bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Inventing New Social Relations: Théâtre-femmes and the Creation of the Feminist Self in Québécois Women’s Plays
Authors: Fisek Emine
Published: June 2023

In an early moment from Anne Hébert’s The Savage Season, matriarch Agnès Joncas declares, “My home is not a public place” (23). Having received news that the new priest in the village closest to her rural home is making his way over to her residence, Agnès draws a thick line between what she perceives to be the perimeters of private life (one’s home, one’s children and the relationships engendered by their enclosure) and the public domains of action (the parish, its authorities and the codes of conduct that bind them). Against Agnès’s will, however, the doors of her home are opened, the larger world floods in, and the remote, rural life to which she wishes she could bind her children, slowly begins to break apart.
1 Three Characters in Search of an Author… Dramatic in Canadian politics
Authors: Defraeye Piet
Published: June 2023

Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author starts with a dramatically imbalancing scene. A stagehand who is hammering away on some parts of the stage for a play that we are apparently about to see is interrupted by a Stage Manager concerned about the rehearsal that is soon to start. The stagehand’s muttering, “I’ve got to have time to do my work, too,” is dismissed by the Stage Manager with, “After the rehearsal. Now, come on. Get all this stuff out of here and let me set up.” Seconds later, the same Stage Manager calls for the stage lights to be put up for a rehearsal that appears no longer a rehearsal, but the play itself, orchestrated by a Director (with capital ’D’). The reality of the rehearsal is countered by the dramatic illusion—or illusionary reality - of the play itself.
Letters
Authors: Kam Winston
Published: June 2023

Mr. Sid Adelman, the Entertainment Editor of The Toronto Star has asked me to make a formal written apology to Robert Crew, the Theatre Critic of The Star, in order to avert an “all out war waged upon the Shaw Festival” by The Star.
Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home: A Travesty
Authors: Gilbert Sky
Published: June 2023

Lola Stan Builds Her Dream Home premiered at the Edmonton Fringe Festival on 13 August 1988 with the following cast: Sky Gilbert (Lola Starr); Debra Kirshenbaum (Tina Starr); Joe Colborne (Eat Me/Decorator); Steven Cumyn (Malcom Inklepoop); Les Porter (Minoola Grump); Edward Roy (Johnny Bad) and Steven Cumyn and Les Porter (Mover, Cleaners and Reporter). Edward Roy and Sky Gilbert directed; the sets and costume designer were by Leslie Frankish; the original music was composed by Cathy Nosaty and lighting was designed by Lorne Reid. The show was remounted as the inaugural production of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 1988-89 season. Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home is being produced by Live Bait Theatre in Sackville, New Brunswick for a three-week run beginning 22 June 1989. This production is directed by Randy White and features Charlie Rhindress as Lola Starr with Ann Rawley as Tina.
St John’s On the Edge of Childhood / On The Edge of the Country / On the Edge, Period
Authors: Sullivan J.R.
Published: June 2023

How do we remember our teenage years? As a special time that was sheltered from the cares of life? A time full of Diet Pepsi-style fun? That’s how a lot of us speak of those years but are those memories accurate? And, if not, is it because the times have a-changed? Or have seventeen-year-olds? Or theatre? In St John’s, two stage productions explored the moral uneasiness and economic stagnancy with which young Newfoundlanders struggle en route to adulthood. Both involved music in theatre, both took their names from sixties rock and roll; both were inherently, if not overtly, political; both involved actors and musicians in their teens and early twenties. Although the two shows were different in style and purpose, they both had great energy and an abundance of talent. In short, both shows were good.
Improvisation in Creative Drama
Authors: Keller Betty , Kemp David E.
Published: June 2023

According to the press release for Improvisation in Creative Drama the 23 new workshops and 14 sketches which make up this volume are intended to “aide [sic] the beginning acting student (high school and college level) in exploring the imagination and emotions.” Apart from the eccentric spelling certain other clarifications need to be made. The 23 new “workshops” are actually simple exercises with which most high school students in Dramatic Arts classes in Ontario will already be familiar. Of the nine examples in Chapter 1, six can be found in at least two different ideas books for drama, one of which was published in 1972. Apart from a couple of exercises involving the stimulus of visual art nothing in the first part of the book – Creative Drama Workshops – would not be immediately familiar. Admittedly the exercises are structured in such a way as to develop individual ideas in some kind of depth, but there is little sense of any significant and meaningful linear development. The exercises do not lead into more formal aspects of drama, nor do they provide a spring-board into more dramatically significant work. The idea of improvising situations with no audience, first individually and then in groups, is a good one. But the 23 exercises included would certainly not last a year as Ms Keller suggests in her Author’s note. Even if one included the 15 “Dramatic Sketches” which make up part II, this work would occupy a class for no more than half a semester.
Looking Back
Authors: Hardcastle Anne , Graefe Sara
Published: June 2023

Sara Graefe, 19, has just completed her first year at Queen’s University. She is majoring in Drama. Her three plays: Hunky Dory (1985), Gimme Some Truth (1986) and Sadly As I Tie My Shoes (19871 were winners in the National Arts Centre Young Playwrights Search
Video as Theatre
Authors: Davies Ioan
Published: June 2023

Parents and pedagogues are frequently frustrated to find that their adolescent children’s conception of dramatic entertainment and performance bears little relationship to their coordinated strategies of what mimesis, performance, narrative, didacticism and play should be all about. After a kindergarten and early-primary phase of apparent harmony between TV and classroom, in which Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street, Polka-Dot Door, or You Can’t Do That on Television are at least there to compete with the purely commercial nature of the Strawberry Shortcake or Thundercats absurdities, the influence of educators on TV and video production (notwithstanding the efforts of the new Youth and Family TV channels in Canada) seems to have minimal effect on what adolescents actually watch and play. For the age group 11 to 15, unbridled commercialism dictates extra-curricular viewing habits. Here I would briefly like to indicate what is watched – primarily on video, but also on TV and film (the overlaps are, of course, very great) – why, and whether this should give any cause for concern.
Kristal Dreams
Authors: Pody David
Published: June 2023

Kristal Dreams was commissioned and produced by Youtheatre in Montreal in October 1987. It toured to schools in Montreal, Ottawa, Hull, and throughout the province of New Brunswick and played at the Children’s Festival in Toronto with the following cast:
Living the Part: John Drainie and the Dilemma of Canadian Stardom, Don Harron: A Parent Contradiction, Turn Up the Contrast: CBC Television Drama Since 1952
Authors: Drainie Bronwyn , Harron Martha , Miller Mary Jane , Tovell Vincent
Published: June 2023

These echoes of yesterday’s hopes have a value beyond the show-business successes they recall. They enrich the mosaic of pioneering Canadian radio, television and theatre that is slowly coming together and they imply questions for a new and less innocent generation. (Note, however, that for “national” in all three books we should read “English-speaking Canada” as a rule.)
The Biz of Les Miz … and Cats … and Phantom Marketing the Megahits
Authors: Burrows Malcolm
Published: June 2023

On September 12, 1989, a restored vaudeville theatre called the Pantages reopened with one of the largest grossing musicals of all time – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. But Phantom, despite its unparalleled hype, is ultimately less significant than the circumstances surrounding it. The real story is the revamping of the Pantages by a large corporation and the introduction of 2,100 new seats into the Toronto theatre market.
What’s New about Newhouse? / 3: Ambivalences of Representation
Authors: Sidnell Michael
Published: June 2023

With some deliberation, if not deep consideration, Richard Rose and D.D. Kugler have situated Newhouse right in the middle of the muddle: the muddle of political and social cliches, rough-hewn aesthetics and unarticulated expectations that pass current as criticism of the theatre. They have compounded the problems, moreover, by not making entirely clear to the theatre community what kind of ambitions and sympathies the work harbours. Hence the mute disapproval that Newhouse has been accorded and its peculiar distinction in the annual theatrical caucus race of most unnominated play of the Toronto season. And as to the response of the many-headed, there has scarcely been one, since the production was mounted in an ad hoc space for small audiences for less than two weeks. This occlusion of a deeply interesting work created by natives of the place is symptomatic of the dropsical Toronto scene. Not even the Tarragonians or the Canadian Stage Company’s audiences were in on this act, and that was a pity, since their responses would surely have revealed a good deal not only about Newhouse but about Toronto and its theatre today.
Montreal A Ryga Retrospective
Authors: Rubin Don
Published: June 2023

Canada is a country known more for attacking its artists than celebrating them, so when it was announced some months back that a national wake would be held in honour of the life and career of the late George Ryga, suspicions were immediately raised from Summerland to St John’s. I mean, like, didn’t Ryga speak the truth in his plays? How dare he not be assigned to the traditional trash-heap of our collective artistic memory?
Theatre in Atlantic Canada: Soap on a Rope
Authors: Downton Dawn Rae
Published: June 2023

Over the clinking of champagne flutes at Halifax’s tony Prince George Hotel, Neptune Theatre interim artistic director Tom Kerr announced his 1989 / 90 season. “I think Neptune is the most important of the Canadian regional theatres,” said Kerr, “because it’s the only one outside Toronto that does new work consistently. Original things happen here. ” An ambitious claim, certainly, but one which is in no way borne out by the season itself. The line-up is barely distinguishable from so many others over the 26 years of the Neptune Theatre’s history: Man of La Mancha, yet again; war horse Neil Simon’s well-ridden Broadway Bound; Health, the John Gray musical that premièred last winter at the Vancouver Playhouse to lukewarm reviews; Brass Rubbings, Gordon Pinsent’s new play about old times; The Playboy of the Western World, that veteran snoozer in which Kerr promised but could not deliver the “Canadian” enfant terrible Kiefer Sutherland, can probably not light a spark. For Christmas, there’s yet another stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol, this time by Mavor Moore (who, the Neptune brochure reminds us, played Undershaft in the production of Major Barbara that launched Neptune over a quarter of a century ago); and lastly there’s Foxfire, an American drama with music that will star a man known to most of us as the relic Relic on CBC TV’s The Beachcombers.
A Certain Number of Choices: Nationalism and Theatre in Quebec
Authors: Winsor Chris , LeBlanc Alonzo
Published: June 2023

Almost as if it is a sign of the times, the stop sign in front of the Grand Théâtre de Québec has been defaced by the addition of a few deft strokes of red spray paint which reduce “STOP” to “101,” a reference to the province’s controversial sign law. Throughout the province, the French and the English seem to be living as if to verify that Quebec is two solitudes. In Montreal, for example, an education law, 178, so incensed Montreal’s anglophone community that they elected four members of the newly formed Equality Party to deliver this message to the provincial government. Although Quebec has re-elected Bourassa’s new-deal federalist Liberals for a second consecutive four-year term, the percentage of Parti Québecois support remains at the referendum level of forty per cent. In addition, the separatist position articulated by P.Q. leader Jacques Parizeau in this election was far more extreme than that maintained by former premier and P. Q. leader René Lévesque. The Meech Lake constitutional accord, the deadline for ratification fast approaching, is all but dead. The political project of confederation now seems to be entering difficult times.
Drawing Strength from Within
Authors: Abel Douglas , Thomson R. H.
Published: June 2023

Since his return to Canada from studies in England in 1973, R. H. Thomson has advanced steadily from being a rising young star to one of Canada’s most praised and respected actors. He has performed on the stage, on television and in film. Despite having success here, in the United States, and in England, his career choices demonstrate a fiercely passionate commitment to the development of the performing arts in Canada.
Victoria The Canadian National Theatre Festival
Authors: Boer Deborah de
Published: June 2023

From July 9 to 15, 1989, the best of community theatre in Canada participated in a festival held in Victoria, B.C. Eight provinces sent representative theatre groups to the competitive component of the festival, with an additional seven non-competitive “Showcase” productions filling out the week of performances and workshops. The success of the project can be measured by the fact that it drew an audience of over 6,500. This success suggests that the demise of the Dominion Drama Festival in 1978 left a void which is now being filled by The Canadian National Theatre Festival.
Social Drama: Towards a Therapeutic Curriculum
Authors: Amies Bert , Warren Bernie , Watling Rob , Goffin Jeffrey
Published: June 2023

Playing is serious business. Children do it spontaneously and derive endless hours of enjoyment from it. Through play, they gain social skills, exercise their creativity and improve their problem-solving techniques. As they grow older, children lose the habit of playing. By the time they reach adulthood, play disappears. To the detriment of the adult, they often forget the lessons learned through play. Social Drama: Towards a Therapeutic Curriculum is a response to this sad state of affairs.
The Vanek Plays: four authors, one character
Authors: Stankiewicz Marketa Goetz , Reeves John
Published: June 2023

Ethics decree that reviewers declare their bias. Mine is, in this case, a predisposition to admire. I have produced and directed several plays by Vaclav Havel on radio, including two of the plays in this book; and I consider him to be not only one of the best playwrights of today, but also one of the world’s foremost voices of conscience. The other playwrights associated with him here are all participants in the same struggle as he: they have insisted on the truth, under the governing lie; and for this they have variously suffered imprisonment, slander, proscription, and exile. In Canada, it is hardly imaginable that a writer would be banned for criticising the authorities, or jailed for paying tribute to a patriotic martyr. In neo-Stalinist Czechoslovakia, it is hardly imaginable that he would not.
William Hutt: A Theatre Portrait
Authors: Garebian Keith , Westley Meg
Published: June 2023

In his foreword to William Hutt: A Theatre Portrait, Keith Garebian states that his book is intended to be a “theatre portrait rather than a full fledged biography,” its specific aim being to “determine what has made Hutt the kind of actor he is today.” This statement of purpose is welcome, for it suggests that Garebian will focus specifically on Hutt as an actor, analyzing the relationship between the man and his work, and offering insights into his art.
Notions of Nationalism
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

What’s in a name? The short response is, quite a lot. For example, the title of this journal, Canadian Theatre Review, indicates an assumption that there is a homogeneous theatrical practice which can be called “Canadian.” But is this the case? And if so, how might we begin to examine the implications of a theatre which is defined by the political construct “nation”? The answers to these questions may at first seem so evident that the questions might be viewed as rhetorical. I can imagine a response along the lines, “Of course there is a Canadian theatre. Why else would there be journals like CTR, Canadian Drama, a reference book like The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre and the anthologies of Canadian drama which have appeared in recent years?” But this sort of response can be turned on itself so that these periodicals and books are not evidence of the existence of Canadian theatre but rather of the desire for Canadian theatre, for a theatre which defines use as a nation thereby giving us a sense of identity. (For an excellent discussion of the implications of the creation of a Canadian dramatic canon see “Voices (off): Deconstructing the Modern English-Canadian Dramatic Canon” by Richard Paul Knowles, forthcoming in The Canadian Canon: Essays in Literary Value. Ed. Robert Lecker. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press.)
Strategies for Survival / 2: Funding for Visible Minorities: A Minority Within a Minority
Authors: Breon Robin , Kamino Brenda
Published: June 2023

Artists are, by and large, a minority within any given society. And artists as a group – actors, dancers, playwrights, filmmakers, visual artists, etc. – enjoy far less by way of salary and benefits, job security, pensions, and seniority rights than the average unionized worker on the assembly line. The smaller artistic ensembles, be they theatre companies, dance groups, or multidiscipline collectives, face increasingly difficult times. Yet, historically it has been the smaller companies – who constitute the overwhelming majority in terms of numbers – that have produced some of the most provocative and original work and have consistently acted as vital artistic tributaries providing training, development, and high quality programming that eventually flows into the mainstream cultural institutions.
Surviving in Vancouver / 2: New Direction at Tamahnous
Authors: Martin Jennifer
Published: June 2023

When Tamahnous Theatre’s artistic director Kathleen Weiss announced her resignation in the spring of 1989, there was much speculation as to who would be her successor. Then in its 17th year of production, Tamahnous had established an international reputation for experimental work with hits such as The Haunted House Hamlet, Last Call! A Post Nuclear Cabaret and Billy Bishop Goes to War. The board of directors felt that it was important for the new artistic director to carry on the Tamahnous tradition of innovative, non-traditional theatre. And although the search was Canada-wide, it was hoped that the successful candidate would already have strong ties with the Vancouver theatre community.
Musical Metamorphoses: Opera in Transformation
Authors: Hood Sarah B.
Published: June 2023

In Delacorta’s Diva (memorably filmed by Jean-Jacques Beneix) a teenage delivery boy falls in love with an internationally renowned operatic soprano, attends every performance he can and eventually inveigles himself into her company. Nowadays there is an exotic element in this; we would have expected the young man to be more interested in a rock star or a movie actor. But a century or so ago it would have been much more usual for someone neither rich nor old to be passionate about opera.
Photography of Theatre: Images Always Fail
Authors: Villeneuve Rodrigue , Aronoff Phyllis , Scott Howard
Published: June 2023

The fundamental question is always that of the “verbalization” or “semanticization” of the photograph: what does it mean? Is it worth a thousand words, as popular wisdom would have it? What words, then? Or could it be, on the other hand, as Barthes and Metz had already said in the sixties, that a photo can tell nothing, says nothing, other than “That has been”? A photo does not speak; it can only be spoken. These are commonplaces. Whether the photographic image is eloquent or mute, the difficulty for someone who wants to use photographs of theatre for documentary purposes or for purposes of analysis of a performance is considerable. Such an endeavour has strict “scientific” limits that should inspire the utmost humility.
Theatre in the Museum: Rivage à l’abandon
Authors: Pavlovic Diane , Aronoff Phyllis , Scott Howard
Published: June 2023

Livage à l’abandon (Despoiled Shore), mounted by Carbone 14 in February 1990, was born of a double impetus, museological and theatrical: the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal had asked Gilles Maheu to create a finale to the Blickpunkte event, exhibitions which focused on various facets of contemporary German art, and Maheu chose for the occasion to go back to Heiner Müller, by whom he is fascinated and whose Hamlet-Machine he had already staged in 1987. The entire museum was offered to Maheu. Inspired by this huge empty space filled with connotations, he decided to present the trilogy Rivage à l’abandon I Matériau-Medée / Paysage avec Argonautes (Despoiled Shore / Medeamaterial / Landscape with Argonauts). An unusual place for theatre, the museum itself would become an integral part of his project. His vision coincided with the museum’s desire to broaden its role, and he conceived a work between performance and opera, pursuing the multidisciplinary path he had already chosen for himself and trying to push back a little further the boundaries of traditional theatricality. Having chosen people for conception and design and the cast in the same spirit of opening up the boundaries between genres, he also wanted to try a new kind of experiment, and he asked me, who had become very familiar with his work through my activities as a critic, to assist him in the conception and direction of the production. It is thus as a participant and privileged observer that I give this account of the process of creation of the show.
Montreal Maison Théâtre: Dreams with an Impact
Authors: Beauchamp Helene
Published: June 2023

Maison Theatre opened its doors for its first season on the 19th of October 1984. Expectations in the theatre community, especially that concerned with theatre for young audiences, were tremendously high. Work had begun on the project in 1978; a general meeting had been called in August 1982; work had progressed regularly and in the autumn of 1984 the member companies, the same that had brought Quebec children’s theatre to a fine state of excellence, knew that they finally had a house! From now on, they would have a theatre to come back to, after months of school touring or international travels, a place where they could meet artists with interests similar to theirs, and engage in mutually enlightening dialogue. Would it become a home? A place from which to radiate outwards?
Scenes from Canadian Plays
Authors: Brenna Dwayne , Kemp David
Published: June 2023

I suspect that every day across this great country, students from schools, universities and colleges try to come to terms, practically, with scenes from dramatic literature. I know from experience just how difficult this process can be for young people, especially if they are inexperienced in the techniques of the stage and have seen little live theatre.
Edouard Lock and Bliss: About Dance, Mime, Theatre
Authors: Gélinas Aline
Published: June 2023

The last label Edouard Lock would like to have applied to his choreographic work is “dance theatre.” The artistic director of La La La Human Steps takes a firm stand against this new trend in the dance scene, stating again and again that it tends to impoverish the vocabulary of movements and impose limitations on the creativity of the choreographer. I would like to analyze some basic notions about these three related fields from my own point of view, which is that of a dance writer, theatre critic and corporeal artist trained in mime. Then, I want to ask: why are some people from the theatre tempted to see Edouard Lock’s dances as being part of dance theatre? First, we need to go back to the history of dance to understand why it has taken so long for it to be recognized as ma jor art form. In fact, this recognition only happened in the course of the 20th century, soon after Serge Diaghilev brought the Russian Ballet to Paris. But even then, dance in Europe was still part of an ambitious, total spectacle which included music from great composers, backdrops by talented young painters and narrative by people with literary inclinations. The public would not come to see dance per se, but to enjoy an evening of very high quality entertainment. This sense of dance was not at all remote from the dreams Richard Wagner had had just a few years before.
Toronto Write About Now: A Monologue in Changing Lights
Authors: Moses Daniel David
Published: June 2023

Here we are: another meeting, another weekend of spinning words and being spun by them. That’s quite a title. I’m a playwright, among other things, and I have been invited (heck, I was part of the advisory committee) so I must also be a visible minority. I am the only registered Delaware Indian playwright I know.
Ile-à-la-Crosse Upisasik Theatres in Our Schools
Authors: Borgerson Lon
Published: June 2023

This is the story of a little theatre group in northern Saskatchewan that for nine years quietly created plays that spoke of the lives of the actors, of their culture, of their community. I write this as a belated thank you to the actors who once were Upisasik (“Little”) Theatres, for I continue to draw inspiration from their work.
Toronto Hitting the Wall: Richard Rose, Howard Barker and The Europeans
Authors: Bannerman Guy
Published: June 2023

During my preparation of this article about Necessary Angel Theatre’s world premiere production of The Europeans in Toronto (7-21 April 1990), some unexpected coincidences between the careers of Canadian director Richard Rose and English author Howard Barker emerged. Interviews with the two men revealed similarities in their attitudes to their work, perhaps shedding light on the continuing professional relationship which has seen Necessary Angel produce three Barker plays in the last four years. The premiere of The Europeans, which brought Rose and Barker together in person for the first time, provoked some interesting observations on their own condition and that of their art.
Québec A Breath from the East
Authors: Winsor Chris
Published: June 2023

Quebec City, seat of the provincial legislature, was also the site of some fine international drama produced during la Quinzaine Internationale du Theatre, a festival mounted under the direction of Rachel Lortie. La Quinzaine ran from 18 May to 13 June during which time the city played host to eighteen productions from eight countries.
Winnipeg Close-ups / 2, Paradigm Shifts at the Box Office
Authors: Arrell Douglas
Published: June 2023

Winnipeg’s theatre community faces the beginning of a new decade with a sense of malaise. In the last few years, both of our major theatres have had problems with declining audience support and with confused and ambivalent artistic policies. Our most successful small company throughout the 1980s, Agassiz Theatre, has folded. The production of local plays has fallen off, and playwrights themselves seem uncertain of their own artistic goals. Although promising new groups are starting up, our hopes of a thriving body of “independent” theatre produced by small companies do not seem destined to be fulfilled. The major bright spot is Winnipeg Fringe Festival, which this summer more than doubled its attendance to 35,000 paying customers. But one week of vitality cannot make up for decline and uncertainty the rest of the year.
Alberta Voices / 1, Of Us and the Fringe
Authors: Martini Clem
Published: June 2023

Calgary: there are times when I think it’s madness to live here. I mean, why live in a city that has so much to offer in the way of wind off the hills, and so little to offer in the way of protection? Why live in a city that has so little to offer in its range of theatres and so much to offer in the plenitude and diversity of its reactionaries? There are no clear answers to these questions.
Warm Wind in China
Authors: Stetson Kent
Published: June 2023

Nu-age Editions’ bilingual publication of Kent Stetson’s Warm Wind in China makes usefully and widely accessible to readers and potential producers this highly theatrical dramatization of the predicament of gay people with aids. Stetson’s play, first produced at the Neptune Theatre, Halifax, in January 1988 and subsequently given further productions and staged readings, has received positive critical response. Ronald Guevremont’s skilful and sensitive translation, a 1989 finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Prize for translation, received its première in October 1988 at le Théâtre de l’Ile, Hull.
Exploring the Fringe / 2: Chronicling Cambodia
Authors: Davies Roger
Published: June 2023

“This is an essay, a short story, a novella, a harangue, a poem, a rant – whatever is dictated by the necessities of my subject matter” (Fawcett 61). “This” is Cambodia described by its author Brian Fawcett. “This” is an intellectual autobiography, a meditation on history, and an elegy for a civilization that is being electronically erased. It could also be described as a sermon illustrated by parables, the appositeness of which is not always readily apparent. Cambodia eludes easy categorization but “play” is not among the genres listed by Fawcett.
Exploring the Fringe / 3: The Death of Nostalgia
Authors: Duffy Craig
Published: June 2023

The ideas presented here began to crystallize during rehearsals with Peter Giaschi, a Vancouver-based actor, in preparation for his performance of Barry Collins’ one-actor show Judgement. Giaschi’s approach, insisting on the primacy of the scripted text, injected the rehearsal process with an immediacy which necessitated a degree of exploration often lacking from traditional rehearsals. The result creates a performance quality which potentially challenges the passive complacency of traditional theatre audiences. This approach serves, for both of us, to regenerate the dynamism of the theatrical event both in rehearsal and in performance. The attempt here is to document this approach which responds to many of our instincts regarding the nature of theatrical performance and to share perspectives on some of its possible implications.
Indian Theatre in the United States: 1991: An Assessment
Authors: Geiogamah Hanay
Published: June 2023

Intermittently over the past twenty-five years there have been bursts of creative energy and enthusiasm aimed at the development of an American Indian theatre in the United States. There have been so many problems, however, that some of the few brave souls who struggled for that goal have given up, exhausted by frustration and a failure of nerve.
2/ Memory and Remembering
Authors: Trujillo Raoul
Published: June 2023

Now that this planet is no longer graced with the physical beauty and sensuality, the comic and passionate artistry and the Cree dignity of René Highway, it is to memory that we must direct our energy when thinking about him. Memory is to René Highway what remembering is to the essence of Native theatre. The dancer / choreographer / actor / director is dead. That creative mind, that feeling and compassionate heart is dead. He left us with still more work to do but he accomplished much while alive. He was beginning to develop a movement vocabulary that was contemporary although intrinsically Native in feeling. He was successful in exploring the experiences of Natives assaulted by the European institutions and turning those explorations into wonderfully visual and vital theatre.
Ibeler Uagen: Nietos del Sol / Grandchildren of the Sun
Authors: Miguel Gloria
Published: June 2023

November 19, 1989 – Sunday afternoon. I received a call from Ingrid. “Do you want to go to Panamá on Friday?” I said, “Yes!! But I have to work til Friday. I’ll leave Saturday, okay?”

I packed and was at the airport Saturday morning, ready to make a second trip to the land of my father. My first trip was back in 1971 with Uncle Joe.
Through the Mists of Transformation: Excerpts from a Conversation with Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juarez Espinosa
Authors: Perez Fernando Hernandez
Published: June 2023

In the footsteps of the history of this continent is a long path of resistance and survival. Five hundred years of change and transformation have forged a different society, a balance with no midpoint. The destruction of social, traditional and spiritual values has made a deep wound in the hearts of First Nations Peoples. We also must not forget in our spirits the First Nations that were wiped out by the Spanish, French and English, in their greed, appropriation and conquest of a world different from theirs. It is because of genocide, torture and death that at the end of the twentieth century, the new generation searches for different ways to express its ideals and goals, ways that will permit the continuing survival of the First Nations. One form of expression that has a very important role in the political struggle of First Nations people is theatre.
Sharing a Dream, Sharing a Story
Authors: Messer Leah
Published: June 2023

My weekend workshop with a group of Aboriginal women writers began on April 19th and ended April 21st, 1991. That weekend gave a renewed sense of strength for writing the stories that are both joyful and painful. It began with a feast blessed by an Indian woman elder (the first time I was witness to a woman doing blessings). A sharing of food is what allowed for the sharing of intimate thoughts and feelings that was to come later on.
Quest for Fire: How Trickster Brought Fire to the People
Authors: Keeshig-Tobias Lenore
Published: June 2023

Quest for Fire was written for De-Ba-Je-Mu-Jig, and toured Ontario during November and December of 1990 A child’s play: imagination and reality, mixed , on various levels in a child’s mind. It begins in the present day, with the sweetest little boy in the world bored almost to tears. His older sister is given the task of entertaining him while Mother steps out to visit gramma. Older Sister gingerly coaxes him out of his mal aise with a story, and then gets caught up in the story herself as th e boy’s imagination shifts into gear and the Trickster and other mythical creatures race about the living room. Upon reaching the top of a great mountain, Trickster realizes he needs the help of his Blueberry Sisters if he is indeed going to get fire for the people.
Towards a Better, Fairer World: An Interview with Sharon Pollock
Authors: Zimmerman Cynthia
Published: June 2023

This interview took place at Glendon College in Toronto on 21 May 1991. It followed a final meeting for participants of the Second International Women Playwrights Conference, “Voices of Authority.” We spoke first about the conference and then about Pollock’s own work.
He and She: Linda Griffiths’ Gendered Family
Authors: Bird Kym
Published: June 2023

I’m twelve years old and he’s been watching me for a while. I can feel his eyes on me. I even wiggle my bum a little when he’s around. He brought me something special to eat once, and I ate it all alone, hiding. I’m twelve years old, when I found the blood, my mother laughed, then crossed herself. Now you’re in for it. The night comes, I sort of expect it, but I don’t know what it is. My dad’s got huge arms and a bloated face, big bulging brown eyes with lots of veins, all watery, like a dog’s. He just hauls himself on me, pulls my legs apart, then shoves his thing up me, like a kitchen knife like a knife so far up I didn’t know it could go, right up me so far I think it’s gonna rip me in pieces, pounding away. When he crawls off I wipe the slob from my cunt and get out of there. Maybe I kill him, I don’t know. I can’t remember.
Women Scenographers: Astrid Jansen and Mary Kerr
Authors: Plunkett Shelagh
Published: June 2023

Do women scenographers in Canada have a distinctly female or feminist approach to their work? As women break into areas of theatre that have never had a women’s view brought to them, are they having a unique impact on how Canadian theatre looks today?
Montreal, Quebec: Festival de théâtre des Amériques, Montreal
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

“Devant le jardin de Bertuch”, a photograph by Claude-Phillipe Benoît, made a striking poster for the fourth edition of the Festival (May 21-June 8). For Marie-Hélène Falcon, the Artistic Director, this telluric landscape signalled an inquiry into the primordial impulses of theatre, making the Festival a forum for cultural memory and expression in the forms of dance, corporeal mime, puppetry and, in continuity with these, video and the other electronic modes of the present.
Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada
Authors: Wallace Robert , Nunn Rob
Published: June 2023

Robert Wallace’s collection of essays, Producing Marginality, is a book to go back to again and again. It is deeply thought out, is built on a strong foundation of research, and is passionately committed. The positions Wallace maintains are bound to provoke long, hard thinking about the present state of theatre in Canada, the relation between theatre and political power and ideology, the relation between Quebec and the rest of Canada. It is frankly a polemic. Not only does Wallace make no claim to objectivity, he mounts an impressive argument against the very concept of objectivity and of universal critical values.
Mountain Changes: The 1991 SFU/Equity Showcase Voice Intensive
Authors: Sprung Guy
Published: June 2023

The Equity Showcase / Simon Fraser University Voice Intensive claims existence as a kind of remedial touchstone to allow working actors to reexamine their voices and vocal technique. For five weeks in the early summer forty working professionals with a wide range of experience gather at the concrete Nirvana of SFU, perched atop the focus-inducing quietude of Burnaby mountain.
Dinah Christie: “Necessity Is A Mother”
Authors: Martinuk Andrea , Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

If anyone has earned the accolade of a Canadian cabaret star, it’s Dinah Christie, who has been entertaining audiences, at home and abroad, for three decades. Although her theatrical work has embraced every aspect of production, including writing and directing, she is most familiar to Canadians as an eclectic trouper whose work covers all the performing media. Whether starring in cabaret (often with Tom Kneebone and Dean Regan), on television (including This Hour Has Seven Days, Party Game, and Check It Out), dramatic film (she won an ACTRA nomination for her role in One Night Stand), singing with symphony orchestras across the country or donating her talent for charity fund-raisers, Christie has maintained a special connection with Canadian audiences. Along with her theatrical career, she has also established herself as an inventor and businesswoman, creating practical, environmental-friendly accessories for her company, The BADD Sisters. Her creations include decorative heel protectors and insulated water bottle carriers (which were sent with Canadian troops to the Persian Gulf).
Music Theatre
Authors: Manning-Albert Jacqui
Published: June 2023

This issue on new developments in musical theatre took focus for me in a casual conversation with Jacqui Manning-Albert, during which I realized that, like so many others in Canadian theatre, I was virtually unaware of the artists and the companies that are creating unique and varied approaches to musical theatre. The fact that as an editor of CTR I knew so little about this increasingly active area of Canadian theatre indicated that an issue on musical theatre was long overdue. On the spot I asked Jacqui to help me shape an issue that would survey those developments and suggest their remarkable diversity – and which wouldn’t talk about Les Miz and Phantom of the Opera.
Forging Their Own Modernity: The Igloolik Dance and Drama Group
Authors: Ott Alison , Robinson Qajaq , MacDonald Lucy
Published: June 2023

In 1988, as a teacher at Ataguttaaluk School, on Baffin Island, Northwest Territories, I decided to start an after-school drama club. When the teacher who led the dance club left the community, it made sense to combine the two extra-curricular clubs since the same enthusiasts were in both! The result was the Dance and Drama Club. Today, the Igloolik Dance and Drama Theatre Group consists of northern youth ages thirteen to twenty, all of whom are students of Ataguttaaluk School. But we are not exclusively a student organization: adults and elders of the community are also members of the company, and at any one time there might be over thirty people from Igloolik involved in a production.
Carrying On The Song
Authors: Innuksuk Pakak
Published: June 2023

The Inuit drum dancing has been slowly fading since Christianity was started in the North. This is because the drum was sometimes used to call the Spirits, although many of songs were just a way of telling stories. I thought it was important for the tradition to be carried on by the new generation, so I started a theatre which had drum dancing in it.
From Prestige Project to Simply Shell: The Short History of the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre
Authors: Thompson Francis
Published: June 2023

The Northern Arts and Cultural Centre, once a monument to pan-Canadian generosity and Yellowknife civic pride, is now living off the proceeds of bingos.

“I don’t want to see it go ... I’ll chain myself to the door if I have to do it,” says Heather Ross, a long-time NACC board member, director and actress. And more recently, bingo organizer. Ross’ despondency and determination may be common in Canada’s theatrical community. But NACC’s riches-to-rags story is anything but common. This is not some vulnerable old institution, slipping slowly into financial oblivion. This 313-seat theatre opened in 1984 after unprecedented community mobilization raised $1.3 million in four years.
In Search of a Friend: A Script Outline
Authors: Theatre Tunooniq
Published: June 2023

Inuit myth was an inspiration for exploring substance abuse and the ways of dealing with overcoming it both individually and collectively as a community. Recently the play was re-worked to be about a wide spectrum of social problems associated with modern society.
Hornby
Authors: Valpy Bruce , Rafferty John
Published: June 2023

The stage consists of two sets: the Purgatory set and the Cabin set. The cabin set is the interior of Hornby’s cabin on the Thelon River in the winter of 1926-27. This may be realistic or implied. The Purgatory set surrounds the Cabin set and may be left void of properties. Lighting should be used to create a vague spiritlike atmosphere. Purgatory characters observe the three Cabin set players throughout the play.
Beast of the Land
Authors: Cowan Cindy
Published: June 2023

The combined population of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon is approximately 69,000 – roughly equal to that of Peterborough, Ontario. Northerners are loosely distributed throughout a region which represents 39% of the total area of Canada.
Funding “Australia”
Authors: Gauntlett Mark
Published: June 2023

Which of the following arts-related stories is likely to make frontpage news?

(a) the death of a diva; (b) the theft of a priceless painting; (c) a dispute between a grant-giving body and a theatre company.
Colonial Discourse and the National Imaginary
Authors: Mitchell Tony
Published: June 2023

Like Anglo-Australian popular music, which is often indistinguishable from its English or American counterparts, Anglo-Australian drama tends to have a familiarly white, post-colonial veneer which all too frequently simply covers a neocolonial core. As Stan Anson has stated:

the rhetoric of postcolonialism assumes that anticolonialism has either overthrown imperialism or exhausted itself in the attempt. It has done neither. The world we live in is still manifestly colonial, although it might be better to call it neocolonial, in recognition of the fact that the crude annexations of the past have ben superseded by subtler impositions, of which the very notion of postcolonialism is one. (64)
Infinitely Rehearsing Performance and Identity: Africa Solo and The Book of Jessica
Authors: Tompkins Joanne
Published: June 2023

Canadians are taught that we are part of the mosaic or the salad bowl, not the melting pot that supposedly characterizes the Americans. Yet no one can really explain the Canadian identity salad. As Canada lurches towards the twenty-first century, risking disintegration on various fronts, I would like to consider the old post-colonial issue of “identity” in the context of two recent Canadian plays. “Identity”, originally a key concept of establishing national selfhood, has been re-played recently by the West Indian writer, Wilson Harris, in The Infinite Rehearsal. Harris’s novel frames the identity quest in a theatrical context which imposes on the search a repetition that is necessarily endless as is the search itself. The Book of Jessica, by Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell, and Afrika Solo, by Djanet Sears, both exploit the metaphor of theatre and rehearsal in their plays, which infinitely rehearse the construction of personal and national selfhood. Both plays force a revision – or re-acting – of the traditional paradigm(s) of Canadian identity.
Acadian Parlance on Stage
Authors: Godin Normand
Published: June 2023

As everyone knows, the Acadians were deported from Acadie, in Nova Scotia, in 1755, but many later returned to the Maritimes (New Brunswick, where they are more concentrated, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland). In Nova Scotia, they are divided into five small pockets, spread out at the four corners of the province, each with its own variety of French, and all quite distinct from the Quebec linguistic group to which the other French minorities in Canada are linked. As Antonine Maillet puts it in Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie,1 these groups survived linguistically not only because they were cut off from France and living in autarky, but because they opted for an agricultural rather than industrial economy. With modern education, trade, mobility and communication, however, assimilation into English is so rapid that statistics for the loss of language run in the double digits at every census. The young generation uses less than 80% of the linguistic richness of their peers of twenty years ago. The preservation of Acadian is left to an elite who can do but very little to resist the general apathy of the population which contrasts sharply with the strong and often blunt Quebec response to the same problem. Assimilation here involves an imperceptible death as Acadian undergoes a rather slow metamorphosis into another language. Many feel that, in the face of such adversity, any activity promoting cultural awareness could be of some help. One response has been for Les Araignées to tour their work.
Conversations with six Québécois playwrights
Authors: Lavoie Bernard
Published: June 2023

In the seventies, collective work and improvisation gave actors unprecedented room to contribute to the making of plays. This period passed and a shift occured in Quebec’s dramaturgy. The text signed by the playwright acquired a new profile. In the eighties, actors, who had been the core of the creative process, went back to their role of interpreters. It is as if they had indicated to the playwrights that a theatre of content was possible, and that this return to the technical and aesthetic problems of acting made way for writers to reclaim their place in theatre.