
Published: June 2023

With its population of twelve million, Tokyo is a huge market for performing arts. It has more than one hundred theatres, and in each theatre something goes on almost every day. (Unlike in North America or Europe, there is no “Theatre Season” in Japan. Performances go on all the year round, probably because of the size of the market and the high cost of building and maintaining a theatre.) The repertoire ranges from Japanese classics, such as Kabuki or Noh, to modern dramas reflecting the day-to-day life of contemporary Japanese.
Dancing Across Cultures: Xing Bang Fu
Authors: Sun Andrew
Published: June 2023

The Panda Dance Theatre studio is shockingly quiet. Normally the bunker-like church basement at Bathurst and College in downtown Toronto is a whirling dervish of students, twirling sticks, Chinese opera costumes, and chatter. But this afternoon all is calm, including Panda’s artistic leader Xing Bang Fu.
Hunting Stuart and The Voice of the People, Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass, The Architect
Authors: Davies Robertson , Reaney James , Cone Tom , Eden David
Published: June 2023

Here we have three scripts by noted playwrights, two who have had recent productions and one of whom we have not seen represented on our stages in a long time. All three made their reputations at an earlier time in Canadian theatre. When reading these scripts, especially the Davies’, I was struck by the lack of a sense of history in our theatre. Not that we lack theatre history for the academic mind. But of the Canadian plays produced on our stages today, precious few are more than ten years old. Why do we never revive the pioneering works of our theatre? Are we ashamed of what we wrote in the past?
Confessions of a Performance Artist: Excerpts from a Conversation
Authors: Liliefeldt Louis Ethel
Published: June 2023

In my first performances I was really frustrated because I knew that this was the place I needed to be but I didn’t know what to do. So much of it was physically aggressive, letting out all of those frustrations, letting it go blah, and feeling embarrassed because I just exposed myself to everyone not even knowing what I just did up there. I shook my body and moved around a lot. It was really disturbing in a way, but I was very sure that I had to keep going. That was really important but often unsatisfying. Satisfying in that stuff was being let out, but unsatisfying in that I hadn’t figured out what the relationship was with the audience, or even if there was one. I went that way because I felt I needed to go that way, but I couldn’t have explained what it was or where it was going at the time. The feeling is not a choice, but it’s a choice to go with it or not.
This Is Not My Curriculum Vitae
Authors: Vingoe Mary
Published: June 2023

A few days ago, a researcher from CBC’s Morningside called to ask about new developments in Atlantic Canadian drama. What’s hot, what’s not? How do we, at The Eastern Front, make choices about what projects get accepted into the On The Waterfront Festival of new work, now in its third year? His questions presupposed that there were hot trends in play-wrighting, that theatre companies, such as our own, survived on our ability to capture and to market those trends. This, I believe from my limited experience, is very much the way the television medium works – a producer-driven medium where writers fill in the blanks. It is not, and never has been, my experience in the theatre. I think it is why I have remained, despite the abysmal rate of pay, primarily a theatre artist.
Practising Dramaturgy – A Canadian Take on Text
Authors: Cottreau Deborah
Published: June 2023

My tackling the subject of dramaturgy for CTR came about in a most unexpected way. Two years ago, I was asked to prepare an upper-level course on the subject for the theatre department where I work. Discussions with various colleagues led me to the surprising conclusion that no two people viewed the practice in a unified way. This discovery made, I found myself walking up the stately stone steps of the National Theatre School to the office of Maureen Labonté, coordinator of the Directing Programme. A practising dramaturge herself, Maureen helped me unearth reams of published material, some ancient, some obscure, and some directly applicable to what we in Canada seem to do best: new play development.
Survival Techniques
Authors: Walling Savannah
Published: June 2023

We have come to the “Survivors of the Ice Age Symposium” to consider visions for survival. We hope to identify and understand the forces that are massed against us, as well as to recognize and mobilize forces that will support us. How can we survive, and thrive, and support each other, in an unfriendly environment whose economic base is chilling? Let us learn to transform our obstacles into pathways of survival.
In the Wings of Eden
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: June 2023

Theatre Smith-Gilmour is a Toronto-based company that features the work of co-founding artistic directors Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour, who met while studying at the Jacque s Lecoq School of Clowning in Paris . Smith-Gilmour closed the "Survivors of the Ice Age" Festival in Winnipeg with their performance of In the Wings of Edenon May 5,1996. Written by Smith and Gilmour in collaboration with Diane Cave and directed by Herbert Olschok, In the Wings of Eden was a fitting end to the festival, both for its sheer delightfulness and for its comic metatheatrical reflection on the role of the actor in the creative process.
Epilepsy & the Snake Fear in the Creative Process
Authors: Thompson Judith
Published: June 2023

The text of a talk delivered by Judith Thompson at the Stratford Festival, 30 June 1996, as part of the Festival’s Celebrated Writers Series.

Today I am going to talk for a while about pure fear and the loss of the self in the act of creation. Where are the eleven other Judiths?

About ten years ago I woke up early one spring morning in a sta te of pure fear. For at least a minute, which seemed like foreve r, I was in a panic, trembling from head to toe, as I couldn’t remember where the eleven other Judit hs might be. Without them, I had no self. I was disappearing. Although psychologically I can attribu te this moment of ter ror to a cha nge in med icat ions, it gave me some insight into the psychological cost of the work that I do: the creation of other cha racte rs within a world that resembles our own, but, like Alice’s Wonde rla nd, is seen throu gh the looking glass, darkly.
Tornado
Authors: Thompson Judith
Published: June 2023

Tornado was originally produced as a work in progress by the Department of Drama, University of Guelph, 30 November – 5 December 1992.
Summer in the Bight Theatre Festival
Authors: Peters Helen
Published: June 2023

Rising Tide’s Summer in the Bight originated in Trinity in 1991 with Rick Boland’ s monologue on the origin of Newfoundland’s judi cial system. It developed into a Newfoundland historical pageant written by Boland and Donna Butt which was first performed in 1993.The pageant led to a full fledged theatre festival in 1994. In its third season the festival,running from late Jun e to September, featu red plays by Newfoundland playwri ghts David French, Michael Cook, Al Pittman, Des Walsh, and Ted Russell, mainland collaborators Fern e Downey and Paul Ledoux, and Shakespeare.
Aesthetic Morality in the Blyth and District Community Play
Authors: Utile Edward
Published: June 2023

Many Hands, the opening production of the 1993 Blyth Festival season, was billed as a co-production between the Blyth Festival Theatre and “The Local People of Blyth and District”. The idea of producing a large-scale community play based on the Colway model (otherwise known as a Collaborative Community Play, or CCP) had originated with Peter Smith, the Festival’s Artistic Director. Smith had been appointed AD for the 1991 season at a time when the Festival’s popularity in the township was at a low ebb, and the theatre’s intimate past relationship to the community appeared to be in jeopardy. During the tenure of Smith’s predecessor, Katherine Kaszas (1985-90), the Board’s decision to build a “national” profile through touring and capital expansion projects had resulted in a precedent-setting deficit and increased ticket prices. The growing presence of the theatre in the community had also exacerbated the discomfort already experienced by a number of residents with the cosmopolitan lifestyles and values of visiting artists, while others had complained about the worsening of seasonal inconveniences such as increased traffic and parking problems, and insensitivity to local customs on the part of tourists visiting the theatre. A high percentage of the theatre’s Board at the time was composed of members from the environs (as distinct from Blyth itself) and many local residents perceived the theatre to be losing its ability to remain either accessible or responsive to the immediate community as constituted by the village. Finally, the risks that Smith had taken in his first two seasons as artistic director to produce theatre that was “a little more urban, a little more on the edge” (Algie) had met with only limited success, and the nature of pressure from the Board prior to the 1993 season can be inferred from the results of a poll taken during a dinner hosted for long-standing patrons of the Festival. Supporters were asked to voice their “artistic requests” for 1993, with the result that Smith was asked to include “something lighter”, a comedy and a musical (Waters).
Performance and Cultural Politics
Authors: Diamond Elin , Farfan Penny
Published: June 2023

In Performance and Cultural Politics, editor Elin Diamond has brought together thirteen essay s that articulate the relationship between cultural studies and performance. As Diamond notes in her introduction, though “performance” and “performativity” have emerged as keywords of postmodernism, performance has generally been neglected within the field of cultural studies. The contributors to Diamond’s volume forward the project of redressing this omission. Treating such diverse topics as the trial of Oscar Wilde, lesbian sado-masochism, the excavation of the Rose Theatre, Holocaust museums in the U.S., the performance of oral history, ballet treatments of the Pygmalion myth, pop duo Milli Vanilli, and the Mardi Gras krewes of nineteenth-century New Orleans, the exemplary essays collected in Performance and Cultural Politics clarify how the interdisciplinary nature of performance studies, as a branch or manifestation of cultural studies, “[moves] beyond explicit theatre contexts and [confronts] performance issues within structures of power” (7). At the heart of Performance and Cultural Politics is the fundamental insight that performance is always and at once “a doing and a thing done” (1), embedded in pre-existing cultural performances but at the same time infused with the potential for transformation that is implicit in the act of representation. Further to this premise, the performances considered here are understood as “cultural practices” that “[negotiate] with regimes of power” to “conservatively reinscribe or passionately reinvent the ideas, symbols, and gestures that shape social life” (2).
This Year, Next Year, The Little Years, Mad Boy Chronicle, The Monument
Authors: Harding Norah , Mighton John , O’Brien Michael , Wagner Colleen , Basourakos John
Published: June 2023

Four very different cover designs constitute a compelling and evocative mosaic of images from this collection of Canadian plays. A woman kneeling, her face contorted by grief, grasping what appears to be a rotted corpse, gazes back from underneath a caption that reads The Monument. Wielding a broad sword, O’Brien‘s ‘Mad Boy’strikes a pose of gleeful vindication. In comic book fashion, a well-coiffed, meticulously powdered young woman is shown embracing a Canadian soldier. Finally, a subdued illustration of a rust-coloured crown, with a graven image of an emaciated face transfixed in its centre, stares back from the cover of Mighton’s script. These diverse icons symbolically attest to the thematic divergences of these recently produced Canadian plays, that look beyond the frame of nationalistic issues, and explore seminal philosophical questions and ethical concerns about the human condition, while presenting a delectable cornucopia of colourful dramatic characters and archetypal figures.
Design by Example
Authors: Chesney William
Published: June 2023

It sometimes seems as if the current economic climate is the sworn enemy of the small when it comes to things theatrical. Small professional companies are under tremendous pressure these days: their grants cut back, and their audiences increasingly wooed away by mega-musicals with mega-budgets for publicity and advertising. The same could be said about small post-secondary Drama programs. Unless the school is big in budget and reputation, nationally or internationally recognised, and offering conservatory training with a clear emphasis on preparing its students for actual jobs in the profession, then what purpose can it have?
Defining a National Scenographic Style at the National Theatre School of Canada
Authors: Eagan Michael
Published: June 2023

An architect friend of mine once spoke to me at length about the high level of frustration in his profession which, according to him, is largely due to the fact that, with few exceptions, students who were originally attracted to architecture by the opportunity to design often find themselves burdened with deciphering building codes, the drudgery of designing housing multiples, and with the growing realization that only a handful of them will ever rise to the top of the architectural heap where they will get a chance to realize their aspirations as de signers. As our conversation continued, he expressed a certain admiration of and envy for the work of the scenographer, who has the opportunity, sometimes several times a year, to work on design projects in which the major preoccupation and, indeed “raison d’être,” is metaphorical.
Design Training at UBC
Authors: Gardiner Robert
Published: June 2023

During my eleven years at the University of British Columbia I’ve frequently been surprised to encounter wildly divergent assumptions about university design programs in general, and the UBC Design for Theatre Program in particular. No one seems sure what is taught in these programs. The right things? Too much “academic” material? Not enough “academic” material? Are the standards high enough? Too high? Are there standards?
New Dance Horizons: A Ten-Year Retrospective
Authors: Dicenzo Maria , Farfan Penny
Published: June 2023

In his book on theatre criticism, Irving Wardle suggests that “[s]et designers, and costume designers even more, are generally under-acknowledged by reviewers; but it is often they, rather than the director, who fix initial impressions and leave lasting prints in the memory.” In this issue devoted to designer training, it seems appropriate to give reviewers an opportunity to focus on some of the feats achieved by current Canadian designers and to consider the role of design in generating meaning in the theatre.
EDITORIAL
Authors: Wads Allan
Published: June 2023

Write about what you do...it’s what you know most about. The advice, as sound as it may be, fills many theatre designers with trepidation. For many, even those who are the most articulate in and about the practice of design, the prospect of writing with authority is a daunting one. It seems that the longer one practises one’s art/craft, the more deeply one understands the complexities and subtleties of visual communication and profoundly honours the informed breaking of established visual conventions, the more difficult it is to compress and express clear thoughts about design in writing. For those who try, the discrepancies between the visual and the written as modes of communication become obvious. Those who teach design as well as practise it are perhaps most accustomed to the challenges of using these two distinct languages of communication in a complementary fashion.
Recreating/Re-enacting a Dream: Rhonda Trodd, Frank Moher, and Supreme Dream
Authors: Perkins Don
Published: June 2023

In Supreme Dream a character named Rhonda Trodd, a white woman from Calgary, in a karaoke bar recounts her infatuation and eventual career with a black female Motown group, The Supremes. She begins with her first six-year-old infatuation with the group, lip-synching to their songs with a couple of friends on their parents’ lawns. She follows her education and training in music and theatre to her big break, when she actually gets to tour hotels and cruise ships as a Supreme, and experiences both the glamorous and not-so-glamorous sides of the somewhat bigger time of the entertainment industry.
Kierkegaard and the Art in Ross McMillan’s Fever
Authors: Brask Per
Published: June 2023

What appeals to me in a monodrama is the way it can suggest the interiority of a character, a life of the mind. At stake in Wallace Shawn’s play The Fever is precisely this interiority, this being born into the life of the mind which is the “privilege” of members of the middle classes (and above) of Western culture. He has chosen the dramatic form which best approaches interiority in order to make it problematic.
Lying and Dying: Theatricality in Here Lies Henry
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

Here Lies Henry is the result of a collaboration between Daniel MacIvor and Daniel Brooks, who, as the director involved in the genesis of the piece, was the critical eye, an audience who intervened and, with MacIvor, shaped the piece. What emerges through this collaboration - which, like their earlier collaboration House, is self-consciously theatrical - is an exploration of lying in the context of performance. This exploration has particular resonance if we bear in mind that the theatrical culture of the twentieth century places enormous premium on evaluating the actor’s work in terms of the “truthfulness” of the performance. Brooks and MacIvor use Here Lies Henry to query the relation between truth and lies in theatrical performance. From their collaboration emerges the question: why does theatrical culture place such premium on notions of “truthfulness,” which are often equated with the actor being “present” in the moment? This seems like an odd investment when theatre involves an actor assuming a role which is, from one perspective, the performance of a lie, a misrepresentation by the actor of who he or she actually is.
Niels Bohr’s Pre-Ramble to a Dramaturgical Theory: A Monologue Intended Only for Reading
Authors: Brask Per
Published: June 2023

As a necessary consequence of his contemplative nature the theorist is much more easily deceived than the enterprising prackticus who has no storage of rules to follow.

- Paul Martin Møller, Aphorisms1
Maritime Drama and the Maritime Way of Life
Authors: Jones Heather
Published: June 2023

“I finally got tired ,” Charlie Rhindress writes, “of not being taken seriously as a writer because I tend to write pop culture stuff as opposed to ‘Maritime drama’ and this new play was the result.” The Maritime Way of Life is billed as a satire on the maritime way of life, but it might as easily be called a satire of dramatic representations of the maritime way of life. “The story,” as related by Tom McCoag, “deals with a hard luck, rural New Brunswick family forced by economic conditions to milk the system.... There is the devious grandma; the proud, but bumbling father; the tireless, self-sacrificing mother; the smart, well-to-do, city-fied daughter and the lazy, dumb son.” When Pa “comes home from his lonely shift at the mine which [has] been closed down for two years” the cliches already abound. As Dale Fawthrop notes in his review of the play’s opening night, “too often other Canadians see us as unemployed, pogie-abusing miners and fishers who are proud of their lobster, crab, maple cream roots”. Rhindress’s frustration is understandable. Since 1991, he has co-written ten dinner-theatre pieces with Karen Valanne, written two Christmas plays for teens and written four more mainstage shows including Elvis Presley is Alive: and Well and Living in Sackville, the Gates Motel, and a musical about werewolves entitled Under the Night, which was co-written with Dean Burry, in addition to The Maritime Way of Life which he took to the Atlantic Fringe Festival on the Labour Day Weekend. But even his work closest to “Maritime drama” mould, Guilty! The Story of the Great Amherst Mystery, rep resent s the maritime way of life with an un orthodox twist.
Another Perfect Piece, Beyond the Pale: Dramatic Writing from First Nations Writers and Writers of Colour, Monologues: Plays from Martinique, France, Algeria, Quebec
Authors: Fulton Allegra , Hamill Tony , Kaplan Jon , Nolan Yvette , Quan Betty , Seremba George , Kourilsky Françoise , Strempel Cristina , Temerson Catherine , Fraser Kathleen D.J.
Published: June 2023

It is not every day I have the pleasure of commenting on the work of 140 playwrights. The first two books are publications of Playwrights Union of Canada, which has approximately 350 members, receiving, in 1996, 136 new scripts from members and non-members. With funding from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, the Union, through its publishing imprint Playwrights Canada Press, publishes six to seven plays a year in trade book format. It also maintains a list of cerlox-bound copyscripts. This year, for sale in book stores, it will also start publishing copyscripts that sell well in a form analogous to the Samuel French format. Daniel David Moses’ Almighty Voice, for example, is about to be issued in this format. In addition to publishing single scripts, the Press also publishes anthologies, including in 1997 a collection of Newfoundland dramas, the largest and most costly project in the Press’s history, a conscious decision to bring Atlantic Province theatre - well, at least one Atlantic Province - to “mainland” Canada. The East has certainly been under-published in the last decade or longer.
South Asian Theatre in Toronto
Authors: Vaze Bageshree
Published: June 2023

For most aspiring thespians in Canada, Toronto is the place to be. Montreal may be home to the National Theatre School, but Toronto is where artists flock for work. Boasting more than 10 000 live shows in the past year, Canada’s most populous city is the third largest theatre centre in the English-speaking world, after New York and London.
Exploring the Immigrant Experience through Theatre: Uma Parameswaran’s Rootless but Green are the Boulevard Trees
Authors: Mittal Bina
Published: June 2023

Uma Parameswaran was born in Madras, India. She studied in Jabalpur and Nagpur, India, and received her PhD from Michigan State University. Today, she is a Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and is involved in the Indo-Canadian and Women’s communities in Winnipeg. More specifically, her community involvement includes organizing the first series of Indian classical dance instruction (1978–81) and producing a weekly television show (1979-92). She has also participated on various boards and advisory panels, including the Immigrant Women’s Association of Manitoba, the Margaret Laurence Chair of Women Studies and she Chaired a three-year project on Women Focused Research. At present, Parameswaran is involved with the National Council of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Her publications include selections from many genres, including critical essays which explore the work of Salman Rushdie and her own creative contributions such as poetry, short stories, dance-dramas, and the play under study, Rootless but Green are the Boulevard Trees (first published in 1985 in Toronto South Asian Review, Volume 4:1, and subsequently republished as a book in 1987).
Drama as Docufiction
Authors: Murphy Sarah
Published: June 2023

Leila Sujir interviewed by Sarah Murphy with excerpts from Leila Sujir’s The Dreams of the Night Cleaners

Murphy: In The Dreams of the Nightcleaners, your docufictive approach to your material - the combination of document, drama, fiction and fantasy in a multilayered fantasy - yields an extraordinarily rich and complex final product. How did you decide on this approach?
A Family of Puppeteers: An Interview with Nina Keogh about Puppets on Television
Authors: Scott Shelley
Published: June 2023

Nina Keogh is a third-generation professional puppet designer/puppeteer. Her television career started in 1958 when she apprenticed on The Friendly Giant and Razzle Dazzle (CBC). She currently appears as Muffy Mouse on Today’s Special (TVO), Truffles on Mr. Dressup (CBC), Norbert on Bookmice (TVO), Crystal on Groundling Marsh (YTV) and Kitty on Hello Mrs. Cherrywinkle (The Family Channel). She has worked with many major players including the Muppets, Hanna Barbera and Touchstone, and has created and/or puppeteered hundreds of characters for TV series, feature films and commercials. In 1991 she received the Outstanding Contribution Award for children’s television from the Alliance for Children and Television.
World on a String
Authors: Nicholls Liz
Published: June 2023

“Make the bastards laugh; that way they won’t know you said anything important until it’s too late.“
Tinka’s New Dress
Authors: Burkett Ronnie
Published: June 2023

Copyright Ronnie Burkett. This play is protected fully under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are expressly forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language or by any group, are retained by the author. For copyright information contact: Ronnie Burkett, Rink-a-Dink Inc., 1152-10 Street SE, Calgary, Alberta, T2G 3E4.
A Vehicle for Discovery: Theatre SKAM’s Volaré Venue
Authors: McNerney Sheila
Published: June 2023

In the opening remarks of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes informs us that his investigation into photography has been propelled forward by a very personal “‘ontological’ desire” (3). The following reflections on Theatre SKAM’s production of Norm Foster’s Louis and Dave, which was experienced by 202 spectators at the 1996 Victoria Fringe Festival, are similarly driven. My interest in this particular production is fuelled by a need to understand what are the essential features of the actor/audience relationship, of the audience experience. I wish to get at the heart of why and how live theatre delights.
Scenographic Stories: Design in Contemporary Opera Performance
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

Recent new operas by experimental opera companies and lesser-known works by the Canadian Opera Company attest to a new positioning of opera in the cultural landscape and new visual frameworks in which to see and hear it. Many productions have made use of multimedia design or have invited collaborative efforts by artists in other fields of visual presentation, making it increasingly evident that scenography now has a more developed narrative function, not constrained by earlier concepts of a unified production. Designers are making, in spatial and temporal terms, a contemporary mediation of music and gesture. Scenography is used in this discussion as the critical and inclusive term to observe the perception of space, movement, rhythm and time for performance effected by a collective effort. The details of the visual compositions are understood as performative in themselves and as capable of affecting corporeal presence on the stage, rather than simply illustrating the opera.
“Don’t Look Back”: Jackie O in Banff
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: June 2023

Exactly three weeks after I’d seen one of the Canadian premiere performances of Wayne Koestenbaum and Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O at the Eric Harvie Theatre at the Banff Centre for the Arts, I spent a Saturday evening watching CNN with my teenage son as the news of the car crash which killed Princess Diana unfolded in an incredible, shocking and often chaotic dramatic narrative. As one royal observer from the British press commented during those long hours of broadcast, “We have lost perhaps the most important icon of the twentieth century. Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, they are the only other contenders; and Jackie, she lived too long.” It was an odd moment in a night of many odd moments, and the reporting in the period immediately following the accident pointed to a remarkable prescience in Jackie O, where a second-act duet for Jackie and Maria Callas becomes a fierce attack on a tap-dancing paparazzo who would aggressively invade the sanctuary of Skorpios in search of an exclusive photograph. Almost balletic in performance style and moving from high opera to film score in its musical range, this scene was one of the most powerful of Nicholas Muni’s direction of Jackie O, one which pointed to the relentless demands of “celebrity” and a necessary, concomitant quest for self-protection. The evidence on CNN that night gave a ghastly truth to the earlier staged performance. And even before August 1997, in an interview coinciding with the Houston Grand Opera premiere of Jackie O (in March of the same year), the opera’s librettist, Wayne Koestenbaum, had said, “Jackie dominated the world’s biggest theatrical proceeding, the media. Her only rivals are Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana – and Di’s really just a copy of Jackie” (“A Diva” 10).
From Megaworlds to Mini-Magic: Catalyst Theatre’s Process for Small-Scale Spectacle
Authors: Perkins Don
Published: June 2023

The process that Catalyst Theatre has been evolving to create some of the most startling theatre in Edmonton over the past two years is a bit hard to name. It has been mistakenly called collective creation, but there is little of the democratic idealism popularly associated with that style as it was developed by Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille in the early 1970s. The directors at Catalyst maintain a firm overseeing, evaluating eye. It has inadequately been called workshopping, but the public performances are not conceived of simply as stages in the development of an unfinished work in progress. While Catalyst has been known to invite the audience in at scheduled intervals over a period of months to see the stage a project has reached, viewers get and respond to fully realized shows each time, both as individual productions and as parts of a sequence. In such cases, process effectively becomes part of the product with which the theatre engages its audiences, who, with each visit to the theatre, experience suspense over what might have emerged and over where things might go next.
In Pursuit of Process: Reflections on Directing for Canadian Theatre
Authors: Vingoe Mary
Published: June 2023

At the age of ten I was taken to New York’s Central Park to see a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the story of a Black family in Chicago who move into a ‘Whites only’ neighbourhood. I was absolutely spellbound. Up to that point theatre had meant Cinderella at Neptune or Baker Street on Broadway. All at once I was seeing theatre that was immediate, provocative and relevant to the here and now. My mother said my eyes were popping out of my head all through the show. Today I continue to seek out theatre that is provocative and meaningful, theatre that emanates from a strong sense of place.
Michael Levine: The Process to See
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

Design for opera readily reveals the positioning of this cultural genre, together with the collaborative nature of scenography. As artistic directors in the late 1990s choose a repertoire of canonical operas mixed with lesser-known works, they are placing a strong emphasis on visual expression, and the engagement of a designer has become a highly significant marker of the director’s stance in relation to the complex multidisciplinarity of contemporary opera. But much opera today is produced in houses which have had to accommodate busier seasons and more technologically complex scenography than they were built for (with the exception of such recently built venues as Opera Bastille, Glimmerglass Opera and the outdoor Sante Fe). Moreover, in the last twenty years the increased mobility of performers and performance paraphernalia has not only meant that large-scale experimentation is feasible and more frequent, but has also added a layer of complexity to opera design that must meet the exigencies of transferability and co-production. The work of Michael Levine embodies an aesthetic for opera that accommodates and appreciates such new dimensions and attempts to explore and exploit the possibilities they offer.
Medea in the Media
Authors: Papadakos Anna , Parisien Aurèle
Published: June 2023

The intriguing black posters appeared along Montreal’s Saint-Laurent Boulevard and other key locations in early May. Beside “Dummies Theatre” in small print, the large, luminescent blue-on-black block of type on the top says “Medea in the Media” - an alliteration as seductive as it is confusing, leaving a nagging impression of misreading. A band of haunting black and white images across the middle of the poster has the same effect, seducing while eluding straightforward comprehension: on the left, a misty field with a bit of railway track; on the right, the rippled surface of a sea or lake. The two images bleed into each other in a middle panel where the field, the railway track and the curving side of a moving train become immersed in a film of watery ripples. In the lower part of the poster the same mysterious blue type proclaims “Free Theatre,” providing dates and a nameless Saint-Laurent Boulevard address. Anyone checking the address on the way up the street would discover a door leading into a stairway to the second floor above Segal’s Supermarket.
Spirit Wrestler: An Historical Drama
Authors: Nelson Greg , Osachoff Margaret Gail
Published: June 2023

Greg Nelson’s Spirit Wrestler was first performed by 25th Street Theatre in November 1995 as a slightly late commemoration of the centenary of the Burning of Arms by Doukhobors in southern Russia on 29 June 1895. The revival of this play by the Rosthern Station Arts Centre, from 11 July to 2 August 1998, came a little early to mark the hundredth anniversary of the arrival in Canada of the first shipload of 2000 Doukhobors in Halifax, on 24 January 1899, and their subsequent journey to western Canada. Opening night of the Rosthern production served to launch Coteau Books’ publication of Nelson’s script.
Too Distant Voices: The Publishing of Dramatic Texts in the Maritimes
Authors: Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

Writing about the publishing of drama in the Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) is a little like composing a treatise on woodland sprites, in that printed texts written by local playwrights and published by Maritimes imprints are similarly rare, equally unfamiliar to the average citizen and just as likely to be surrounded with a sense of the miraculous. The conditions responsible for the scarcity of local publishing opportunities for Maritimes playwrights are neither simple nor obvious in nature, although, to be sure, straight-forward financial considerations play a central role. But numerous other factors are involved: some are the consequences of physical geography, others of cultural priorities and practice, and still others of attitudes and idiosyncrasies of the discipline. Yet while opportunities for publication may be scarce, there is no shortage of perspectives regarding the sources of – and potential solutions to – what is seen by many as a fundamental obstacle facing Maritimes playwrights aspiring to recognition beyond their native region.
Toronto Playwrights Union of Canada and Playwrights Canada Press: A Profile
Authors: Matzig Catherine
Published: June 2023

In the late 1960s, Canada’s regional theatres – those established by the federal government to celebrate the 1967 Centennial – had a general reputation for offering few opportunities for Canadian work to appear. Artistic directors of these houses tended to be primarily European-born – Christopher Newton at Theatre Calgary and Heiner Piller at Neptune Theatre, for example – and were inclined to produce remounted Broadway hits and musicals or popular foreign-stage classics. Theatre companies like Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre Centre and Nova Scotia’s Neptune Theatre were ostensibly created to present Canadian theatre, but the repertories broadened and playbills often told a different story, listing productions by Shaw, Miller, Wilde, Chekhov and Shakespeare with the rare Canadian play. As a result, there was virtually no space on our regional stages for new Canadian works and little interest on the part of Artistic Directors to actively search out and develop this genre.
Perspectives from Playwrights Canada Press: An Interview with Angela Rebeiro
Authors: Ratsoy Ginny
Published: June 2023

Angela Rebeiro is Executive Director of Playwrights Union of Canada and the publisher of Playwrights Canada Press, publishing imprint of the PUC. She has been with the organization since 1992.

Ginny Ratsoy interviewed Angela Rebeiro in August of 1998 in Toronto. The interview was updated in early December.
Talonbooks: Publishing from the Margins
Authors: Hayward Michael
Published: June 2023

A history of Talonbooks is simultaneously the history of many of the specialized, small to mid-sized independent publishers in Canada. Their stories were not penned by Horatio Alger: there is not a “rags to riches” tale amongst the lot. In fact there are no material riches in the picture at all.
Industrials for the Social Services
Authors: Bouzek Don
Published: June 2023

Dandng in the Minefields

I was realizing today that it’s fifteen years since I did St. George / The Dragon at a Canadian Labour Congress Educational at the Canadian Auto Workers school in Port Elgin. That show irrevocably altered the theatre work I created.
Pulp Fiction: A Photo Installation
Authors: CondÉ Carol , Beveridge Karl
Published: June 2023

We met in 1967 and have been working together for almost twenty-five years. In 1969 we had moved to New York to seek fame and fortune as sculptors and painters. We became politicized there, partly in reaction to the insane competitiveness of the art market but also in response to the larger politics of feminism, anti-racism and the left. In 1975 we became involved with a collective named Art and Language and produced a magazine titled The Fox. It became notorious for its critical discussion of the New York art scene and raised, along with the work of many other artists, political issues in relation to the production of art.
Westray: The Long Way Home
Authors: O’neill Chris , Schwartz Ken
Published: June 2023

There are times when a confluence of circumstance and personality come together to make a hitherto unthought of partnership possible. In 1994, such a confluence led to a unique collaboration between the United Steelworkers of America and Two Planks and a Passion Theatre that lasted for the next two years and led to a national tour of a Canadian work developed by the artistic directors of the company.
Spoken and Unspoken: When Theatre Meets Labour
Authors: Salverson Julie
Published: June 2023

Foucault has pointed out that any body of knowledge depends on systems of practice and belief, principles of organization, assumptions that are more – or less – examined. Recently, notions of “narrative” and of “informing fictions” have been used to refer to “uncertified sets of assumptions and procedures” (Des Pres 217) that order and inform a practice. Fictions transform and regenerate themselves, but they also restrict. The following is an exchange of e-mail letters between me and Vancouver actor/writer/clown Steven Hill, in which we try to nudge at some of the spoken and unspoken “narratives” evoked when theatre meets organized labour.
The athleticism as a type of the motor activity of the applicants of the higher education: characteristics and effectiveness of the classes
Authors: Dakhno A. O. , Slobodianiuk O. V.
Published: June 2023

Studying in the higher education institutions is characterised by intellectual stress and a decrease in the level of the physical activity among students, which is due to an increase in the time spent on educational activities.

The physical activity promotes health, improves the functional state of the systems, increases physical fitness and performance in the applicants of the higher education institutions. Its deficit has a negative impact on the physical condition of this contingent.

One of the effective types of physical activity and effective means of the physical education of the applicants in the higher education institutions is athletics.

Today, athletics is a popular form of the physical activity among the applicants og the higher education. The number of people involved in various types of artistic gymnastics is growing.

The purpose of the study: to characterise and reveal the effectiveness of systematic athletic training by the applicants of the higher education institutions. Research methods: theoretical analysis and generalisation of scientific and methodological literature.

Results of the study. The general characteristics of athleticism are considered. The effectiveness of systematic training in this type of motor activity by the applicants of the higher education institutions is studied.

Conclusions. Athleticism is a health-improving direction of bodybuilding, which is based on the use of complexes of physical exercises of power orientation with different burdens. Athletic gymnastics is an effective means of improving health, increasing the level of physical fitness and performance in the applicants of the higher education institutions.

Prospects for further research: to develop a programme for improving strength in the applicants of the higher education institutions by means of athletics.