bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Editorial
Authors: Graham Catherine
Published: June 2023

What is “activist theatre”? As the articles in this issue will show, it can mean a broad range of things, ranging from theatre created with specific communities to theatre that addresses pressing local issues and even theatre that attempts to engage interest in issues that are happening on a global scale. It is a kind of theatre that CTR has covered since its inception, under titles like “political theatre,” “community-based theatre” and “popular theatre” and often by relating it to particular cultural communities, as in recent issues on Chinese Canadian and Italian Canadian theatre. So why now use the term “activist”?
2. from Full Moon
Authors: Keens-Douglas Richardo
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Richardo Keens-Douglas © 2003. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are expressly forbidden without written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For permissions, copyright, and performance rights, contact the author through Core Group, Attention Charles Northcote. (416) 955-0819.
1. from Blacks Don’t Bowl
Authors: Haynes Vadney S.
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Vadney S. Haynes © 2003. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are expressly forbidden without written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For permissions, copyright, and performance rights, contact the author at 3639 Clark St., Montreal, QC H2X 2S1. Telephone (514) 845-4401.
Outside of the Box
Authors: Gale Lorena
Published: June 2023

Nine years ago, I wrote an article for Canadian Theatre Review, titled “Into the Margins,” about the challenges of being a Black theatre artist in Vancouver. It was an emotionally charged article. I lamented the loss of my Montreal and Black communities. I berated Canadian theatre for its racial exclusivity, its exclusionary practices, and its narrow-minded perception that Black theatre was of special interest and not suitable for mass (read mainstream) consumption. I vented the frustration of constantly having to prove oneself as a Black artist and justify one’s presence long after one’s talents and accomplishments should have earned respect and acceptance. I spoke to the fears and ignorance and misconceptions within the community, and the rejection and isolation of those daring enough to confront racial issues head-on. I voiced my longing to belong, my yearning to grow and my need for a safe space in which to explore my craft or simply be. At the end of this article, I concluded that mainstream Vancouver/Canadian theatre could not and would not sustain me. Believing bell hooks to be correct in her assessment that marginal space is revolutionary space, I exiled myself to the fringes of the theatre community (see hooks 1992).
The Talking Creature: Adventures with Audiences
Authors: O’donnell Darren
Published: June 2023

The Talking Creature was the inaugural event held by my theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, in our new program, SocialCapital. SocialCapital is a wing of the company dedicated to stripped-down research, experimentation, discussion and artistic forms that, as yet, remain off the radar of traditional theatre and performance practices. The Talking Creature was an experiment in trying to isolate two core elements in the theatrical experience: talking and strangers. Standing in front of an audience of people you don’t know or, at least, don’t know very well and establishing an open channel for the transmission of ideas is, in my experience, nerve-wracking. There is a tendency to imagine the audience is thinking the worst, that they are aware of your every mistake and are there to judge you as harshly as you judge yourself. Or if, on the other hand, you happen to have an overabundance of confidence, you run the risk of trying to dazzle, and this also rules out an open conduit of communication. I confess to oscillating between these two tendencies. The Talking Creature required humility, confidence, talking and listening; arguably, the four cardinal points in almost all theatre.
Deep-Mapping a Morning on 3A
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

By the spring of 2001, I had been living in Saskatchewan for almost four years. During this time, I discovered that a province famous for its slow decline of population - particularly of youth leaving for lucrative employment and bright futures elsewhere - and for its photographs of barren-looking homesteads and soon-to-be torn-down grain elevators was actually a place blessed with absence. Saskatchewan’s abandoned buildings are potentially some of the greatest archival treasures that exist in all of Canada. Several decades of relatively slow economic growth have created an environment where what remains from the past has been left, in some cases virtually undisturbed, in the very spot where it was placed years ago. While many see old, empty buildings as a measure of decline and even the death of a culture, I see them for their immanence as a performative archive and as a resource for re-birth through reconsideration of what remains of both the building and its embedded culture.
Lieutenant Nun
Authors: Avila Elaine
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Elaine Avila. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For performance rights, contact the author: Playwrights Guild of Canada, 54 Wolseley Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto, ON, M5T 1A5. Phone 416-703-0201. For further information, contact Elaine Avila, 24347 Newhall Avenue, Suite 33, Newhall, CA, 91321 USA. Email elaineavila@hotmail.com .
Shakespeare and Canada: Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation
Authors: Knowles Ric , Worthen W.B.
Published: June 2023

Ric Knowles’s new book, Shakespeare and Canada – number 8 in the P.I.E.-Peter Lang Dramaturgies: Texts, Cultures and Performances series – is an important collection of essays. Knowles is widely known for his cogent critique of the culture of contemporary Canadian Shakespeare performance. He is also a major figure in the landscape of contemporary Canadian theatre studies; a widely respected reviewer; editor of the Canadian Theatre Review and Modern Drama; author of two searching books on recent Canadian drama, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning and Reading the Material Theatre; and co-editor of Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English and Modern Drama: Defining the Field. There’s perhaps no one more able to dramatize the critical dialogue between Shakespeare and the forms, moods and shapes of Canadian theatre.
Photographic Performance: A Part of Me
Authors: Riva Kyle
Published: June 2023

Kyle Riva is one of the few people actually born and bred in Calgary. After high school, Kyle studied Broadcast Journalism in hopes of becoming a News Anchor or reporter. After three years of pursuing the News Anchor dream (technology was changing, limiting work, so jobs were few and far between), Kyle decided to look elsewhere tor a career. In 1998, the arrival of Kyle’s first SLR Camera proved the winds of change were blowing. When he opened the camera up for the first time, it seemed that his calling had come.
Disability Pride within Disability Performance
Authors: Frazee Catherine
Published: June 2023

It moves us, impassions us, emboldens us. Disability art – for many of us, the stuff and business of our everyday and particular lives. Far beyond offering simple entertainment – performance, song and dance – disabled artists and creators push back the demons of shame and humiliation, wrench the cameras away from the distorting angles of mainstream media and bite a goodly chunk or two out of the benevolent hand of charity.
Dramaturgy and a Collective Theatre
Authors: Frey Heather Fitzsimmons
Published: June 2023

For the last four years, I have had the privilege of being the company dramaturge for the Etcetera Theatre Collective (ETC), a small Edmonton company led by Artistic Director Barbra French. The company, whose motto is “a never ending process,” is dedicated to creation-based theatre. Following Peter Hinton’s recent article on dramaturgy in CTR, I identify myself as a dramaturge with some trepidation — he writes, “[Canada] has very few fine dramaturges” (6) — and I know I am still learning and growing in my profession. Yet, I think the ETC collective process makes a worthwhile contribution to the field of dramaturgy in Canada. In many people’s minds, the dramaturge is closely tied to a script, but an ETC project begins with an idea and a production deadline, and nothing more. Negotiating the work of a dramaturge in the collective creation process led me to try to differentiate the work I do from the wide range of dramaturgy practised in Canada.
Editorial
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

To begin, an observation about the topic which this issue of Canadian Theatre Review addresses: Theatre is discussed most often as art, but theatre is also a site of labour, as the existence of unions and professional bodies such as Actors’ Equity and the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres evinces. These organizations, and others like them, protect the working conditions of their members. Their function is crucial, but it is one that carries implications, as it organizes theatrical labour through what is, fundamentally, an industrial model, based on the segregation of workers into discrete categories of specialization. Some of the implications are problematic, as many of the articles in the issue suggest: The divide between various modes of labour in the theatre is not neat and tidy, particularly in the case of small companies, where the artistic director may also be an actor in, and director of, productions mounted by the company, as Sky Gilbert discusses; or, when professional theatre is being produced in northern Canada, as Michael Clark writes. In a blunt assessment of the state of labour relations in Canadian theatre, Ivan Habel argues that, in addressing the various conditions of work, the contractual protocols for actors have expanded into the cumbersome, if well-intentioned, Canadian Theatre Agreement. He argues that the unwieldy agreement requires an onerous commitment of time if it is to be implemented appropriately, suggesting that it has become largely inaccessible for those whom it ostensibly serves: theatre artists.
Plan Yellow
Authors: Kroesinger Hans-Werner
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Hans-Werner Kroesinger. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For performance rights, please contact Hans-Werner Kroesinger at kroesinger@gmx.net .
Friction
Authors: Brooker Blake , Green Michael , Curtis Andy , McDowell Richard , Payne Brad , Belle David van
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Blake Brooker and Michael Green. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the copyright union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the authors. Rights to produce, film, or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the authors. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. For performance rights, contact One Yellow Rabbit at #21, 225 - 8th Ave. SE, Calgary, AB, Canada, T2G OK8.
Alternative Collaborations in the Theatre of War: Liberators, Occupiers and Population
Authors: Bennett Susan , Farfan Penny , Yacowar Maurice
Published: June 2023

The bad “collaboration” inspires a good one. In Liberators, Occupiers and Population, three international companies each provide a one-act play to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Netherlands’ liberation from the Nazis. All three plays are based on “real people talking,” as director Blake Brooker put it at the premiere, as the dialogue is drawn from speeches, letters and memories. The companies’ dramatic collaboration provides a positive alternative to the negative of wartime collaboration.
The End of the Moon: Reports from Elsewhere
Authors: Gaunce Julia
Published: June 2023

Part meditation, part entertainment and part symphony (of monologue, music and images), Laurie Anderson’s solo work The End of the Moon hinges on two keys: her recent tenure as NASA’s artist-in-residence and the question, “Who taught you what beauty is?”
Editorial
Authors: Bennett Susan , Farfan Penny
Published: June 2023

In January 2006, OneYellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo will celebrate its twentieth anniversary as a showcase for new performance from Calgary, Canada and beyond. What better time to begin to reflect upon the history and significance of one of our country’s premiere festivals for the presentation of live art by the artists who created it? In this special issue, we approach the Rodeo from a number of different angles.
“Make Thee an Ark”: On the North American Cultural Laboratory, Theatre and National Identities
Authors: Bartscherer Thomas
Published: June 2023

To christen a theatre company the North American Cultural Laboratory (hereafter, NACL) is to locate it in a specific, albeit large, geographical space and, at the same time, to take an ambivalent stance toward national identity. NACL was founded in 1997 by Canadian Tannis Kowalchuk and American Brad Krumholz. The name neither aligns the company with one or the other nation nor simply ignores questions of national origin. Rather, by designating a geographical space that encompasses more than one sovereign state, the name “NACL” announces the organization’s ambition to reach across international borders.1 The name also indicates this New York—based laboratory’s links to such organizations as the late Jerzy Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium in Poland and Eugenio Barba’s Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in Denmark. In respect of national identity, then, NACL has been shaped by three distinct forces, two emanating from the national origins of the founders and a third that is, in essence, supranational as a matter both of fact and principle. This essay examines the interplay of these forces as manifest in NACL’s history, artistic work and institutional life.
Mutation and Performance Genealogy in The Confessions of Punch and Judy
Authors: Wolford Lisa
Published: June 2023

On the morning before The Confessions of Punch and Judy (Bobgan, Kowalchuk and Wells) opened at the Theatre Centre in Toronto’s trendy Queen Street West district, director Raymond Bobgan met me for breakfast. We set out at 9:30 on a Saturday morning, too early for the hipper cafes to have begun serving brunch but reached the Swan diner at 10 a.m., just in time to see the doors unlocked and the sign in the window flipped to “Open.” Sliding into the tall wooden booths, we spoke about our shared desire to relocate to Ontario. We debated the merits of my wish to apply for skilled-worker status versus Raymond’s current freedom, under the provisions of NAFTA, to teach and direct in both the United States and Canada. My motivations for wanting to immigrate are mostly ideological, while Raymond’s are primarily artistic. Having taught intensive modules at Toronto’s Humber School of Creative and Performing Arts for the past three years, he’s encountered a number of gifted student artists interested in his approaches to vocal and physical training and the creation of devised performance. It’s a surfeit of riches he lacks in his current home of Cleveland, Ohio, where Wishhounds Theatre, the company he founded with partner Holly Holsinger, currently includes only one member in addition to themselves, apprentice Chris Seibert. Other gifted collaborators have come and gone over the decade since Bobgan established his first ensemble company in Cleveland, most eventually moving on because of the difficulty of earning a living wage for their artistic labour and the scant availability of non-service-sector jobs in the troubled rust belt city.
“Between Home There and Home Here”: An Interview with Nina Lee Aquino
Authors: Knowles Ric , Aquino Nina Lee
Published: June 2023

Ric Knowles: You play an astonishing range of roles in theatre in Toronto — actor, director, playwright, playwright in residence with Cahoots Theatre Projects, dramaturg, former company dramaturg with Carlos BulosanTheatre, marketing and development coordinator with Native Earth Performing Arts, producer of the CrossCurrents Festival at Factory Theatre and, of course, artistic director of fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company. Can you talk a little bit about your background and what led you to this position?
Enjoyment and the Nation Thing
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

Sometimes the best way to understand a nation and what bonds people together toward a particular sense of nationhood is to know what breaks it all apart. Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian scholar of philosophy and psychoanalysis, has combined firsthand knowledge of the political and ethnic antagonism that fuelled the social conflicts in the former Yugoslavia with a remarkable revision of ideology to argue that what breaks a country apart, especially along the lines of ethnic and cultural difference, is a collectively driven refusal of enjoyment. Zizek argues that the force that holds together a community cannot be reduced simply to the point of symbolic identification, the singing of the anthem, the flying of the flag, and so forth; rather, the bond linking together those aligned in nationhood always implies “a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated” (201).
The Razor’s Edge between Performativity and Theatricality in Bluemouth Inc.’s American Standard
Authors: Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

My purpose has been to suggest points at which the floor cracks open and we are startled, however pleasantly, by the upsurge of the real into the magic circle where the conventions of theatricality have assured us that the real has been subdued and transcended.
Views & Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew , Nanni Laura
Published: June 2023

Today we can see the beginnings of a new way of thinking about the world – as sets of relationships rather than separated objects – which we call ecology… . We belong to, are made up of, that world that surrounds us, and respond to it in ways beyond knowing.
Bigger than Jesus: Mediating the Larger than Live Story
Authors: Cockett Peter
Published: June 2023

The title of Miller and Brooks’s play is a reference to John Lennon’s famous comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but Miller and Brooks’s point is that Jesus is bigger than Jesus. The play addresses the mystery of cultural generation that turned a potentially obscure Jewish Rabbi called Yeshua into Jesus Christ, the iconic figurehead of one of the world’s dominant religions. The play was first performed in 2004, the year in which Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ broke records at the box office, but one cannot imagine two more contrasting approaches to the same subject matter. Gibson’s film is a modernist or even pre-modern throw-back, clinging to a belief in the absolute; Miller and Brooks’s version of Christ’s story, Bigger than Jesus, is thoroughly postmodern in its conception and effect. We are always aware of the performance as a performance — of the telling of the stories, not just of the stories told — and this marks a fundamental difference from Gibson’s film.
Intimate Acts with Obsolete Bodies: Theatre Gargantua’s e-DENTITY and Mediatized Theatre
Authors: Papoutsis Natalie
Published: June 2023

Bodies and the people who inhabit and animate them are at the centre of Theatre Gargantua’s e-DENTITY,1 even in moments where nobody (or no-bodies) is visibly present. In the representation of the online, “remote” world, director Jacquie Thomas utilizes theatrical devices that rely on a high degree of presence, immediacy and human interaction. In contrast to this, Michael Spence’s script constructs every onstage exchange, with one exception, around individuals who are spatially dislocated. The performers’ bodies inhabit the same physical space, yet none of their characters share space in the dramatic frame. These onstage bodies are endlessly mutable, transforming both into set pieces (allowing images to be projected upon them) and a multitude of characters (the actors’ bodies are vessels filled by a variety of characters throughout the piece).
Dancing with Spirits: Zuppa Circus’s Open Theatre Kitchen
Authors: Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

Zuppa Circus is an enigma. Originally founded by Ben Stone and Sandy Gribbin in 1998, the Halifax-based theatrical ensemble draws on diverse forms of training and inspiration. They are a collaborative, highly physical company whose performances defy categorization. Their developmental processes are both uncommonly structured and conspicuously unpredictable. They are driven by curiosity, and their subject matter and theatrical style(s) precociously mix the profound with the trivial (often revealing the tricky, elusive distinction between the two). The stories that they tell evolve out of deadly serious whims and take form through constant negotiation between spoken and embodied poetic expression. They are charting new territory … and they are finding their way.
Family, Places and the Island: An Interview with Kent Stetson
Authors: Doran Greg
Published: June 2023

Kent Stetson has written many plays, which have been performed widely. In 2001, The Harps of God won the Governor-General’s Award for Drama. Currently, Stetson is working on a novel, an adaptation of his play New Arcadia. As well, his play Horse High, Bull Strong, Pig Tight is being translated into French for a planned tour of France. The following interview took place on 29 December 2005 over coffee and cinnamon rolls in Charlottetown, PEL

Greg Doran: How did growing up on PEl shape your view of the world or the country? Is there a different sensibility?
Trudeau – Long March /Shining Path
Authors: Clarke George Elliott
Published: June 2023

During my Black Nova Scotian (Africa dian), crypto-socialist and poetry-b esotted youth, my heroes were warriorint ellectuals - scarved, lone figures. I romanticized chivalric character s such as the spea ker in Conrad Kent Rivers’s great poem, “Four Sheet s to the Wind and a One-Way Ticket to France” (1962):

As a child I bought a red scarf and women told me how beautiful it looked, wandering through the sous-sols as France wandered through me.
Beyond Kids’ Stuff: A Review of Mermaid: A Puppet Theatre in Motion, by Alice Walsh (Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005); Provenance, by Ronnie Burkett (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005)
Authors: Cleveland Janne
Published: June 2023

Since its modest beginnings in 1971, Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia has maintained its commitment to “tell a good story, tell it simply, tell it well and tell it often” (Morrow). The story of the evolution and success of this company that creates and produces theatre for young people using puppetry, mask, dance, music and original scripts has been carefully and meticulously documented by Alice Walsh. As Walsh notes in her historiography, Mermaid: A Puppet Theatre in Motion, the company has evolved from a small experimental troupe touring shows in local schools in the Annapolis Valley to one that annually produces theatre for young people internationally. In the 2004/5 season, Mermaid toured twenty-seven states and five provinces and returned to Japan for the seventh time in its history (Mermaid). In fact, the company has toured so continuously and extensively across the globe that in 2001 it earned provincial and national Export Awards usually reserved for the industrial manufacturing sector. In 2005, the company repeated this performance as the recipient of the Canada Export Award. Current artistic director Jim Morrow concedes that, although being recognized as producers of a “product” is somewhat disconcerting to the artistic minds of Mermaid, as Nova Scotian ambassadors of puppet theatre for young people, the company “do[es] export a good energy from Atlantic Canada” (qtd. on 129).
Poetic Terrorism and the Politics of Spoken Word
Authors: James Kedrick
Published: June 2023

Late teen, early 1980s, and first gorging on poetry because it was the only thing that made sense, I became deeply enthused by hearing poems, as much as by reading them: to experience poetry as immanent, in synaesthetic plenty, all writing, reading, listening, speaking, watching, touching, tasting and smelling of poetry was involved. Poets whose work was about all the things language could do, and all the ways of doing it, really appealed to me. Among Canadian poets, I was not left wanting. Amazing work had already been achieved in the experimental spirit of the sixties and seventies: sound, visual, concrete and performance poetry; experimental theatre; choral and improvised forms; dub; and small press activism had all contributed to a robust literary environment. Best of all, we had great mentors and lots of critical work published to base our work on, to push the envelope toward an ever-more imaginative and unbridled poetic passion. One could follow the work of bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Lillian Allen, bill bissett, Roy Kiyooka and so many more, set free to consider far-reaching visions of poetry’s future. It was this openness to experimentation, this breadth of imagination, that made Canadian poetry a wonderful ride that cost very little money and took you a long way.
Come Away: Remembering Mavor Moore
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

In his most poignant and lyrical play, Come Away, Come Away, Mavor Moore imagined death as a little girl gently leading an old man away in a park. When it played on CBC-TV in 1972, Mavor — it still seems impossible to call him anything else — was at the peak of a brilliant career. That his success should lead to scenarios of imagined death is not surprising because as he later explored in detail in his 1994 autobiography, his many successes were accompanied by depression and self-doubt. Anticipating the inevitability of his own death, he scripted the best possible and lived long enough to produce it. “Produce” may be a curious way to speak of a death, but Mavor was, among his many professions, foremost a producer, for whom the boundaries of life and theatre were always troubled.
To Be Virtual . . . or Not to Be: Theatre Museum Canada’s Travels into the World of Technology
Authors: Barris Kate
Published: June 2023

Theatre Museum Canada began as an organization dedicated to capturing our theatrical past. But if it is to succeed, it must embrace the present and be on top of the future.
Theatre Unplugged: The Technology of a Performer-Centred Theatre
Authors: Keiley Jillian
Published: June 2023

If the technicians for a production are those who realize the visual and aural designs of the director and designer, what, then, if the onstage actors are the executors of the visual and aural aspects of the production? It’s a tangly suggestion, but an argument can be made for performer-based technical theatre. These are productions where it is the actors, executing instructions from the playwright, designer and director, who create the onstage “effects” or, in their physical or vocal actions, indicate the time, place and mood to the audience. This is most simply exemplified by scripts that have time, place and mood references in the text. But the theatre I’m talking about uses more than stated references to indicate this information. It uses the actors’ voices in music for the soundscape and their bodies in stillness and motion as the landscape. If it is the performers who are executing the main design of the designer, could we call them technicians? OK, they’re not, in a plug-in, soldering, climb-a-ladder, call-a-cue, run-a-show way, but they can be in an execute-the-design way. And because the focus of this CTR is the intersection of technology and theatre, humour me here, and let’s agree that some actors in some productions have more technical items than others. It’s not a new style in Canada: the choreography of the “set” of the Farm Show was most influential, and a great deal of performer—technical work is now done by companies like Video Cabaret, Theatre Gargantua, Theatre Smith Gilmour and many puppet theatres, led by companies like One Yellow Rabbit, who stand alongside the amalgamation of technically active performers and actual technicians in Robert Lepage s work. So lets call this brand of artist “performer-technicians” (just in this technology + theatre quarterly) – the actors who are responsible for the set changes and the sound changes, as well as the embodiment of character(s). In Vancouver, companies like Radix, Rumble and the Electric Company are calling this kind of performer who is involved in all aspects of the production an “artist” as opposed to an “actor.” Here the artist takes a fuller responsibility for the entire staged creation, from text work, to the moving of sets, to singing underscores. This seems to be prevalent in a lot of what is called “creation” theatre or “devised” theatre, but it isn’t as common as I had previously thought. There is a line, a very solid line, between theatre that uses its performers to create the space, the effect and the sound and theatre that uses actors solely to inhabit a role. A strictly role-inhabiting actor kindly pointed out this delineation to me just this year, as he grumbled through rolling a set piece. “This,” he said, “is bullshit.”
Technologically True
Authors: Elliott Erin
Published: June 2023

In the introduction to The Baron Bold and the Beauteous Maid: A Compact History of Canadian Theatre, author Brian Kennedy makes a small statement reassuring the reader that he is aware of the choices and omissions involved in compiling his anthology of Canadian theatre history. He refers to the contents of the book as “small appetizers to a much greater buffet” (vi). This claim is useful to keep in mind as we explore how the essence of technology, as defined in Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” actually governs how Kennedy at once reveals and buries the truth about Canadian theatre history.
Beyond Reaching Out: De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group and Native Youth
Authors: Freeman Barry A.
Published: June 2023

De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group is the youngest, longest-running Native company in North America. With an artistic director under thirty years of age, a group of experienced core artists of about the same age and a slew of young long-term interns, the company seems to be living up to its “commitment to youth and education” (“Dbaajmaataadaa“ 2). Getting set to move into a brand new indoor facility in 2008 (still called ”the space“), the company is as busy as it has ever been in its laudable twenty-three-year history.
New Voices, New Cultural Perspectives in TYA
Authors: Hill Lynda
Published: June 2023

The practice of touring professional theatre for young people into schools is between thirty- and thirty-five-years old in English-speaking Canada and has emerged out of the Theatre in Education (TIE) tradition in the United Kingdom, which is more than fifty-years-old. Companies like Green Thumb Theatre, Carousel Players, Quest Theatre, Youth Theatre, Roseneath Theatre and Theatre Direct, the company I lead, have gained the respect of educators and the artistic community for quality productions that use the power of theatre to explore important issues relevant to the lives of children and youth.
Crack
Authors: Gilbert Sky
Published: June 2023

Crack was written a couple of years after I moved to Hamilton Ontario. I was the founding artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto for eighteen years (from 1979 to 1997) and moved to Hamilton in 2003. The move was very much a class issue: as my partner and I are both artists, we didn’t have enough capital to purchase a house in Toronto, where the average price of three-bedroom home has easily been over four-hundred-thousand dollars lately. Also, the condo boom in downtown Toronto was getting on our nerves. After a condo arrives in a community, the big box stores and chains that accompany it kill the small businesses and the street life that was once so charming, diverse, and intimate. Recently, the Drake Hotel, the Gladstone Hotel and the Distillery District were created arbitrarily — not by artists, but by administrators and entrepreneurs obsessed with gentrification. The messy, cross-class Queen Street community that we had so enjoyed was replaced by corporate-created pseudo-artistic institutions predicated on the premise that art — if it’s sexy enough — will sell condos.
Flashes of Insight as Feminist Epistemology
Authors: Rafferty Kelly
Published: June 2023

Critics have often noted that Karen Finley performs in a trance, seemingly possessed by the violent, disgusting and desperate characters she has so famously embodied. According to the Village Voice’s C. Carr, she doesn’t rehearse her pieces but, instead, conducts extensive research and then, when the time comes to perform, turns “inside herself” and “slip[s] into that personalized primeval ooze,” disappearing so completely that she doesn’t recognize herself in videos of her own performances (141). In my own work as a director, I’ve had to rely on something “inside myself” that is not quite the rational, analytic set of skills upon which I usually call to solve problems. Sometimes, a scene isn’t working, and no matter how long I spend pouring over my script or staring at the set trying to fix it logically, it still doesn’t work. And then I have to remind myself to trust that, when I get into the rehearsal space with my actors and stay relaxed and receptive, the answers will come, most likely in a flash of insight at the perfect moment. During these perfect moments, I don’t experience the same kind of dramatic possessions that Carr describes, but I think this difference is one of degree and not of kind.
Editorial
Authors: Gilbert Reid , Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

For this issue of CTR, the editors have two underlying assumptions: first, most of us love to eat; and second, many of us — the readers of this journal, certainly — love theatre. There are implicit and explicit links between these two consumptions, a set of intersections this issue seeks to explore.
Staging the Impossible: SaBooge Theatre
Authors: Walker Craig , Essery Jodi , Fell Kayla , Shaver Andrew
Published: June 2023

CW: Let’s start with the name. SaBooge is a bastardization of a French expression, “ca bouge,” which translates roughly as “it moves “That certainly describes something of the intense physicality commonly employed in the work of SaBooge Theatre. But, as always, nuances inherent in the contexts in which the French expression is used discourage such a blunt translation. For example, one might, in exasperation, warn a naughty child, “Ne bouge pas!” (don’t budge!); one may say of someone rather old-fashioned and hidebound in his outlook that “ses ideé’s n’ont pas bougé”; one says to an idle complainer: “il faut se bouger pour obtenir satisfaction.” So, impertinently restless, intellectually dynamic and indefatigably industrious: these are also good descriptors of this company. Finally, one says of a cloth that does not wear out that “ce tissu ne bouge pas.” Although the company itself is anything but wearing’ in that sense, one might say that the company has always been ready to wear out an idea to their satisfaction and move on.
John Murrell at the Banff Centre
Authors: Day Moira
Published: June 2023

John Murrell is a respected and acclaimed playwright, librettist, arts advocate, and mentor. Born in 1945 in Texas, he came to Alberta in 1968 to pursue a career in teaching and quickly emerged as one of the first significant playwrights of the bustling new professional theatre scene in the province. Accepting a position in 1975 as playwright-in-residence at Alberta Theatre Projects (ATP), he scored his first popular “hit” with Waiting for the Parade (1977) about five women in World War II Calgary. A second play, Memoir, depicting the closing year of Sarah Bernhardt's life, brought Murrell to both national and international attention. Since then, he has served as both associate director of the Stratford Festival and head of the theatre division of the Canada Council (1988—92). His work has been performed at the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, at the National Arts Centre and in theatres across Canada. Internationally, his plays have been produced in more than thirty countries and been translated into more than fifteen languages. Despite Murrell's national and international reputation as a writer, his career has been based primarily in Alberta. In 1999, he returned to the Banff Centre, where he had earlier served as head of the Playwrights’ Colony (1986—9), to assume the position of artistic director/ executive producer of the Theatre Arts section. In the fall of 2007, he stepped down from the position to become the first emeritus artist-in-residence at the centre. In the following interview, conducted in Banff in January 2008, Murrell shares his views about the continuing importance of the Banff Centre as a uniquely Albertan generator of new regional, Canadian and international work, especially in opera, and about what he sees as exciting new possibilities for musical and dramatic collaboration in Western Canadian theatre.
Sense and reminiSCENT: Performance and the Essences of Memory
Authors: Drobnick Jim
Published: June 2023

If the sense of smell appears to have been eclipsed by the other senses in western culture, there is one realm in which it retains an almost mythic power — memory. reminiSCENT, a performance series curated by myself and Paul Couillard,1 acknowledged the powerful relationship between smell and memory and explored the artistic and cultural potential of this undervalued sense. Documentation in literature and science indicate that no other sense evokes memory as intensely as smell. For Marcel Proust, a whiff of a madeleine conjured up the world of childhood; for Helen Keller, smell was a “potent wizard” (181) that transported one across thousands of miles. Even newborns, after just a few days, recognize and remember their mothers via the distinctiveness of smell. As compelling as these olfactory experiences are, there is a tendency to regard smells purely on the level of immediacy. Yet fragrances also have complex social meanings. How, what and why we smell are subject to many cultural influences. One only has to consider hygiene and the myriad ways in which the body is bathed, cared for and scented to appreciate the role that smell plays in transmitting culture. In short, smell is as much a learned, cultural practice as it is a physical act of perception (see Drobnick Smell Culture).
Vintage Breast Milk: Exploring the Discursive Limits of Feminine Fluids
Authors: Esterik Penny Van
Published: June 2023

What are feminine fluids — fluids consumed by women or fluids produced by women? Fluids that enter female bodies or fluids that exit female bodies? Breast milk is clearly a fluid that leaves one body and enters another. No fluid is more feminine than breast milk. No fluid carries with it as much complex symbolic baggage surrounding what it means to be female. This article explores the material and symbolic dimensions of breast milk in North America, building on the provocations of a Toronto performance artist whose work has transformed breast milk from a fluid produced by women to a fluid consumed by women.
The Traumatic Truth
Authors: Flamme Michelle La
Published: June 2023

Trauma in Aboriginal performance art practice implicitly reveals the precariousness of any established Aboriginal history. In the reenactment of trauma - individual pain confronting collective pain - performance art does not make meaning or create closure. Marcia Crosby
Impressions of a Sharp-Elbowed Georgia Beatty and an Easily Saturated Bar Fly: HIVE2 at the Magnetic North Festival
Authors: Barton Bruce , Hansen Pil
Published: June 2023

I’m lying on my back, huddled in with a group of nine or ten strangers in a small, dimly lit crawl space. I have headphones on, a soft, ethereal soundscape completing the sense of utter dislocation and isolation. A Jew feet above me there is a thick plate of glass, a low ceiling that, I gradually realize, is also the floor of another space, one that extends, like a narrow well or a vertical mine shaft, high above me, towards a capped opening. And as the light slowly begins to increase in Boca del Lupo’s surreal optical illusion, I see that there is a female body sprawled across the transparent ceiling /floor, its naked limbs flattened by its own weight and oddly, awkwardly twisted, as if buckled by a fall from a great height. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it begins to twitch. She is alive, progressively aware of her predicament, increasingly animated, suddenly desperate. Can she see me? Perhaps. But her attention, ultimately, is on the man at the top of the shaft, who has drawn away the cap, revealing, by all impressions, distant clouds in an early evening sky. As she/I watch, he car fully arranges the harness (a Boca staple) that will lower him towards her. Towards me. Into the HIVE.
Poetry, Remnants and Ruins: Aboriginal Theatre in Canada
Authors: Favel Floyd
Published: June 2023

I am in Vancouver at the Talking Stick Festival hosted by Full Circle Performance, an Aboriginal theatre company led by Margo Kane. I have had a hard time attempting to write an essay on theatre. There is no joy when I think of the realities of theatre for Aboriginal people in this country, the reality being that there is no place for them in the current theatre system. Rather than being negative, I am searching for a way to send a positive message, as I have lived with this reality all of my theatrical life. Watching the Inuvialuit Drum Dancers dance at this festival inspires me so that I am able to write an essay, as once again I am brought back to one of the reasons I went into theatre, to express our culture and the beauty of our people.
Vancouver Theatre and Its Audiences: A Critical Conversation
Authors: Prendergast Monica , Thomas Colin , Wasserman Jerry
Published: June 2023

On 9 February 2009, Jerry Wasserman, Colin Thomas and Monica Prendergast met to discuss audiences from a author/critic’s perspective. The following are excerpts from that conversation.
Uqqudq, the Shelter: Building a Space for Intercultural Exchange
Authors: Wilkinson Lydia , Pepin Geneviève , Arnatsiaq Laurentio Q.
Published: June 2023

I originally thought of Geneviève and Laurentio for this issue on audiences because I remembered their Uqquaq, the Shelter as a piece that evoked a particular audience-performer intimacy. I saw their production at a studio on the corner of Front and Cherry Streets in Toronto, on a frigid February evening in 2007. I remember waiting sceptically for a friend on the all but deserted street, hoping that this production would be worth the wait in the freezing cold and the trek to a crossroads that’s not transit friendly in the best of weather. On entering the studio, we were asked to take our shoes off and don a pair of slippers; we were invited to take a seat on the floor with other audience members, who encircled the performance space in which Geneviève and Laurentio had already set to work, Laurentio softening with his teeth the sealskin rope that would form the skeleton of their shelter, Geneviève gathering the yarn that would make up its outer layer. This working space was simultaneously their performance space.
Bard on the Beach in Vancouver: Twenty Years On
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: June 2023

The 2009 season marks the twentieth anniversary of one of Canada’s great theatre success stories — Bard on the Beach, in Vancouver. By any standard, Bard’s development from one show (Midsummer Night’s Dream) in a rented tent in 1990 to four plays in repertory in two spaces in 2009 is a remarkable history and one of which founder and artistic director Christopher Gaze (and his Board and colleagues) should be proud. What is as praiseworthy to me, however, is the contiguous artistic development of Bard performance; increasingly, over the past number of seasons, the shows have been original, innovative conceptions that often work wonderfully well.
Halifax Towards an Atlantic Playwrights’ Colony
Authors: Cowan Cindy
Published: June 2023

Two years ago, participants at the Atlantic Theatre Conference held in Halifax moved that delegates representing the region’s theatre community study the feasibility of an Atlantic Playwrights’ Colony. As a result, the Dramatists’ Co-op of Nova Scotia established a committee to assess support for the colony idea. Founded in 1976, the Co-op is a self-governing branch of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. During the past 10 years, it has developed programmes that serve the interests of playwrights, including the publication of a monthly newsletter, a catalogue of members’ plays, public readings, round-table workshops and, most recently, a highly-successful workshopping and public presentation of six new Nova Scotian plays.
Getting the Message: The NAAGS of Halifax
Authors: Smyth Donna E.
Published: June 2023

We were accused of “going too far,” of “trivializing war,” of being silly, absurd, ridiculous and Communist. From 1983-87, the NAAGS (Never Again Affinity Group) of Halifax performed street theatre and created media events to raise public consciousness about peace issues from a feminist point of view.1 The original group of seven women, with one exception, had no professional theatre experience.2 We were scholars, teachers, mothers, writers, artists. We all belonged to the Voice of Women, Canada’s oldest national peace group, and we all felt a sense of urgency about the threat of nuclear war and survival of the planet.
Shakespeare with a Difference: Genderbending and genrebending in Goodnight Desdemona
Authors: Fortier Mark
Published: June 2023

Imagine Ann-Marie MacDonald on tour with Nightwood Theatre’s This is for You, Anna, a play which presents a woman with the strength and will to exact the most violent revenge against a man who submits her young daughter to sexual victimization, a victimization unto death. Set this play and this woman against Othello and the pale Desdemona who dares ask for no revenge. Then imagine MacDonald, in grim jest, passing amongst the touring company, from bed to bed, pillow in hand: she feigns the smothering of each woman, each time saying, “Goodnight, Desdemona!” Such is the germination of a feminist adaptation of Shakespeare.1
Closet Plays: An Exclusive Dramaturgy At Work
Authors: Gilbert Sky
Published: June 2023

I remember the first time I read Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf! I wanted so much to like it (this was when Albee was hot in the early seventies), and I almost did. I mean, it had all the elements that usually excite me in theatre – wit (it had a lot of that), and absurdist structure, and lots of sex. I got about halfway through it and was very excited; then I got to the “baby” and I just got bored. Why? Well, I didn’t know why until I saw the movie (which is really bad, but again, starts out great) and realized that it was Albee’s great closet gay play.
Professional Solutions / 1: Presentable Issues Portraying Racism for an Adolescent Audience
Authors: Fatkin Grace Y.K.
Published: June 2023

In the rapidly expanding repertoire of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) and adolescents in Canada, there are very few plays which deal with racism. Of these, only two are aimed specifically at an older teen audience: Skin by Dennis Foon, and Cornelius Dragon by Jan Truss. And only Skin is directly concerned with prejudice against visible-minority kids.