bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Theatre of the Oppressed / 3: But Not in Canada?
Authors: Spry Lib
Published: June 2023

“Nobody thinks they are oppressed in North America,” my actor friend said, summing up his position on my work. “Now you better catch a cab home.”

The conversation has stayed in my mind.

He did not see the contrad iction between one statement and the other.

I experience it.

As I was in New York, it was late, and I was female, I had to navigate my way home carefully , picking my way street by street , so that I could avoid the block where the junkies hung out, the block - a schoolyard running blankly down one side - where a woman was raped last week, the block where last night a gang of boys whistled and heckled and jostled me as I went by.
When the Performer is Black
Authors: Deverell Rita Shelton
Published: June 2023

This issue of CTR does not include an article on “white performance.” This is because, perhaps through no particular faults of our own, many of us make the assumption that performance by whites is the norm. Our assumption is probably not based on living in a predominantly white country like Canada. It is based on commonly held ideas about the nature of performance.
Readings in Review
Authors: Wagner Anton , Fraticelli Rina
Published: June 2023

Robertson Davies, along with a handful of other writers such as Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, Is one of the few Canadian authors with a wide international reputation. That international esteem, however, is based almost exclusively on his novels and essays. Even within Canada, especially since the unsuccessful production of Question Time in 1975, Davies Is not considered a significant playwright in the professional theatre community. In Robertson Davies, Playwright Susan Stone-Blackburn attempts to unravel the paradox of why one of Canada’s preeminent writers has failed to establish himself on the contemporary stage.
Issues in Performance: An Introduction
Authors: Wallace Robert
Published: June 2023

While at first glance the articles in this issue of CTR may seem unrelated, most share a common concern with the nature and function of performance. More specifically, they investigate the social dimensions of performance, an area in performance studies often subordinated to aesthetic and conceptual analysis. In this sense the title of this CTR is a pun: most of the following articles address not just the issue of performance - what it is and can be - but performance that itself deals with issues.
Prince Edward Island / 1: Theatre: Who’s It For?
Authors: Mair Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

The Charlottetown Festival at PEI’s Confederation Centre promotes itself as the Canadian home of Broadway-style musical theatre. With the exception of Anne of Green Gables and Johnny Belinda, however, few shows done at the Centre have reflected substantial Canadian content. Although the festival has been active for over 20 years and is technically the foremost producer of all-Canadian musicals, it has yet to evolve a distinctively Canadian form of musical theatre, preferring to make use of the ready-made Broadway structures transplanted, with minor adaptations, to accommodate Canadian content where necessary. Just as most regional theatres across the country have had limited success providing a truly national theatre, the Confederation Centre on a smaller scale has had limited success producing theatre that genuinely reflects its home province: it tends to use actors from off-island to perform theatre for tourists.
Life after TNB
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

Theatre New Brunswick is a regional theatre in a way that no other regional theatre in Canada can equal: it has a mandate to tour every show it produces throughout the province that it serves. In a gruelling series of one- to four-night stands, TNB takes large-scale productions out from its base at the Playhouse in Fredericton to (mostly) high-school auditoria from Campbellton to St. Stephen, bringing theatre to the province in a way that perhaps exemplifies the original goals of the regional theatre movement in Canada.
1 The Comedy Asylum
Authors: Munday Jenny
Published: June 2023

The Comedy Asylum began in 1982 when Lou Roelofsen, then manager of the Wandlyn Inn In Fredericton, decided to present dinner theatre in order to promote the hotel during the traditionally slow winter season. He got together with Marshall Button and Michael McHugh, and the great Comedy Asylum dinner theatre experiment began. At that time there was nothing like it in Fredericton. Apart from several good amateur groups throughout the province, the only English-language theatre in New Brunswick was Theatre New Brunswick. Lou believed not only that dinner theatre was commercially viable, but also that there was an audience hungry for an alternative form of entertainment in the province. So did we, and we were to be proven right, despite the fact that starting something new in New Brunswick is never easy. Things take a while to catch on and theatre is a rather sacred institution. Although TNB has managed to widen its audience over the years and to fulfill what I believe is part of its mandate - to take theatre “to the people” - the tendency of the general public to think of theatre as elitist persists. The Comedy Asylum offered a small-scale alternative that was both popular and populist.
2 TNB’s Contact Theatre
Authors: Silk Ilkay , Young Vicki
Published: June 2023

As New Brunswick’s regional theatre, Theatre New Brunswick’s mainstage company tours each of its five annual productions to eight different centres outside its home-base of Fredericton. Young audiences experience live theatre staged by its peripatetic Young Company in schools throughout the Atlantic region during a six-month tour. With the arrival of Janet Amos as artistic director came the decision to further “broaden the scope of TNB’s programming, develop a new audience, and create more work opportunities.” In October of 1985, Theatre New Brunswick expanded its programming to include a second-stage series called Contact Theatre.
Nova Scotia / 1: The Halifax Problem: Inside and Out
Authors: McKenna Ed
Published: June 2023

The announcement in 1962 that a permanent, professional theatre was to be established in the Maritimes through the creation of Neptune Theatre in Halifax precipitated considerable public discussion about what kind of theatre it should be. Leon Major, Neptune’s first artistic director, reportedly expressed the hope that Neptune would be a truly popular theatre, close to everyday people - the farmers, miners, and fishermen of the region - whose own stories and legends would find expression on its stage. It was also reported that Major wanted to open the theatre on rehearsal days so that the same audience of farmers, fishermen, and everyday people can see how theatre is made.” Neptune also would “interpret the classics,” of course, but the creation of a body of new drama, popular in nature and integral to the community, was to be a major artistic goal.1
My Brilliant Career as a Maritimes Actor
Authors: Sinclair Carol
Published: June 2023

Being an actor in the Maritimes can feel, at times, like walking in water against the current. And I’m sure it can look that way from the outside. But I’ve spent a lot of time recently coming to the conclusion that the situation of the Maritimes actor is not as bad as it seems.
A Woman from the Sea
Authors: Cowan Cindy
Published: June 2023

When my daughter Meghan was born, the first emotion I experienced, after relief, was that of utter astonishment. Lying on the table, between my shaking legs, was a living human being. This was power. Real power! Like wind and water and fire. What had this to do with those frothy, baby doll maternity clothes? Why didn’t women look like Amazons when they were pregnant? Why had I never seen a pregnant woman swagger? Why hadn’t I?
Rhubarb! / 2: Towards a New Dramaturgy
Authors: Leonard Paul
Published: June 2023

The possibility for co-operative artistic input which characterizes theatre in part gives rise to the well-known workshop process, in which a group focuses attention and expertise on an individual playwright’s work, in order to improve it. Sky Gilbert, artistic director of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, is an outspoken critic of this practice, which he sees as a violation of the artist’s vision. The whole system of play development In this country, according to Gilbert, is based on a fundamental distrust of the individual writer, on an implicit assumption that directors, actors, and dramaturgs know better than the playwright what Is needed to make a script “work.” This communal approach to theatre Is so deeply rooted, Gilbert suggests, that artistic directors feel they should be able to dictate what playwrights write about. Indignantly, he recounts an experience from the beginning of his career as a playwright, “An artistic director in this city actually told me, actually said, ‘You shouldn’t be writing plays about Baudelaire’!” Continues Gilbert: “Artistic directors telling you what to write about Is the beginning of the workshop process.”
Sex Tips for Modern Girls
Authors: Astley Edward , Astley Susan , Seary Kim , Sereda John , Strang Hilary , Willes Christine , Eliot Weiss Peter
Published: June 2023

“When you read a novel, everything in it seems so old and obvious, but when you fall In love yourself, you suddenly discover that you don’t really know anything, and you’ve got to make your own decisions … My dear sisters, my dear sisters!”
Vancouver Doing It in the Road
Authors: Grace-Warrick Christa
Published: June 2023

Street theatre at Expo was a feast. The dishes were of great variety, some tried and true, some regional, a few cordon bleu, a selection of fast food and the occasional birthday cake. Circus skills, clowning, characterization, magic, music, comedy, spectacle, pageantry, and story were some of the ingredients in various quantities and combinations which provided the fare to be consumed by a surfeited populace. An examination of some of the acts will Invoke their flavours but first a look at the corporate restaurant, Expo Entertainment.
Le Théâtre pour enfants au Québec: 1950-1980
Authors: Beauchamp Hélène , Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

What are the characteristics of good theatre for young audiences (TYA)? Doubtlessly most of us would answer that TYA should stimulate creativity, examine relevant issues and be entertaining. Controversy would arise, nevertheless, if the question were phrased regarding form, content, and approach to TYA. In practice, answers to both of these questions have been debated on the stage for over 30 years; very little of this experimentation, however, has generated accompanying critical literature. Unfortunately, most written commentary has been limited to recording, reviewing or prescribing for the future, based on contemporary practice with only passing reference to past experience. Although individual articles demonstrate great insight into facets of TYA, little has been done to provide a comprehensive historical overview of the answers to the questions posed above. A coherent analysis of the evolution of TYA in Quebec can, however, be found in this recently published study by Hélène Beauchamp. She guides the reader through a rigorous examination of the historical development of TYA in Quebec and encourages us to synthesize a critical theory with which to approach such theatre. This volume is a significant contribution to the development of a critical perspective on TYA in French Canada and, by extension, in English Canada as well.
Murder Pattern and the Critics
Authors: Voaden Herman
Published: June 2023

Herman Voaden ‘s Murder Pattern was greeted with great curiosity when it appeared on stage in 1936. As examples of that reaction in Toronto and as examples of Canadian theatre criticism of this period, the following reviews are offered from The Globe, The Toronto Daily Star and The Mail and Empire.
Ubu in the New World
Authors: Dennis Wendell
Published: June 2023

A graduate of the National Theatre School, Wendell Dennis has been working with Montreal’s Theatre du Nouveau Monde as head of its properties department since 1969. This past Fall, Dennis was given the opportunity to design his first mainstage production at TNM, Alfred Jarry’s surrealistic comedy, Ubu Roi (the production was called Ubu and also included Ubu Enchaine) directed by Jean-Pierre Ronfard. In addition to Ubu, Dennis has designed sets for TNM’s noontime theatre productions and the costumes for Dario Fo’s Les Archanges. He is presently designing sets for TNM’s production of Jean Barbeau’s Citrouille. When not designing, Dennis teaches design at Montreal’s John Abbott College.
Two Other Solitudes
Authors: Rubin Don
Published: June 2023

Except for very brief periods of theatrical history, theatre artists have never had much use for universities nor have universities — for all their Infinite Wisdom —had much use for theatre artists. The reasons for this historically are manifold but can usually be traced back to either ignorance or fear on both sides. Were there funds enough and time, the situation might have turned into forever in Canada but the fact is that neither side is in such red-hot financial shape these days. And while the conservative majorities on either side of this Distrust, on either side of these not-so-new solitudes, are still as vocal and cynical as ever, it is becoming quite clear that both these hesitant bodies may find themselves sharing the same slim, financial bed in the years to come. The result, of course, could be rape of one sort or another or it could lead to a diminution of standards by either the professionals or the academics. On the third hand, these two bodies could learn through some sort of national T-Group session that both, when properly excited, really do have much to offer the other.
Cultural Reclamation in Iran
Authors: Merin Jennifer
Published: June 2023

Organized by National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT), the Iran Festival of the Arts held in August each year at Shiraz and Persepolis is one aspect of Iran’s current effort to reclaim ancient Persian international cultural leadership and is intended to both protect the traditional and stimulate the modern Iranian culture. Under the patronage of the Empress Farah, who has shown deep per- sonal concern that Iranian cultural development be kept abreast with the oil rich nation’s rapid industrial and military expansion, the first Festival was held in 1967. NIRT representatives travel world-wide to select troupes for Shiraz. Transportation as well as sumptuous accommodation costs consume nearly two-thirds of the Festival’s annual budget (estimated at $300,000). Official guests account for about 30 per cent of each year’s attendance with the remainder coming from tourists (about 20 per cent) and the general public (about 50 per cent).
Bonjour, La, Bonjour, The Trial of Jean-Baptiste M., A Collection of Canadian Plays
Authors: Tremblay Michel , Gurik Robert , Snider Edwin
Published: June 2023

Canadian scripts which were both performed and published were the exception rather than the rule until about 1967 when a Montreal publishing company called Lemeac began to add play titles to its already distinguished list of Canadian works in French. Edited by Yves Dube, brother of playwright Marcel Dube, it came as no surprise to anyone that Marcel Dube’s works led the Lemeac list not only in those early days of play publishing but even today. Lemeac currently publishes three different play series — the Collection Théâtre Canadien for works of potential national and international appeal (there are 41 titles in this series including nine by Michel Tremblay and 14 by Dube); the Repertoire Québécois series (46 titles including eight by Robert Gurik and six by Jean Barbeau); and the Collection Traduction et Adaptation series (five titles to date including two by the American writer Paul Zindel — both translated by Trem- blay — and one each by John Herbert, John Thomas McDonough (Charbonneau and the Chief) and Mordecai Richler (The Bells of Hell). But what has been particularly interesting about the Lemeac situation through the years is that in addition to their being intelligently-introduced, cleanly-designed and well-bound in soft cover, the books are also selling well not only in Quebec but in other provinces too. Initial printing of most Lemeac scripts is 4,000 and several of the Dube and Tremblay scripts have been reprinted three and four times pushing individual sales as high as 10-12,000. Lemeac’s latest edition — Tremblay’s Bonjour, La, Bonjour — is clearly expected to be one of its biggest sellers to date. A fascinating sexual octet for voices, Bonjour, La, Bonjour is already heavily pre-sold in Montreal bookstores.
Making Image Theatre
Authors: O’Regan James
Published: June 2023

Several years ago I read an article on religious ritual behaviour which suggested that redundancy was the technique through which ecstasy was achieved by those who meditate.1 The article reported clinical tests that had measured brainwaves with provocative results: one side of the brain reveals a certain level of repeated activity during meditation as the result of a repeated event, which intensifies over time. At a particular moment, the other side of the brain becomes involved so that both sides become simultaneously excited. For the meditator, the result is the experience of ecstasy.
Le Pool: Speaking the Body
Authors: Gélinas Aline , Gannon Roger E.
Published: June 2023

To the uninitiated, mime often appears to be a solitary art. Inevitably the word makes one think of Marcel Marceau, a direct descendant of the Pierrots of the nineteenth century. Fortunately in Montreal, two companies in particular – les Enfants du paradis and Omnibus – have enlarged the popular perception of the word. Initially, both created work that was silent; then they began to speak; not only did they speak, they adapted literary works and commissioned original scripts, with one person spontaneously assuming the role of producer/director. In this respect, without realizing it, they were following in the footsteps of Etienne Decroux who, after working for 20 years with Jacques Copeau, developed a corporeal syntax for the actor in Boulogne-Billancourt. For Decroux, the body, more than the voice or the text, was the necessary element for the theatrical experience. The body had to be mastered completely: it was essential to know what it meant and what it could say before incorporating with it, one by one, the other arts of literature, music, and design.
England Mirvish, Marx, and Shakespeare
Authors: Ackerman Marianne
Published: June 2023

In the beginning, champagne. Monday morning, September, 1986, cast and crew of the newly-formed English Shakespeare Company (ESC) assemble in the drafty Territorial Army Drill Hall, South-West London. Wearing his familiar bankers’ blue suit and white shirt, Torontonian David Mirvish grins his eager-beaver, anything-is-possible grin and toasts the most ambitious theatrical venture launched in London this season. In the next nine weeks, director Michael Bogdanov, 25 actors and a small crew will rehearse some 80 roles in three of Shakespeare’s history plays. Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V will play 12 English cities, plus Paris, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and Toronto. The entire nine-hour trilogy will be performed each Saturday.
Vancouver The Expo Legacy
Authors: Leiren-Young Mark
Published: June 2023

For the duration of Expo 86 most Vancouver theatres looked as if they had been hit by a neutron bomb: the buildings were standing, but the audience had disintegrated. In mid-August, with almost two months remaining in the World’s Fair, the Vancouver Social Planning department began surveying the damage in order to make a report to city council. Some cultural institutions – notably the Vancouver Art Gallery and the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology – were having a banner year as tourists flocked to their special exhibits. But performing arts companies, which were suddenly competing with “the world’s best” as well as with the glitz of the fair itself, were bruised and battered. In their responses to the survey, theatre companies and rental halls related a litany of financial woes. The Vancouver Playhouse, bolstered by Expo optimism, offered a summer season featuring remounts of their big hits of 1985-86, A Chorus Line and Noises Off. According to the survey, the Playhouse lost $175,000. Arts Club managing director Bill Millerd reported that his three theatres were “down approximately $250,000 in revenue compared to 1985” for May, June, and July.
Montreal Face to Face with the Actor
Authors: Féral Josette , Gill Rosalind
Published: June 2023

La Tour (The Tower), by Anne-Marie Provencher, was presented at Espace Libre from 30 September to 2 November 1986. The play has a rather unique format: it was designed for an audience of one and features one actor, one spectator, and a tower. When I heard about La Tour, I was immediately taken by the idea of a single spectator confronted by a single actor, face to face. This one-on-one confrontation would allow the participants to observe, as if in a laboratory, the hidden facet of a larger confrontation, that of the audience and the stage. A number of questions come to mind: does a spectator listen in the same way when he or she is alone with the actor, looking each other straight in the eye? Does the close proximity make it difficult to listen to the play? What is the effect of the physical closeness between actor and spectator? Is the actor able to draw the spectator into the drama? Where is the theatricality in such a format?
Image Theatre
Authors: Wallace Bob
Published: June 2023

“There are no obviously identifiable characters, just human beings who express fear, love, ecstasy, violence and death by colliding with spoken words, as if only an expressive body could adequately convey the intensity of the exploded script.” Hélène Beauchamp’s summary of the Omnibus production of René-Daniel Dubois’s Deux contes parmi tant d’autres pour une tribe perdue included here applies to much of the other work discussed in this issue, work that pursues physical more than literary values. With the “explosion” of the script in this work, the authority of the word – and of its author – is eroded, perhaps even replaced, by the transitory theatre event that denies commodification into book or tape form because of its spatial as well as temporal essence. In Quebec, this is the work of concepteurs and créateurs – terms that defy easy translation into English theatrical terminology. Even when this work expresses the vision of one artist, it invariably is created by a group whose collaborative methods are considerably different from those of traditional theatre production. Working from concepts rather than scripts, they ignore the assumptions of conventional dramaturgy as words give way to images; here, images are not a means to an end, but an end in themselves.
The Hand that Feeds
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

By the time this article appears in print, the two winners (in English and French) of the 1986 Governor General’s Award for Drama will have been announced; but as I write this the juries have not yet met to select a short list of candidates. Late in the spring the Canada Council will plant a discreet notice in the media announcing the finalists in each of the prize’s four categories (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama), and about a month later a second terse announcement will name the winners. The official gaze of Canadian culture will fix momentarily on literature, blink and pass on to things that really matter. Like Pay-TV.
The Envelope Please ... / 2: Definite Jessie Material
Authors: Leiren-Young Mark
Published: June 2023

“Definite Jessie material.” It’s a phrase invoked in reviews, rehearsals, cast parties, and casual conversations wherever Vancouver theatre people are found. Suggesting someone should be – or should have been – nominated for a Jessie award is high praise, interchangeable with telling them they’ve done some of the best work you’ve seen all year.
Saskatoon Reopening the Carlton Trail
Authors: Macpherson Rod
Published: June 2023

As File caught fire in its progress from Montreal’s Centaur Theatre to the National Arts Centre via Edmonton’s Citadel last January through March, two western theatre companies began to ship live entertainment down an overland trade route of the 1800s, establishing what they hope will be a trade route for quality Canadian drama that stretches right across the Prairies and eventually reaches the Pacific. Twenty-Fifth Street Theatre in Saskatoon and Theatre Network in Edmonton have embarked on the first Carlton Trail Theatre Festival, a joint venture which saw the two companies exchange productions in a flurry of media hoopla late in February, after two weeks run on their home stages.
Papers, The Melville Boys, Odd Jobs
Authors: Stratton Allan , Foster Norm , Moher Frank , Rudakoff Judith
Published: June 2023

The quest for commercially viable Canadian plays is faring better today than in years past. With David French’s Salt-Water Moon winning accolades both at home and abroad, the increasing production of small-cast, low-budget comedy-drama may finally be proving that Canadian theatre can be both funny and marketable. Perhaps we are moving into a new era for English-Canadian theatre – beyond the kitchen-sink realism and representational collectives of the 1970s, and towards a new Canadian dramaturgy: the saleable commodity seasoned with wit, poignancy, substance, and relevance. All this, and most with a cast of less than four actors… .
The Directors’ Colloquium at Calgary The Director’s Role: 1/ The Workshops: Transformations
Authors: Levine Meredith
Published: June 2023

As Nick Hutchinson, head of the acting and playwriting section of the English language division of the National Theatre School, puts it: “Directing is a difficult craft to teach and a difficult craft to learn, because to be a good director, you have to learn all the crafts of the theatre.” Hutchinson was speaking on a panel about actor expectations at the recent Directors’ Colloquium at Calgary, Canada’s first major attempt to engage directors in a comprehensive examination of the technical and theoretical issues involved in their art. Why has this not been previously attempted? Certainly part of the answer is that directing is still relatively new to the process of creating theatre: directors did not begin to appear until the mid-19th century, before which, actor-managers usually ran theatre companies. Consequently, the art of directing still is struggling to claim its identity, still is delineating its borders amongst the playwrights, actors, designers, and technicians who all collaborate on this most ephemeral form. Who is in control of what in the creative process understandably remains in a state of flux.
2/ Panel Session One: 16 May 1987: The Role of the Director in New Play Development
Authors: Raby Gyl , Benedetti Robert , Hawthorne Pamela , Biros Jim , McInnes Alan , White Bob
Published: June 2023

Gyl Raby: I would like to start by asking each of our directors to remark on what they feel the ideal playwright/director relationship should be.
Gilles Maheu: Corps à Corps
Authors: Pavlovic Diane , Gannon Roger E. , Gill Rosalind
Published: June 2023

Gille Maheu’s keen sense of space and movement, his deliberately provocative critical stance, the richness of his visual imagination, and the consistency of his interests (aesthetic and thematic), have been highly praised in Quebec and elsewhere. His performances are characterized by a unique sense of rhythm, colour, and élan. Those interested in experimental theatre and the avant-garde quickly recognize that Maheu has the ability to create a total theatre exploiting mime, dance, theatre, performance, cinema, and the plastic arts. Maheu studied in Europe under Etienne Decroux, Yves Lebreton, and Eugenio Barba. Over his 20-year career, he has evolved a corporal language which is at the same time rigid and supple, evocative and meaningful. Founder and artistic director of Carbone 14, a group with an increasingly international reputation, he has staged a number of memorable productions (Pain blanc, L’Homme rouge, he Rail, Le Titanic), working variously as director, scenographer, writer, and actor.
Michael Hollingsworth: Making History
Authors: Bettis Paul
Published: June 2023

Bettis: Michael how did the idea of a cycle of plays about Canadian history come about? Hollingsworth: Initially, I started doing these historical satires in order to set myself up for some classic Video Cabaret International presentations: screens, monitors, live electric music, and so on. The idea was to get to the 20th Century, which is what I wanted to write about. But, in an odd way, setting up that context has become a whole thing unto itself. After all, the history of this country as a totality remains undramatized.
Hillar Liitoja: Chaos and Control
Authors: Hunt Nigel
Published: June 2023

Hillar Liitoja’s theatre work, whether it is his settings of Ezra Pound’s poetry, his staging of other people’s texts, or the creation of his own, is at once a reaction against, and a celebration of, the fundamental incomprehensibility of the world. From his musical background and theatrical influences to his current techniques of creating his pieces (in which the traditionally separate tasks of writing and directing are usually blended together), Liitoja’s challenging relationship between performance and audience can be seen as an effort to refocus the way we interact with the world.
Robin Phillips: Text and Context
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

Robin Phillips is widely known as Canada’s leading director of classical theatre. He is known as an actors’ director, and as a director of productions of remarkable textual clarity and visual impact that explore complex texts using an approach that is perhaps best described as contextual rather than conceptual.1 For audiences this means the creation of complete societies around the action of the play through close attention to the precise social and physical settings of each scene, to the costumes and characterizations of all characters, including those usually considered to be minor, and to their careful placement within the social fabric of the play. Phillips does not mount a production as an illustration of an externally imposed directorial concept, but as an exploration of the text within a certain context, in which actors and audiences take part. For actors, that exploration takes place in rehearsal.2
Directing
Authors: Wallace Bob
Published: June 2023

Despite the variety of their reactions to the Directors’ Colloquium at Calgary last May, most of the participants agreed that this event was long overdue. While many of our best playwrights, actors, and designers frequently acknowledge the contributions of various directors to their work, public recognition of the director’s pivotal function in the creation of theatre still is rare.
Notes on Popular Theatre ... / 2: Now More Than Ever
Authors: Mastai Judith
Published: June 2023

As we find ourselves living in what Theodor Adorno called a “fully administered” society, and macro-control units such as television, rock concerts and Maclean’s magazine reduce our human experience to pastiche and comic book characters, theatre is one possibility for artists and the public to engage in social research, to celebrate common rituals, to provide a form of community therapy or to allow catharsis in the face of unsolvable dilemmas of human existence.
Underdeveloped Alliance
Authors: Filewod Ian
Published: June 2023

In the past few years people working in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the field of international development have come to talk about, think about, and on occasion work in popular theatre. At the same time, theatre workers in Canada have become involved with NGOs through work on international issues in Canada or through development work overseas. This meeting of interests has been the subject of much discussion following the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance’s Standin’ the Gaff festival in Sydney last June. The festival itself seemed at times dominated by development interests. The program was consciously international, with funds set aside to bring companies in from overseas. Canadian development educators seemed to have discovered popular theatre.
Starting from Scratch: Politics, Playwriting and Zero Hour
Authors: McDonald Larry , Milner Arthur , McDonald Patrick
Published: June 2023

For over a decade, The Great Canadian Theatre Company has combined a commitment to political theatre with the demands of surviving as Ottawa’s most successful anglophone alternative to the National Arts Centre. Known nationally for the 1983 tour of Sandinista!, GCTC has performed numerous collective creations, docudramas and agit-props – many written by playwright-in-residence Arthur Milner – for community and labour groups. Larry McDonald talks to Arthur Milner and GCTC’s artistic director Patrick McDonald about their collaboration.
Zero Hour
Authors: Milner Arthur
Published: June 2023

Caution: © 1986 Arthur Milner. Rights to produce Zero Hour, in whole or in part, in any medium by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by the author. Interested persons are requested to write to him c/o The Great Canadian Theatre Company, 910 Gladstone Avenue, Ottawa, Canada K1R 6Y4, or phone 613-236-5192.
Edmonton Peter Puck, Meet Peter Pork …
Authors: Burns Kevin
Published: June 2023

The starting point for Pig Productions can be traced to a workshop presented by Cathy Devecka at the Catalyst Theatre Popular Theatre Training Workshop held in Edmonton, June 16-22, 1986. Cathy Devecka is a cultural worker in Ann Arbor who guided The Pinkertons through several years of “actions” in that community. An “action” is the name she gives to any form of organized theatrical intervention – parade, scene, guerrilla or invisible theatre. The Pinkertons are best known in Ann Arbor for their campaign against the Kerasote Theatre Corporation, who were in the process of de-unionizing their chain of cinemas. A series of street theatre scenes were played to the line-ups outside the theatre. The scenes were strengthened by the placement of “nudgers” (undercover Pinkerton members) in the line-ups who would start discussing the scenes and commenting on the anti-union practices of the Kerasote management. An effective “action” resulted in people leaving the line-up. A legal suit soon followed in 1985 but The Pinkertons escaped relatively unscathed, ready to divert their energies and their considerable theatre and organizational skills to other community concerns.
The popular performing arts, non-formal education and social change in the Third World: a bibliography and review essay
Authors: Kidd Ross , Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

As I was sunning on the beach this past summer, I read Ross Kidd’s bibliography and essay on popular performing arts in the Third World. My choice of reading material caused great consternation among my companions, who felt it would ward off anyone who otherwise might stop and chat. My friends suggested that reading a bibliography on a beach is tantamount to a formal announcement that one is a dull person. There is a degree of truth in this: bibliographies, notoriously short on narrative, let alone suspense, are dull reading. But then, they aren’t meant to be read like a novel. Bibliographies are resource material. By citing available material on a given subject, the bibliographer saves the rest of us a lot of time.
Popular Theatre
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Only recently has the phrase “popular theatre” won acceptance in Canada to describe theatre for social action and community development. Ever since Kam Theatre’s Bread & Circuses Festival in Thunder Bay in 1981, where representatives of a dozen companies founded the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance, the idea of theatre as a tool of development has made increasing inroads among educators, development agencies, and of course, in the theatre profession itself. Three successive CPTA festivals (Bread & Roses, Edmonton 1983, Bread & Dreams, Winnipeg 1985, and Standin’ the Gaff, Sydney 1987) have done much to legitimize the work of Canadian popular theatres.
This is, and is not, Shakespeare: Pericles self-destructs in Toronto
Authors: Fortier Mark
Published: June 2023

René-Daniel Dubois’ “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,’’ by William Shakespeare takes place after a catastrophe. Outside Theatre Passe Muraille a sign hangs by one corner: it announces the opening of Shakespeare’s Pericles on April 8 (1987). On April 9 and on subsequent evenings the audience enters a shattered theatrical space, up the stairs into what is more like an abandoned warehouse than any even quasi-traditional space for playing Shakespeare. We sit behind industrial wire fencing on four sides of a harshly lit stage. The stage itself irrupts in places at strange angles, as if it has been buckled by an earthquake. All around, where it should meet the wire fencing, is a narrow abyss into which the actors will sometimes partly slip, from which will come great, hollow echoes, and by which we seem irrevocably separated from the persons on stage.
Shakespeare in Vancouver: Guy Sprung’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
Authors: Page Malcolm
Published: June 2023

During Christopher Newton’s term as Artistic Director (1973—79), Vancouver Playhouse had a good record with Shakespeare, in quantity and quality. He offered re-thought Julius Caesar, Powys Thomas as a distinguished Lear, a pretty 18th-century Twelfth Night, a perversely unheroic Macbeth, the Shrew set in a Victorian railway station in Italy, and an Edwardian Hamlet showing a justified faith in the potential of Andrew Gillies in the lead. Since then, an adequate Henry IV, Part I, an enjoyable As You Like It characterizing the principals by their taste in pop music, a Tempest with an o’erparted Gordon Pinsent as Prospero, a disastrous Romeo and Juliet, and another unheroic Macbeth.
Detaining Mr Trotsky
Authors: Fothergill Robert
Published: June 2023

Caution: © Robert Fothergill, 1988. This play is protected by the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and all performances are subject to royalty. Changes to the script are expressly forbidden without written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film, or record, in whole or part, in any language, by any group amateur or professional, are retained by the author. Interested persons are requested to apply for permission and terms to: Robert Fothergill, c/o the Playwrights Union of Canada, 8 York Street, 6th Floor, Toronto, Canada M5J 1R2.
Edmonton A View from the Fringe
Authors: Nothof Anne
Published: June 2023

Experiencing “Gone with the Fringe,” Edmonton’s annual summer theatre festival, is like playing the horses. After a careful analysis of the program centrefold, a critical reading of the colour commentary for each of the one hundred and fifty plays, and a juggling of times and dates for the nine-day run, you pick what you hope are the winners. It’s important to have a system, one which has been refined over the past five years of fringing. First, look to the Chinook Theatre venue for quality productions. Although this is only one of fourteen stages scattered through the Old Strathcona district, it is the headquarters for that mastermind and master planner of the Fringe, Brian Paisley. With a seating capacity of one hundred and seventy-five the Chinook is one of the largest venues at the Fringe, the seats the most comfortable. And traditionally the Chinook has at least two out-of-country sellouts in its line-up.
Montreal Beyond Esperanto: New Developments in Play Translation
Authors: Hunt Nigel
Published: June 2023

In a world where everybody spoke and wrote in Esperanto there would be no need for translation. Fortunately for those who make their living as translators, Esperanto never caught on. Unfortunately, for those of us who don’t speak all the languages of the world fluently - or even two of them - but nevertheless desire to read widely and must rely on translations. Writers who seek out new audiences contend not only with the translation of their words, but also the transposition of the work’s cultural context-and sometimes with unexpected results. I recall Edward Albee’s tale of watching the world première of The Zoo Story in Germany. The play was a huge success, more than when it was later produced in the United States. Albee lightheartedly concluded that his play must have lost something in the original.
John Neville Takes Command: The Story of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Production
Authors: Gaines Robert , Russell Anne
Published: June 2023

In the Preface to John Neville Takes Command Robert A. Gaines points out the problems for theatre historians who must rely on promptbooks, reviews and memories to reconstruct performances. While facts about how a production was presented may be known, the underlying reasons for the directors’ and performers’ approaches to the play may not be understood. In an attempt to answer some of the “whys” behind the productions presented in the 1986 Stratford Festival season, Gaines attended rehearsals of all productions, and interviewed directors, designers, composers and actors. Most of this book is Gaines’ compilation of data on the preparation, rehearsal process and performance of the plays.
Shakespeare in Canada
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

Lois Burdett and Helen Edmonds teach grades 2 and 3 in Stratford, Ontario. The curriculum requires that students in those grades be introduced to their community. Burdett and Edmonds realized that in Stratford where a festival of Shakespearean plays is mounted annually, where streets are named after characters in those plays, where the schools where they teach are called “Hamlet” and “Avon,” an introduction to the community is necessarily an introduction to Shakespeare. Accordingly, the teachers asked their students to research the life and times of Shakespeare. So surprised were they at the children’s interest in the playwright and his work that they decided to expand the unit. Their account of this project, “Shakespeare and the grade 2 and 3 student,” appeared in the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario Newsletter (April/ May 1987).
Le Théâtre Petit à Petit, Order Minus Power
Authors: Salter Denis
Published: June 2023

In 1977, after studying theatre together at university, Annie Gascon, Danielle Hotte, and Claude Poissant founded le Théâtre Petit à Petit. With shoe-string budgets and minimal facilities, they explored a number of theatrical styles, doing everything petit à petit or little by little. Today the company is run collaboratively by Marie-France Bruyère, François Camirand, René Richard Cyr, Annie Gascon, Claude Poissant, and Denis Roy, and is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a remarkable season of both revival productions like Claude Poissant’s Ce qui reste du désir and new work like Fantômes, Concert-Fantôme. It has also been getting a lot of attention because of its hit production of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Les feluettes, directed by André Brassard as a co-production with the National Arts Centre / Centre National des Arts.
A Theatre of Involvement / 1, An Ability to Organize
Authors: Spry Lib
Published: June 2023

Théâtre Parminou is everything that the theatre establishment in this country regards with suspicion. All its productions are created collectively, and the company, a large one, operates as a co-operative. Parminou is political; it works outside the theatrical mainstream and has a style which is large, often clownesque and unsubtle.
A Theatre of Involvement / 2, An Alternative Culture
Authors: Lavoie Odette , Martineau Maureen , Spry Lib
Published: June 2023

In Quebec at the present time we feel that we are going against the tide of a theatre movement of which we were once at the heart. We practise a theatre of collective creation at a time when hardly anyone still does this, a political theatre – a dimension which is less and less present nowadays – and we are exploring the balance between the dramatic and the thematic at the very time that performance art and aestheticism have become a major influence on subject matter.
The Greatest Show, Schafer’s Patria Three The Cycle Continues
Authors: Burgess David
Published: June 2023

Ladies and Gentlemen, Patria Music/Theatre Projects and the Peterborough Festival of the Arts are proud to present; Patria Three: The Greatest Show, a feast for the ears, the nose, the eyes and the stomach. Here, you will experience a world of truth and error, delight and terror, of the real and the unreal, the ideal and the surreal. Pieces collected from far and near, a collection so astounding no one will grasp it all in a single visit. In a moment, you may wander at will through this haunting spectacle of thrills and illusions and you will be amazed at what here may be found (and lost). But have no fear, for I, Sam Galuppi, am your guarantee that the show will run as good clean fun.
Levine meets Lepage Tectonic Plates: Bridging the Continental Drift
Authors: Burrows Malcolm
Published: June 2023

Robert Lepage and Michael Levine are cautious when they explain the subject of their current collaboration, Tectonic Plates. Lepage says in careful, soothing tones, “Well, it is a show about— I don’t know if you know what tectonic plates means – it’s about the drifting of continents.” If this pronouncement came from anyone other than Lepage, the Quebec actor-director who established his reputation with such theatrically inventive pieces as Circulations, La Trilogie des dragons and his one-man show Vinci – it would be met with indulgent smiles and utter disbelief. When the project was initially announced in January few people were willing to accept its geophysical premise. The title was variously announced as Teutonic Plates (on the German porcelain industry?) and Teutonic Plagues (Black Death in the 1340s?); there was even an enquiry from New York about their work on textiles. For a while even the title seemed to be a collaborative effort open to the public and press.
The Newfoundland Collectives, The Wake or the Awakening?
Authors: Lynde Denyse
Published: June 2023

Theatre in St John’s in the late 1980s owes its heterogeneous character to the mixed influences that have created it: the lingering excitement of its origins in the seventies, depressed economic conditions, and the nature of the present acting community. The collective creation, a dominant voice in the 1970s, can still be heard today, but the form and purpose have altered just as the creators and the world they work in have been redefined. While the financial restraint of the 1980s sets new guidelines in the arts across Canada, in St John’s the government dollar continues to shrink at an alarming rate in a climate of over-extended private resources and shrinking audience support. Some artists who cut their teeth on collective creation in the 1970s have moved to the mainland to pursue their careers or have sought more stable forms of employment. Some make St John’s their home base and work elsewhere on demand. And some continue to work in St John’s, primarily at the Resource Centre for the Arts or the Arts and Culture Centre. Those who remain know the collective process intimately and defend the exhilaration of the process and the quality of the product.
The Rich Man
Authors: Kreisel Henry , Osborne Joanne , Potter Gerry
Published: June 2023

The script for The Rich Man is based on Henry Kreisel’s 1948 novel of the same name. The adaptation has gone through many stages and involved creative and editorial contributions from a number of people. The process began with a ten-day, novel-in-hand improvisation session in July, 1985. At the end of that session, Joanne Osborne was commissioned to be principal writer, and she has retained that role, working with co-writer Gerry Potter and with the consultation of Henry Kreisel. Over the past two years, three short workshops were held. The authors thank all those who took part in these improve and workshops, as well as the sponsors: Workshop West Theatre, the Laidlaw Foundation, and the Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts. Special thanks to Dorothy Ann Haug, Frank Moher, Blair Haynes, Jude Beny, Susan Sneath, Jim DeFelice and, for his generosity and help, Henry Kreisel.