bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Fictional Family: in Drama, Education and Groupwork
Authors: Gold Muriel , Anderson Raye
Published: June 2023

In recent years, texts for and about drama teaching in recent years have tended to focus on the theoretical examination of old methods. There’s not been much in the way of the new or unusual in terms of actual practice. Much of the work described in “The Fictional Family: in Drama, Education and Groupwork”, Muriel Gold’s account of her teaching with a theatre class at McGill, is familiar. There’s a strong developmental drama base, the idea that teaching drama leads students towards a healthier perception of themselves, pioneered by Brian Way thirty or so years ago. Teachers, myself included, who tend to agree that Way’s approach is the most humane and effective method of introducing students to the often unexpected demands of the drama class will find echoes of themselves here. There are improvisational exercises based on Spolin’s Who, What, Why, Where tactics.
Directing Political Choices / Political Restraints
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: June 2023

The question of whether a director approaches a project from a particular ideological position or within a particular performance theory or aesthetic immediately raises a competing question. Are directors in Canada free to make such choices, given the restraints of budgets, facilities, funding agencies and – more insidiously – their own training and that of their actors, the expectations of their audiences and the pervasive influence of the dominant culture, and of film and video? If a director aims to produce work that speaks to a specific (often marginalized) community, or that grows from a particular vision of what theatre is, or can be, will she be forced to compromise so often that the final production fails to express the politics in which it was conceived? Or will he unconsciously obey theatrical conventions or cultural inscriptions of which he is not actively aware? And, anyway, should the director impose her own vision on a production, or allow it to grow from a collective rehearsal experience, or from her actors, or from the text, itself? This issue invites directors and critics to explore these questions.
Laughter in the Theatre of Mourning: The Politics of Ken Garnhum’s Beuys Buoys Boys
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

In the past decade, AIDS has entered the world’s consciousness, the photographs of people, often young men, ravaged both in body and in mind by the consequences of HIV making death startling imminent. These representations of people who have died of AIDS-related illness shape our response to what is, for many of us, our personal experience of hiv, either as carriers of the virus or as those who know carriers. As a number of critics (perhaps most notably Simon Watney) argue, the cultural production of response to hiv and aids-related illnesses is extremely important. aids, in Western culture, is seen as the social peril brought to the world by the sexual practices of gay men. The identification of aids with male homosexuality has given rise to virulent homophobia which reinforces the long-held perception in Western culture that gay sexual practices are the enactment of a death-drive which implicitly courts fatality.1 Elements of the gay community actively counter this discourse through a range of cultural interventions – the celebration of Gay Pride Day, the demonstrations of ACT UP and in the theatre, numerous plays from As Is, The Normal Heart, Warm Wind in China, The Panel, Flesh and Blood to Angels in America. Jeff Nunokawa has suggested that the status of these sorts of interventions is problematic for, while they respond to the virulent homophobia which sees homosexuality as death and aids as the logical consequence of that sexuality, precisely because they are responses, they serve to reinforce the very homophobia which they challenge. As Nunokawa writes, “[I]f the majority culture is not inclined to recognize the death of the male homosexual, it is also not inclined to recognize anything else about him ...” (319).
Teaching Acting: Four college programs
Authors: Mann Laurin M.
Published: June 2023

Do actors need training? Can acting really be taught? And, are acting schools, colleges and universities the proper venues for the training of actors? Many people see acting as so much like real life that they question why performers need to be taught the craft. Anyone who has ever “trod the boards” knows why. In real life we perform instinctively, reacting to what goes on around us. When we are on stage, we must consciously access our instinctive and intuitive reactions while moving in pre-arranged patterns and speaking someone else’s words. It takes years of training and practice to act “like life”.
Geometry in Venice; Possible Worlds & A Short History of Night; How Could You, Mrs. Dick?; The Dreamland & Girls in the Gang
Authors: Mackenzie Michael , Mighton John , Rodger Douglas , Storey Raymond , Roby John , Skinner Ches
Published: June 2023

These six plays make up a significant part of publications by Playwrights Canada Press in 1992. Apart from the fact that all but one had its initial performance in Toronto and area, very little ties them together. Maybe that’s good. These pieces, therefore, represent a diversity of styles and genres produced professionally in Canada in the last 2 or 3 years. One caveat, however: do new plays not get produced outside the Centre (Toronto) any more, or if they do, are they published and made available to the reading public and potential producers via other publishing companies? If one requirement for publication is that a script be produced professionally (and since these six plays represent most of what Playwrights Canada published in 1992), the question then is: are new plays not being produced outside the Centre?
Lina Chartrand
Authors: Song Siren
Published: June 2023

Writer, poet, pla ywright, publisher, director, dramaturge, screenwriter. Lina was born in 1948 in the franco-Ontarian community of Timmins, Ontario. She was the eldest child and only daughter of Leo Chartrand, a diamond driller in Timmins’ gold mines, and the late Leocadie Chartrand, homemaker. Lina was one of four children. She was predeceased by her brother Yves, and survived by two brothers, Maurice and Richard, and by her nieces and nephews, Christina, Eric, Marie-Claire, Roch, and Valerie
Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value; The CTR Anthology: Fifteen Play from Canadian Theatre Review; George Bernard Shaw and Christopher Newton: Explorations of Shavian Theatre; A Vision of Canada: Herman Voaden’s Dramatic Works 1928-1945
Authors: Goodwin Jill Tomasson , Lecker Robert , Filewod Alan , Garebian Keith , Wagner Anton , Plant Richard
Published: June 2023

... to the new format for CTR’s book review section. As you may notice, we have made several changes, this introductory commentary among them. To apprise readers of recent developments in Canadian theatre and drama publishing, CTR has now increased substantially the number of pages that it devotes to book reviews. As well, these reviews are longer, allowing the reviewers greater scope to reflect and comment upon pertinent questions, issues, and challenges. Accompanied by pictures of the book covers, a major review article will lead this section each time. In this issue, for example, Richard Plant addresses the idea of canons and canonizing in Canadian theatre, and discusses how most of the authors in these volumes appear to accept some kind of canon formation, while others interrogate, and even reject, the notion.
The Motor Trade & The Affections of May; Yankee Notions; The Saints and Apostles; Taking Liberties & Into
Authors: Foster Norm , Chislett Anne , Storey Raymond , Carley Dave , Snyder Liz
Published: June 2023

Set between newly designed covers which superimpose the title and a photograph on a green faux-marbre design, these four volumes represent the fall releases from Playwrights Canada Press. The design is “classy” in the sense that it reads as “stylish” and in the sense that “stylish” means of a better class than others, and invokes in the reader’s mind, before the covers are even opened, that this is a play worth reading. Indeed, most of the plays are winners of (or at least nominees for) various awards. If you didn’t know that these plays are offered as a micro-canon of Canadian Theatre, this staid-looking design helps you to come to that conclusion.
Vancouver Teaching Do-It-Yourself at Studio 58
Authors: Lazarus John
Published: June 2023

The theatre school where I trained as an actor was, and is, one of Canada’s best. And yet in all the time I was there – 1966 to ’69 – we were taught nothing about creating our own plays or helping develop new plays by others. It was never mentioned that we might ever act in a new play or meet a living playwright. Plays were handed down from on high, which meant New York, London, Paris and Moscow; playwrights were foreign, vaguely superhuman, and usually dead. On graduation we expected to do the auditions and wait by the phone for someone else to cast us in plays that someone further else had written. I understand this was the prevailing attitude throughout Canadian theatre schools at the time.
Battle Fatigue Notes from the Funding Front
Authors: DiCenzo Maria
Published: June 2023

“Canadian arts funding has been effectively frozen since the mid-1970s (until it was cut 10 per cent last year), and we’ve seen the two responses characteristic of arts organizations in financial difficulty: the commercialization of programming and the closing of doors.” Arthur Milner, The Globe and Mail, 18 Feb. 1994

“The most unethical thing you can do in the business world is to design something that has no profit.” Leo Kolber, President, Cemp Investments Ltd, in Artists and Entrepreneurs: A Step by Step Guide for Arts Organizations
The Montreal Fringe: Success on a Mountain of Suds
Authors: Cottreau Deborah
Published: June 2023

Unknown to most people in Quebec, westerner Kris Kieren and her partner, Nick Morra, have become two vital, albeit youthful, contributors to Montreal’s cultural scene. Four years ago, against all financial and political odds, with a little sweat, a lot of hard work, and an impressive team of volunteers, Kieren and Morra found an answer to Montreal’s alternative theatre needs by successfully launching the first Montreal Fringe Festival. Today, the Fringe is an annual event, firmly entrenched both municipally as one of the city’s many summer festivals, despite a paucity of local and provincial funding, and nationally, as the first in a series of ten summer fringe festivals to take place across Canada (the Manotick Fringe in Ontario is currently on hold until 1995 pending funding pledges). The Montreal Fringe Festival has become increasingly popular with local theatre lovers of all ages and of all cultural persuasions. To the credit of its founders, it recently has attracted not only local theatre artists, but theatre artists from across Canada and from around the globe.
Silent Screams of the Invisible, Visible Minority: African Nova Scotian Theatre
Authors: Mortley Basil
Published: June 2023

It is possible to visit Nova Scotia, become intoxicated with the mystifying shores of the Atlantic, enchanted with the spectacular autumn transformation of its maple foliage, yet remain oblivious to the fact that amongst its rocky terrain, descendants of the earliest Canadians of African descent are here in residence. There are African Nova Scotian communities scattered throughout the length and breadth of the province, many of which are hidden, like dirty secrets, far away from public scrutiny. Even today, these communities exist under extremely adverse economic and social conditions.
Defining an Aesthetic: African Canadian Playwrights in Vancouver
Authors: Insell Celeste
Published: June 2023

Concepts of beauty for the African diaspora can be traced back to the aesthetic and spiritual beliefs of various ethnic groups in Africa which were amalgamated over the five hundred years in which the diaspora was scattered. Today, these cultural values remain rooted in the approach that people of African heritage take in the practice of various art forms. The concept of beauty united to the spirit is central to the aesthetics of West Africa – objects of beauty possess a spiritual as well as external beauty, with even the concept of beauty differing greatly from that of the European. The Yoruba, Ibo, Kongo, Mande and Hausa, all West African tribes, were the predominant groups brought to North America during the slave trade. The Yoruba and the Kongo were the most influential cultures and their influence has prevailed throughout the centuries.
The History of the Village of the Small Huts: Parts I – VIII
Authors: Hollingsworth Michael , Brask Per
Published: June 2023

Since the very beginning of his career as a theatre artist, Michael Hollingsworth has been, as they say, pushing the envelope. Since Strawberry Fields, Clear Light and Transworld in the 1970s, he has treated theatre audiences to highly idiosyncratic views of cultural and political conditions and he has done so through an exploration of intensely imaginative theatrical forms. For the past ten years he has dedicated most of his writing to the project The History of the Village of the Small Huts Parts I – VIII which dramatizes, indeed theatricalizes, situations in Canadian history from New France (Part I) to World War II (Part VIII). All eight parts were produced in instalments by Video Cabaret International between 1985 and 1994, and the project will be continued in The Global Village.
Look to the Lady: Re-examining Women’s Theatre
Authors: Peerbaye Soraya
Published: June 2023

On 29 March 1995, Nightwood Theatre held a panel discussion entitled Art in Your Face, on the occasion of their Fifteenth Season and their Tenth Annual Groundswell Festival. The subject of the panel was Women’s theatre development: What is it? What should it be? The panellists were, in the words of Artistic Co-Director Alisa Palmer, “historic and important figures of our past, present and future”. Sally Han moderated. This is an edited transcript of the panellists’ opening statements.
Permission Granted: Romeo & Juliet
Authors: Stanley Sarah
Published: June 2023

The start of Die In Debt and the mounting of the show that got us going was a remarkable time in my development as an artist and has changed how I see myself and the world that surrounds me. I write about it because I know that it happened and because I long for the freedom I remember feeling at the outset of it all. The freedom to choose based on my understanding of the universe as opposed to any dominating one. It was a time when I discovered my own sense of entitlement, gave myself permission to create, to speak. Permission is very rarely granted. The notion is that it is, is a lie. It must be taken.
Twenty-Five Years of One-Night Stands
Authors: Kemp David
Published: June 2023

Standing on a make-shift stage in the lush gardens of the Canadian Ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, with a large Canadian flag flying at the masthead by the front gate and eight ambassadors from various countries in the audience, I experienced a sudden and unexpected attack of nerves. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that my one-man show, A Child Growing Up, was the first piece of Canadian culture to play under the auspices of the Canadian Embassy in Lima in living memory. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to let down the Canadian Ambassador or, worse yet, my country, but the pressure was certainly evident and given the long history of the show and the countless times I had performed it, I was more than a little surprised.
Shared Anxiety
Authors: Walker George F. , Wallace Robert , Nyman Ed
Published: June 2023

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this volume is its very existence. Except for Theatre of the Film Noir and Tough! all of the plays in this anthology have been available to the general public in some published form before.1 Thus this volume represents a very significant publishing choice: rather than apply its limited publishing resources to previously unpublished or unavailable work, The Coach House Press has chosen to produce an anthology of Walker’s relatively well-known plays. This choice signals an important moment in English Canadian theatre, I believe. In the publisher’s eyes, at least, Walker’s texts are now popular enough to make it commercially viable to re-publish them in an anthology destined primarily, one would guess, for the classroom. It also signals a new critical interest (whether anticipating it or responding to it remains to be seen). In producing this volume, the publishers are conferring a status on Walker’s plays that is rare in Canadian letters – they are beginning the long process of canonizing his work. Canonicity, of course, has its theoretical pitfalls; but what a significant moment in Canadian theatre that we should find ourselves even able to consider canonizing one of our own.
Theatre Artists Speaking…
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

In this issue the discussion and analysis of theatre-making is by theatre artists themselves and naturally enough takes up issues that they confront in their own work. The great diversity of concerns evident in these contributions would resist any attempt to knit them together thematically. But they emphatically draw attention to a cultural heterogeneity in theatre practice that challenges the kind of categories which customarily organize our thinking and experience of theatre – and which govern the ways in which it is funded and socially accommodated.
The Far Away Nearby: The Canadian Theatre in Alaska
Authors: Hood Michael
Published: June 2023

Canada and Alaska share much more than a common border, salmon harvest controversies, and seemingly endless streams of tourists. In addition to identifiable cultural, economic, geographical, and climatic similarities, and beyond the shared eccentricity that many people from other parts of the world ascribe to the inhabitants of the “last frontier”, and Canada’s “kinder, gentler America”, Alaska and Canada share a taste for independence and for art that has produced a growing and vital Alaska-Canada theatre connection. Canadian road companies of major commercial properties now play regularly in Alaska’s larger cities; Canadian authors have found receptive producers and audiences for their work in a variety of venues; and students have found Canadian drama a rich and powerful resource for their study of Canada and its people.
A Cry from the City of Virgins
Authors: Poulton Cody , Juro Kara
Published: June 2023

CAST OF CHARACTERS:

Arisawa Bottle (Arisawa’s fiancee) Taguchi, a man Yukiko, a virgin (Taguchi’s sister) Dr Frank N. Shame (Yukiko’s fiance) Nurses Doctors Old Men Four Old Beggars Old Man A, Old Man B A Commander of a Platoon Soldiers Three Women in Air-raid Hoods (Frank’s assistants) Townspeople Man in Diapers Girl in Bib Dr Lifecare Intern
Lethbridge: Interactive Theatre in the Nursing Classroom
Authors: Doolittle Lisa , Kulig Judith C.
Published: June 2023

Cooperation between the Department of Theatre Arts and the School of Nursing in a liberal studies university resulted in a creative way to teach both drama and post-RN students about issues relevant to each discipline. The project incorporated interactive theatre to assist post-RN students in learning family assessment and intervention skills. This is a report concerning the background to the project, the process, the implementation and recommendations for other similar endeavours.
Personal Reflections on Blood Bath
Authors: Mars Tanya
Published: June 2023

Level I. Press play. Click. Play. Click click. Load. Soundtrack: a heartbeat rhythm./boom boom. boom boom. boom boom./I am armed with a .38. An abandoned van sits in a desolate landscape. The back door is open. (Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom.) I don’t know what I’m waiting for. (Boom boom. Boom boom.) Whatever is out there, it isn’t friendly. (Boom boom. Boom boom.) I think I see something. (Boom boom.) Where? (Boom. boom.) My finger caresses the trigger. (Boom. boom.) There! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! (Boom. boom. Argh!!!) And there! (Boom. boom. Argh!!!) Bang! Bang! (Boom. boom. Argh!!!) And there … click click. Bang! splat. got me! Red blood fills the screen. Empty. Fade to red.
A Cyclopean, Evil Eye: On Performance, Gender and Photography
Authors: Fischer Barbara
Published: June 2023

One of the questions which continues to be of interest concerning performance art is its relation to photography, and through photography to gender and sexual identity. At a superficial level, of course, photography has been a medium of convenience to performance artists – one of the few ways in which much past work now exists. However, as Mary Kelly and others have argued, performance has been seen to be much more deeply a part of that tradition in modern art which, at least since Baudelaire, opposed the intrusion of photographic reproduction. Performance, like abstract expressionism with its irrefutable presence of the artistic gesture, or minimalism with its emphasis on experience and duration, would seem to be not merely resistant to photography, but entirely opposed to its “cyclopean evil eye”, the distinctly malevolent look that converted “every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image” (Morris 203). Refuting photography, performance appears as the logical end-point of the modernist path of self-reflexiveness – a path that was initiated by painting in response to the technology of photography, as the affirmation and self-definition of art as purely subjective, living gesture, and as the pure inscription of bodily gesture and presence in the work of art. In fact, against those tendencies within the avant-garde of the 1960s that expelled gesture, denied expression, and contested the notion of an essential creativity through photography, performance was the return with a vengeance of artistic subjectivity in the figure of the artist (in privileged masculine terms) himself: his person, his image, his gestures (Kelly 95). As Kelly writes further on, “the discourse of the body in art ismore than a repetition of the eschatological voices of abstract expressionism: the actual experience of the body fulfills the prophecy of the painted mark” (Kelly 96).
Performance: A Performance: A working script in three movements
Authors: Paterson Andrew James
Published: June 2023

My chosen word for today is performance. A performance is a presentation – usually, but not always – presented to an audience. A performance can be a theatrical presentation, a discursive presentation, and/or a ritual which becomes a presentation when the possible positional roles of an audience are acknowledged by the performer or performers. A performance can also refer to an obligation – an obligation to either challenge audience expectations or else simply satisfy or fulfil those expectations. The obligatory meaning of the word performance can also refer to a more intimate performer/audience situation – for example; student and teacher, or, in some cases, prostitute and client. Performance can indeed refer to forms and instances of role-play – sexual, psychological, et cetera, including combinations.
Doctor Thomas Neill Cream (Mystery at McGill), Saucy Jack
Authors: Fennario David , Pollock Sharon , Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Is it no more than an irony that the two playwrights who might best typify Canadian drama in the late 1970s and early ’80s have both angrily repudiated the professional theatre industry, have both founded their own theatre companies outside of the domain of PACT, Equity and the arts councils? The recent careers – or anti-careers – of David Fennario and Sharon Pollock offer an intriguing object lesson for those who choose to look closely at the way in which our system of theatrical production disempowers the playwright.
Shakespeare’s World of Death: The Early Tragedies, Drama and Feeling
Authors: Courtney Richard , Bamford Karen
Published: June 2023

Richard Courtney, Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, has published widely in the fields of drama and education. The two books under consideration illustrate diverse aspects of his work. Shakespeare’s World of Death provides an introduction to the early tragedies of Shakespeare; Drama and Feeling develops an aesthetic theory of drama as a primary human activity, central to the creation of consciousness and self-consciousness.
The ATP Experience: Giving Good First Production in a Supportive Atmosphere
Authors: White Bob
Published: June 2023

New play development at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary is centred on playRites, our annual festival of new work. Four mainstage productions presented in rep, as well as a host of ancillary events (workshop readings, noon-hour “brief new works”, competitions, cabarets, youth showcases, site-specific performance art and more), crowd our calendar from mid-January through to the beginning of March. We bill playRites as “the Hottest Six Weeks in Winter” and, after ten years, it has become the signature event for the company.
To Keep the Seventh Fire Lit: Script Development at De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig
Authors: King-Odjig Alanis
Published: June 2023

De-ba-jeh-mud. Storyteller. What we are doing is De-ba-jeh-mu-jig(ing). Just kidding! Confused? Don’t be. This is the Anishinaabe theatre group based on the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve, Manitoulin Island. We began in 1984. I wish to share with you my experiences with the group. This article aims to do as its title suggests, and this writer takes best insight from her own experience.
A Deeper Questioning of Assumptions
Authors: Springate Michael
Published: June 2023

Dramaturgy will certainly continue into the next century. The “job” will carry, as it does today, three distinguishable functions.

The first is that of gatekeeper. Someone is needed to read play submissions and generally organize writer-relations, including workshops, commissions, and readings. Byand large the parameters of this function are set by the size and nature of the theatre for which one is working. In spite of the integrity of persons fulfilling these positions, it is frequently a job of artistic compromise and some deception.
In Confidence, Miracle Mother
Authors: Hollingsworth Margaret , Kimmett Deborah , Graham Catherine
Published: June 2023

In Confidence by Margaret Hollingsworth and Miracle Mother by Deborah Kimmett are plays that invite both challenging and trite productions, depending what one thinks they are about. Publisher’s blurbs describe In Confidence as “portrait of a friendship” and Miracle Mother as a “wickedly funny look at the entire birth experience”, but to produce these plays simply as thematic pieces would, I think, seriously undermine their value. Hollingsworth herself underlines this point in her backcover blurb when she draws her attention to her choice to “break a few theatrical rules” by structuring her play as two consecutive monologues. Her characters, women in their late forties who have been good friends but who now live thousands of miles apart and no longer communicate, are both onstage throughout. In the first act we meet Chrissie, whose talk turns largely around issues of sexuality and includes a hilarious description of her trip with Mariana to a Yonge Street sex shop to buy a vibrator. When showing the audience the vibrator later in the play, Chrissie falls into a flashback of incest and suddenly earlier stories about how her father never spoke and she herself would never allow her husband in her daughter’s room take on new meaning.
Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama
Authors: Brask Per , DiCenzo Maria
Published: June 2023

In his foreword, Per Brask explains that the idea for the book was motivated by the difficulties involved in putting together suitable material for a Canadian Drama course: “Apart from being unable to choose from the many fine unpublished plays that characterize our history, I was also unable to offer my students good essays discussing the contemporary scene, i.e., as current as possible, without contravening copyright laws or endlessly circulating journal articles” (9). In the age of the do-it-yourself courseware package, this is getting less difficult, but there is no doubt that a published volume of essays is preferable to mounds of xeroxed pages and, better still, it becomes available to a wider readership (the need, as Brask notes, is certainly there). But what distinguishes a collection of essays from a special issue of a journal? And, more specifically, how can such a collection be shaped for student readers? The role of the editor is crucial in creating an effective analytical framework to contain and contextualize the individual contributions. While many of the papers in Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama offer useful and insightful discussions of various areas of dramatic literature and theatre work in Canada, the rationale for this particular “collection” remains elusive – as does the title which might be more accurately termed “Issues in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Drama”.
The Grotowski Influence: A Reassessment
Authors: Wolford Lisa
Published: June 2023

In the years following Jerzy Grotowski’s much-publicized “exit from the theatre"—his announcement, following the premiere of Apocalypsis cum figuris in 1968, that he no longer intended to develop new productions—critics have debated not only the significance of Grotowski’s subsequent research for more recognizable forms of theatre practice, but also the relevance and lasting impact of a so-called “Grotowski method” of actor training. Charles Marowitz suggests that “as an ’influence’, Grotowski’s dynamic corporality came and went within a period of about ten years,” and that “the Grotowski touch, like Afghan coats, worry-beads and long hair, became part of the cliches” of the late ’60s and early ’70s (Marowitz 5). Polish critic Kazimierz Braun, as summarized by Halina Filipowicz, describes Grotowski as “a has-been who left no trace in the collective cultural memory or the current theatre practice” (Filipowicz 181).
Open Secrets: Mou Sen’s File Zero
Authors: Salter Denis
Published: June 2023

China’s Mou Sen is a survivor in a context under pressure, as are the characters in File Zero, who are robbed of whatever minimal powers they possess. Their civil rights can be violated by the state with impunity, and they are condemned to wander, Kafka-esque, through bureaucratic labyrinths from which there is absolutely no way out. Mou Sen, 32, is the artistic director of the Beijing-based Xi Ju Che Jian ("Garage Theatre” or “Theatre Factory") which he established in 1993. It’s the only fully independent theatre company in mainland China, and Mou guards his independence very carefully, resisting state intervention at all costs. He’s not interested in receiving government subsidies, and stages his productions in abandoned buildings condemned for demolition, or in spaces borrowed for only short periods of time from established organizations in Beijing such as the Zong Zheng Theatre and the Beijing Film Institute. Although Mou has been associated in the past with such venerable state-sanctioned institutions as the People’s Art Theatre in Beijing, he never wants to hold an official position of any kind with a government-controlled or funded organization. Fearing both ideological and aesthetic correctness, Mou even guards his independence from the theatre profession itself. He has no interest in the conventional, naturalistic repertoire of Western classics that dominates China’s stages, and instead concentrates his energies on the development of entirely new pieces. Rather than work with a company of professionally-trained actors, he prefers to collaborate with dissident amateurs and with artists from non-theatre disciplines who don’t have any bad habits to unlearn and who have a healthy disrespect for directorial authority and the patriarchal values it inscribes.
Surviving “Survivors”: A Personal Assessment
Authors: Shantz Valere
Published: June 2023

When I was approached about participating in the “Survivors of the Ice Age” Festival and Symposium to be held in May of 1996,1 felt a bit ambiguous about the whole project, primus was setting up what seemed to be an ambitious venture—they wanted to gather groups from across Canada and beyond to participate in a five-day festival dedicated to looking at company survival. My role would be to coordinate the symposium section of the festival—daily seminars and workshops dedicated to the examination of specific companies and their abilities to survive and thrive.
FarAway Home
Authors: Peters Helen
Published: June 2023

Far Away Home, a play for children, is the latest play of eight years work by PRIMUSTheatre; it is the fifthoriginal play created and performed by Donald Kitt, Tannis Kowalchuk, Stephen Lawson, Karin Randoja and Ker Wells under the direction of PRIMUS’S founder and director Richard Fowler. This play like other plays and works by PRIMUS (Dog Day, Scarabesque, Alkoremmi and The Night Room) is alternative theatre which has established the group as "Winnipeg’s leading alternative theatre" (Toronto Star, October 1991).With Far Away Home PRIMUS must be recognized as English Canada’s leading alternative theatre company.
Character Lines
Authors: Healey Helen
Published: June 2023

When Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets was given a script workshop at Tarragon Theatre in May, 1990, freelance artist Helen Healey was invited to attend and to sketch her impressions. These pencil sketches are a few of the many executed in the course of that workshop.

Healey, whose haunting work graces the cover of The Other Side of the Dark, has an ongoing professional relationship with Judith Thompson. Most recentl y she designed the poster image for Sled at Tarragon Thea tre.
Canadian Grotesque
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

Theatre audiences in England discovered Judith Thompson’s work in 1992 when the Gate Theatre presented The Crackwalker, directed by James Macdonald, from 5 March until 4 April. The production was praised by critics and led the Hampstead Theatre to produce Lion in the Streets in April of 1993 – a production which was acclaimed by critics – and the Battersea Arts Centre to produce Loose Change’s production of White Biting Dog – which received less critical attention than the two other productions – from 19 November to 23 December of the same year. These productions, by companies which are well-regarded as important theatrical innovators, not only mark the recognition of Thompson as a major voice within English-language theatre, but occur within a particular context of London theatre in the early 1990s. That context establishes the terms for the acceptance of Thompson’s work by English audiences, an acceptance which is predicated on a containment of her theatrical voice as that of the “other”.
Off the 401
Authors: Thompson Judith
Published: June 2023

Off the 401 was first produced as part of Stolen Lands, a multi-author play by Ground Zero Productions which toured Ontario in 1995, directed by Stephen Bush and designed by Allan Watts.

Caution

Copyright Jud ith Thompson. This play is fully prot ected under the copy right laws of Canada and all othe r coun tries of the Copyright Union .Cha nges to the script are express ly forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the author.
Holding On and Letting Go
Authors: Howard Ruth
Published: June 2023

Community Plays? Designing them? I try to remember what it’s like. I see a solemn yet festive scene on a beach: a giant papier-maché puppet head - the prized work of myself and many others - in flames. The participants gather round, tearfully eye, I see picnics, dances, music-making. I see oceans of white silk in large cardboard boxes....
The Cosmopolitan Classroom
Authors: Fedoruk Ronald
Published: June 2023

For a few days in March, students at the University of British Columbia occupied the office of President David Strangway, their reason being dissatisfaction with the University’s decision to raise tuition fees for foreign students. This decision could mean that some international graduate students could be paying up to triple last year’s fees to go to school here.1 In the face of continuing budget cuts to education, it is understandable that the university should cast about for alternative sources of income. Raising fees is to be part of the larger proposed solution to budgetary problems and may be justified on those terms alone. But the arguments surrounding this issue reveal our ambivalence toward students from abroad. There is more to this decision than merely economics, and in this context, it is worth examining the value of international students and what their presence means to the university.
The Apprenticeship Program of Associated Designers of Canada
Authors: Hume Charles
Published: June 2023

Associated Designers of Canada is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the status of set, costume, lighting, and sound designers in this country. The organization has over 150 members from coast to coast. Their goal is to improve working conditions, promote professional and public recognition of the designer’s role, and increase communication among Canadian designers.
New Art Book
Authors: Garnhum Ken
Published: June 2023

Listen to this. It begins with a clean pig, pale green ribbon ’round it’s neck, bow at the top, flanked by two child angels in soft yellow robes, and followed by a child dressed for winter. A rough hand holding a rifle pointed north northeast, a crushed tube of titanium white and a toothbrush, bristles up. resting on a plain glass more than half filled with water. Follow the pig. A smudged, blackish crest hovers above the glass.
Perspectives on recent set design by Ken MacDonald
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: June 2023

7 Stories, by Morris Panych, designed by Camille Tseng, the Frederick Wood Theatre, University of British Columbia Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid at the Arts Club, Joan McCloud’s 2000 at the Vancouver Playhouse with mention of Camille Tseng’s set design for Morris Panych’s 7 Stories at The Frederick Wood Theatre at the University of British Columbia
Three In The Back, Two In The Head
Authors: Sherman Jason , Verdecchia Guillermo
Published: June 2023

Onstage at Simon Fraser University’s main theatre is the office of CIA Officer John Doyle. (Doyle: I ama GS12, which is practically nothing. I sit here andfrom this little office I sendand receive messages, cables....)It is an office composed in blues and greys. The floor is slate ; the desk various tones of blue-grey. There is a side table with a model of the Avro Arrow and a copy of Richard Sapper’s “Tizio” ha logen lamp on it, and a dark bl ue, almost black, sec tional couch. All the surfaces in this room are level, uncluttered, clean. The upstage wall of the theatre forms the rear wall of the office, and black scrim across the apron of the stage the other. The audience is disposed in two ha lves, in an alley configuration on either side of this office. Collaborators Norman Armour and Andreas Kahre have chosen this arrangement as the set for their production of Jason Sherman’s award-winning Three in the Back, Two in the Head.
Return to Russia
Authors: Doolittle Joyce
Published: June 2023

Notes from The Twelfth World Congress, General Assembly and International Festival of Performances of ASSITEJ (The International Association of Theatre for Children and Youth/Association Internationale du Theatre pour I’En fance et la Jeunesse).
Some Thoughts about Directing Here Lies Henry
Authors: Brooks Daniel
Published: June 2023

Here Lies Henry was first produced in workshop at Festival Antigonish in July of 1994, then in April of ’95 at Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto. A Canadian and a Scottish tour followed, as did a second run at Buddies. The play was created by Daniel MacIvor and Daniel Brooks. Performed by MacIvor. Directed by Brooks.
The Nth Degree: An Interview with Guillermo Verdecchia
Authors: Harvie Jennifer
Published: June 2023

Guillermo Verdecchia is an actor, writer, director, and translator. His work is seen and heard on stages, screens, and radios around the globe. Within Canada, he is probably best known for his one-person semi-autobiographical play Fronteras Americanas (Coach House, 1993), which won the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 1993, as well as a Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and which Verdecchia adapted into a short film entitled Crucero/Crossroads. With Daniel Brooks, he co-authored and performed in The Noam Chomsky Lectures, and with Marcus Youssef, A Line in the Sand. The Terrible But Incomplete Journals of John D. - Verdecchia’s play for an actor, a cello, a cellist, and a soundscape - is published in this issue of CTR.
Painted, Tainted, Sainted, Plague of the Gorgeous & Other Tales, Split Britches
Authors: Dicenzo Maria , Gilbert Sky , Armstrong Gordon , Thomas Colin , Blackley Stuart , Gregg Kevin , Lowe Lisa , Weiss Peter Elliot , Case Sue-Ellen , Kerr Rosalind
Published: June 2023

This issue offers readers two review articles, both challenging and fascinating in different ways. Rosalind Kerr provides a theoretical framework for three recent collections of gay and lesbian plays and raises important issues concerning the politics of this expanding body of work. Ric Knowles contributes a vivid review of Festival de Théâtre des Amériques for 1997 and describes what was clearly a powerful series of productions from a range of contexts. Both articles remind us that theatre artists have a seemingly inexhaustible store of energy and creativity and the ability to confront and entertain audiences on intellectual, emotional, and physical levels in new and wonderful ways.
Voices From the Landwash: 11 Newfoundland Playwrights, stars in the sky morning: Collective Plays of Newfoundland and Labrador
Authors: Lynde Denyse , Peters Helen , Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

Although both Voices From the Landioash and stars ill the sky morning showcase the drama of Newfoundland and Labrad or, the volumes differ significantly in focus. Both texts have been prepared and are introduced with critical rigour and a sincere commitment to the material and artists involved. However, with one exception, all the plays in Voices From the Lunduiasltare works of single authorship. Conversely, stars in the sky morning features the products of the Collective tradition that has had such a strong influence on Newfoundland theatre. The two anthologies are thus highly complementary and combine toillustr ate the breadth and frequent richness of an intense and doggedly independent theatrical tradition.
Protest Theatre in France and Canada
Authors: Ganapathy-Dore Geetha
Published: June 2023

Robert Etiemble, an eminent Professor of Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, once remarked, “comparisons are misleading.” The following study has been written with this oft-quoted remark in mind for Canada and France; though connected by colonial history, they are separated by official policy (multiculturalism and integration) in their recent evolution. Though Canada is six times the size of France, the number of professional theatres in France is higher than in Canada.1 Canada is a commonwealth country that takes in immigrants from former British colonies, while France, a former colonial power, is trying to preserve its cultural identity in a growing European community. Both Canada and France are valiantly resisting the impact of American culture in their territories, and one way of doing this seems to be by helping the voices of minorities to be heard. I am neither a specialist in French theatre2 nor a resident of Canada, but my qualification for a comparative analysis of protest theatres in France and Canada is that I have been living in France for the past fifteen years after leaving India. I am only too willing to represent hyphenating cultures, as would any person who lives between languages at the end of this century.
Playwright Comes of Age with Counter Offence
Authors: Sudon Winston
Published: June 2023

Rahul Varma is honest and uncompromising in his work as a playwright. As founding member and Artistic Director of Teesri Duniya (an East Indian theatre company), his plays target racism, injustice and inequality in Canadian society. The broad spectrum of his work includes Isolated Incident, about the killing of a black man by a racist white cop; Equal Wages, dealing with wage disparity between men and women; Job Stealer, exploring the perception that immigrants are stealing jobs from Canadian-born workers; and Land Where The Trees Talk, about the North Bay Hydro Electric Project and its effects on the Cree Indians.
On Rana Bose’s Five or Six Characters in Search of Toronto
Authors: Khankhoje Maya
Published: June 2023

Reviewing a play is not an easy task. Reviewing a play seen years ago is an even more difficult task. Reviewing a play by Rana Bose is a daunting, if not impossible task. Or so it appeared to me, until I read the play, read what others had to say about it (and then promptly set it aside), reread the play and then remembered why I had liked it so much to begin with. The production I am referring to took place September 1993 at the Strathern Centre, Montreal, produced by Montreal Serai.
Contemporary Plays by Women of Color: An Anthology
Authors: Uno Roberta , Perkins Kathy , Ford-Smith Honor
Published: June 2023

Roberta Uno and Kathy Perkins have put together a riveting collection of plays from the United States called Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. This unique anthology brings together a multitude of Latina, African American, Asian and Native American voices which tell richly varied stories of racialized existence in America. The collection is provocative because it challenges us to think about the complexity of the politics of race, gender, class, sexuality and disability. Given the burden of demands often placed on the work of individual women of colour, this collection is sensibly and firmly heterogeneous in voice and form. It takes delicious liberties with the English language, undermining its limits, even as it also challenges and bends the limits of “western ” theatre. It provides essential reading for both students and teachers of theatre and drama and is a proverbial “pot of gold” for actors, directors and producers longing to enjoy socially engaging and entertaining scripts.
Movement – Puppet Sized
Authors: Coad Luman
Published: June 2023

Alive actor employs a range of communication tools. Voice, facial expression, body language and movement are used individually or in combination to convey a precise emotional nuance. If one of these tools is unavailable, the emotions to be projected must be altered to suit the remaining tools or those tools must be modified to project more of the emotion’s essence. Either way the emotion is portrayed in an other-than-realistic manner.
Playing With Dolls: A Personal Reflection on a Career
Authors: Duchscherer Brian
Published: June 2023

I work in the film business, making animated films with puppets. These films are not cartoons, yet neither are they quite live puppetry; they are a blend of both. Puppet animation is a performance, as much as any live presentation is; but it is a performance that is recorded in time, frame by frame. The moving, living character exists only on film. The puppet performance must somehow be created outside of time. Each second of movement is broken down into as many as twenty-four separate poses. The animator must live … feel … and act … in small steps of time.
Clown Noir
Authors: Cashman Cheryl
Published: June 2023

In the February 1996 issue of Vanity Fair, British actress Emma Thompson revealed a surprising influence upon her acting process by announcing: “I am a clown.” She went on to say that “the Tragedian plays to the gods. The Buffoon (a deformed outcast) plays mockingly for society’s beautiful people. The Clown plays from the heart. I am a clown.”
In Review, Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 1970s, Dora Mavor Moore: Pioneer of the Canadian Theatre
Authors: Saddlemyer Ann , Plant Richard , Sperdakos Paula , O’Neill Patrick B.
Published: June 2023

As contributions to the continuing discovery of Canadian theatre history, these two works provide valuable information about the development of theatre in Ontario between the First World War and the 1970s and deserve to be added to personal and public library collections for the abundance of information they contain.