bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Remember the Nation: Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens
Authors: Tompkins Joanne
Published: June 2023

In an era in which the promise of globalization continues to be seductive in many arenas, the concept of the nation is often considered to be old-fashioned, restricting or exclusionist. Some manifestations of nation are certainly past their use-by date, particularly if they do not accommodate change. The capacity to expand, modify or otherwise redefine nationhood appears to characterize Canada — at least at the rhetorical level — better than some cultures. Whether or not that redefinition occurs in practice is a different matter: in 1995, Lorena Gale argued that
Miss Orient(ed)
Authors: Aquino Mina Lee , Villasin Madine
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Nina Lee Aquino and Nadine Villasin. 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 the authors, c/o Carlos Bulosan Theatre, 167 Augusta Ave., Toronto, ON, MST 2L4. E-mail: info@carlosbulosan.com
Seeing Red: Theatre and Labour in Twenty-First Century Canada
Authors: Wallace Susan
Published: June 2023

This past summer, the Canadian Theatre Review issue entitled “Working Conditions” went to press lacking a contribution from Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, let alone from any of the other professional artists’ associations or unions. It is hard to imagine a more nearly ideal forum for a contribution from Equity, PGC, AFM or ADC than an issue devoted to theatre labour practices. For our part at Equity, we dropped the ball and, due to an unexpected staff turnover, CTR 123 went to print without our contribution. We have apologized to CTR and to Professor Wilson, in particular. In a more than gracious move, CTR has offered to print not only our clarification but a more fulsome response.
Awkward Silences, Cathartic Tears and Cautious Laughter: Canadian Playwrights Push the Boundaries
Authors: McCoy Amanda
Published: June 2023

Strawberries in January is a romantic comedy featuring two young men and two young women whose lives become intertwined as they explore various facets of their identities and their aspirations. The plot contains interwoven boy-meets-girl stories: François, a would-be film-maker, is in love with his roommate Sophie, but she has ended their relationship in order to date “classy Italian guys.” François’s friend Robert, a university professor from France, hangs around the café where François works, in order to hear his stories. And finally, Léa, the owner of a bed and breakfast, has a child after a one-night stand with Robert and comes to Montréal in search of Sophie, who happens to be her oldest friend. The twists and turns in this script are interesting, but ultimately the focus is on the interplay between fact and fiction. Each character tries to live out her own dreams and fantasies while tackling her fear of failure — and everyone tells a few small lies along the way, lies that eventually snowball into a disastrous dinner party at the play’s climax. Structurally, the play makes use of overlapping lines and stories-within-stories to comic effect, and a number of reversals in situations and dialogue reward the attentive reader or audience member. Interwoven throughout the text are numerous references to Hollywood films, with their attractive players, perfect dialogue and happy endings. François is particularly taken with the idea of having his life emulate these films, and the play frequently drifts into his fictionalized versions of events. In the end, though, perfect scenarios and perfect dialogue are put aside when the characters discover love in unexpected places. No Hollywood ending could ever produce the sweetness or surprise of strawberries in the middle of a Montréal winter.
The Site’s the Thing: The Shifting and Expanding Role of the Site-Specific Scenographer
Authors: Irwin Kathleen
Published: June 2023

For the past three or so decades visual artists of varying backgrounds and perspectives have been working in a manner that resembles political and social activity but is distinguished by its aesthetic sensibility.
Junk/Beauty/Respect
Authors: Dixon Sean
Published: June 2023

Outdoor theatre. Am I just paranoid or does it have the rep of 3-D movies? You don’t expect it to be good, but it might be fun in a cheesy sort of way, especially when the actors embarrass themselves. Here’s an example.
Bride Revisited
Authors: Balint Sue
Published: June 2023

DNA Theatre’s long history of producing challenging environmental work is widely acknowledged across Canada and abroad. Under the artistic direction of Hillar Liitoja, twenty-five years of unique installations, interventions and inventions have found and redefined a stage. In June 2005, DNA produced The Large Glass, a study in urban nomadic theatre. Following in the footsteps of Deborah Warner and Janet Cardiff, seven collaborators1 conspired to create seven rooms, a performance installation accepting its pilgrims one by one. From dusk until dark, a duet of the natural and urban worlds played, inspired by the wedding of two brides, one modern and one ancient.
On Site with the Electric Company: What Lures Artists out of the Theatre and into the Woods?
Authors: Ditor Rachel
Published: June 2023

Montreal, July 1991. Dress Rehearsal. It was hot and muggy and the gnats were rising in clouds from the tall grass with every footstep. I was lugging my script, Mag light, pen, jacket, and mosquito repellent up a hill in the failing light, walking the uneven path to the next scene that the audience would walk in a couple days time when we opened the production of Romeo and Juliet that David Hudgins and I were co-directing in Mount Royal Park. I remember thinking, “Who in their right mind is going to come see this show? Only a masochist would give up the comfort of the theatre to traipse through the woods and sit on the — What’s sticking to my shoe? Is that a condom? — ground, swatting crawling bugs off their ankles and out of their eyes in order to watch a play.” Then I reached my destination: a rocky promontory shaded by the arching branches of trees, lit by scattered glowing lanterns, and looking out over rolling hills. Overhead, the leaves rustled in a slight breeze and the sound of city traffic on the Avenue du Pare was a distant background thrum. The dirt floor still held the heat of the day and the scent of dust mixed with that of the decaying underbrush. This was our site for the crypt.
Avatar Happenings: Activating Liveness in Online Environments
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

It’s the evening of 25 December 2005. To celebrate the holiday, I’m spending the night hopping from one party to the next. I begin by cutting a rug at the community dance pads over at Club Creations, then flit over to an eighties party at Buba’s Dance Spot in Yagoo. Scanning the local event listings, I find out about a fabulous participatory theatre event that is about to begin over at the Elbow Room at 7:15 p.m. In a flash, I teleport into the Mare district and make my way to the bar. It looks deserted. Suddenly, voices are calling me from somewhere up above. “On the roof Hedda,” Noire Mirabeau calls down. “Up on the roof … the more the merrier … its Christmas MST3K!!” I spin around in the direction of the chat bubbles, press the “Fly” key at the bottom of my screen and soar up to the roof to join the group.
Body Degree Zero: The Mediatized Body in an Interactive Performance
Authors: Dunning Alan , Woodrow Paul
Published: June 2023

Within the context of European and North American art practices, the twentieth century has witnessed a de-configuration of the image, beginning with impressionism, the Cubists and the expressionists and including a variety of abstract styles. Running parallel to artistic movements, it is also evident that de-configuration has occurred within the context of literature, as is noticeable in poetry. De-configuration comprises the break-up of surfaces – decomposition into smaller, often disjunctive fragments. Image de-configuration is also a resulting product of the twentieth-century technological inventions of television and computer screens.
Balancing between Borders: Liveness and Aerial Theatre
Authors: Frey Heather Fitzsimmons
Published: June 2023

One of the exciting things about creating performance based on two different artistic traditions is imagining what that hybrid/pastiche/blend or new form will look like. Another is imagining how the audience will expect to read the new performance hybrid. Circus and theatre practitioners approach the audience-to-performer relationship differently, and therein lies a tension that significantly influences the way that aerial theatre is created and received. Aerial theatre is a dramatic presentation, in which the trapeze, hoops, silks or ropes are central to the execution and telling of a story. This form of theatre is neither “traditional text-based drama” nor thrilling choreographed stunts but exists in the space between the two cultures of circus and theatre. In terms of “liveness,” aerial theatre practitioners create performances that teeter precariously or balance perfectly between the creation methods and priorities of each discipline and the audience’s expectations of either circus or theatre. Since 2000, Edmonton-based Firefly Theatre has been struggling with ways to forge a creation process that balances between the worlds of theatre and circus, honours the strengths of each discipline, capitalizes on the audience’s relationship to the living performers onstage and produces work that is neither circus nor theatre but an exciting example of something in-between. By viewing the two “parent” disciplines as separate cultures, we can identify some of the sources of Firefly’s struggles and the ways their solutions thus far have mitigated or increased the tensions of working in this in-between space.
Liveness in the Okanagan: Caravan Farm Theatre
Authors: Belliveau George
Published: June 2023

Caravan Farm Theatre, a short drive outside Armstrong, BC, in the rolling hills of the Okanagan, has been producing and developing live outdoor theatre for over 25 years.1 In this near idyllic pastoral setting, the company takes full advantage of the natural surroundings, both in the themes and in the staging of their shows. The 2005 world premiere of Linz Kenyon’s the I. O. U. Land beautifully exemplified the weaving together of space and script, as director Estelle Shook and designer Catherine Hahn combined their creative talents to capture the poetic landscape and narrative.
Abilities Festival: A Celebration of Disability Art and Culture 2005
Authors: Elliott Erin
Published: June 2023

The Abilities Festival: A Celebration of Disability Art and Culture made its Toronto debut 27–30 October 2005. This project of the Canadian Abilities Foundation involved four days of multidisciplinary work by artists and performers from around the world. In addition to the gala performances, art exhibitions and concerts, the event included a series of panel discussions and workshops, which covered such broad-ranging topics as storytelling for children, broadcast journalism and career advice for artists with disabilities. Artistic director and producer Sharon Wolfe explains that the interaction made possible by the festival fosters a climate of inclusivity and understanding, as the participants build “bridges that will lead to inclusion. Bridges that will reduce attitudinal barriers and negative perceptions about people with disabilities, bridges that will lead us all to an enriched appreciation for the full spectrum of creative talent that exists here and beyond” (1). These points of contact were directly enabled by the liveness of the festival. Theatre with a Difference, the gala evening held at the Glenn Gould Studio, showcased bold pieces by Chaika, a dance—mime troupe from Moscow; Max Fomitchev, a mime artist from Vancouver who was born in Russia; and American humorist David Roche. Within the live performance setting, there exist tensions, pressures and reactions that serve, in this case, to reveal buried assumptions about persons with disabilities. The festival not only promotes a thriving and creative disabled culture by example but, through its live performances, is able to draw out hidden attitudes so they can be recognized, confronted and ultimately transformed.
Keileydography: The Symphonic Theatre of Jillian Keiley
Authors: Devine Michael
Published: June 2023

I first encountered the name of Jillian Keiley in 1997, when the general manager of Theatre Newfoundland Labrador, where I was artistic director, returned from a PACT meeting singing the praises of a talented young artist from St. John’s. As no one ever says, “No” to Gaylene Buckle for long — I soon agreed to give Jillian her first opportunity to direct on Newfoundland’s west coast. My friend John Mighton had written a challenging play called Possible Worlds, which I’d wanted to direct for years. Hearing of the intelligence and verve of this young, home-grown director, however, changed my plans, and I assigned her the project. Soon after, I saw her production of Under Wraps in St. John’s, a production so mesmerizing that it remains, with Robert Lepage’s Polygraphe and Carbone 14’s Le Dortoir, on my list of the most significant Canadian theatre productions of the past fifteen years.
A Conversation with Wendy Lill
Authors: Hubbard Sarah
Published: June 2023

Sarah Hubbard: Looking back those twenty-odd years since you arrived in Atlantic Canada, what brought you here in the first place?

Wendy Lill: Well , my husband Richard was from here. He was from Halifax and we were living in Winnipeg. He was a journalist for the CBC and, you know, he kind of had a midlife crisis and decid ed he wanted to leave and com e home.
Electric Sound: Collective Creation and Sound Design
Authors: Hudgins David
Published: June 2023

Sound design at Electric Company takes place in the context of the collective creation process that has been associated with many of the company’s works. It is not unusual for people to bring music on the first day of creation work, and since our process tends to follow the creative impulses of the group, listening and reflecting on pieces of music or sound elements as a company can quickly coalesce the larger elements and ideas of a project. Our first play, Brilliant! incorporated pieces by Bartok, Stravinsky and Britten in the earliest writing stages, during scenes that suggested movement and emotional arc. Much of that early design exists a decade later in the ongoing remounts of the play. We worked many physical sequences set to music in theatricalizing the relationship between the famous inventor Tesla and the New York socialite friends Robert and Katherine. Eventually, these scenes fell away as the script evolved, but not until they had served their purpose of informing us as writers/actors/designers of nature of the narrative we were portraying.
Outside the Black Box: Sound Design in Non-theatre Contexts
Authors: Copeland Darren
Published: June 2023

Sound Design provides the opportunity to reshape people’s perception of reality by altering the sonic environment of a particular place or situation. The most conventional example today is the sound design of a film or theatre production. Sound, broadly speaking, is used in these contexts to underscore the emotional temperature of any given moment as well as to provide sign posts to key aspects of the narrative or other structural elements. The sound design may draw attention to the emergence of important characters or events or it may designate time and place.
Modern Jewish Plays. Ed. Jason Sherman. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006.
Authors: Bickis Heidi
Published: June 2023

In his search for plays to include in his anthology, Modern Jewish Plays, editor Jason Sherman didn’t start out with a sense of how these plays would come together under a common theme. What he discovered was something quite exciting. All the playwrights share “an interest in writing politically-charged plays about a tiny piece of land in a part of the world that has been, for the last half-century, the source of so much misery for the people who live in it, and the source of much commentary from those who don’t” (363). The plays that follow feature a discussion and debate about violence, identity and responsibility that are blatantly missing from Canadian stages. Each play beautifully dramatizes the intricacies and complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without shielding the audience from its violence or offering a resolution. With the exception of Hand in Hand, all the plays share an emphasis on the overt theatricality of the stage and its capacity to blend and blur distinctions between fiction and reality. These conventions become the means by which the politics are foregrounded so that the audience is engaged and complicit with the action both onstage and in the outside world.
Shards of Light
Authors: Bissett Bill , Karasick Adeena
Published: June 2023

In the early 1980s, when I was first introduced to Canadian poetry, and was trying to make sense of the varying trajectories, aesthetic and historic threads, I became increasingly drawn to bill bissett and the power and intensity that he was tapping into through language. Each performance was a fearless linguistic journey Through the rhythmic insistence of his shamanistic chanting, he was uncannily able to magically transport everyone in a room. Since that time, I have had the great luxury of getting to know him, and, for over twenty years, we have performed together all over the world. We have dwelt inside a shared language of desire and, through our ongoing dialogue, continue to explore how language explodes into life. What follows is part of a decades-long poetic friendship. (Adeena Karasick)
Temporal Forms Unite! A Conversation between Victoria Stanton and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
Authors: Stanton Victoria , Lotbinière-Harwood Susanne de
Published: June 2023

One sunny afternoon in July 2006, while chatting on the phone with my friend Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, I mentioned that I was working on an article about spoken word and performance art. It would be an exaggeration to say I was stuck, but I was certainly talking (more like writing) myself in circles. This is when Susanne suggested we meet in person to continue this conversation, just to see if we could “un-stick” what it was I was trying to say. Susanne, a performative lecturer and literary translator, is infinitely interested in process, in process-based and time-based arts practices and how these interact. We also have a history — not only of discussing such topics but of actually collaborating on performance pieces. What follows is a transcription of our discussion: the recorded performance of the interview process. Instead of synthesizing my thoughts with Susanne’s questions to produce a seamless whole (where the interviewer is markedly absent), together we decided the interview — left intact — more authentically represents our approach to these issues and is more aligned with our respective research, academic and performance practices.
Canadian Cowboy Poetry and the Oral Tradition
Authors: Mitchell Ken
Published: June 2023

A cultural movement is sweeping the West like a prairie fire: cowboy poetry. In gatherings and festivals from Fort Qu’Appelle to Pincher Creek and Kamloops, from Maple Creek to Stony Plain (and beyond), equestrian versifiers are chanting the praises and woes of ranch culture as never before — in numbers unimaginable in the days before the gasoline engine brought the end of horsepower. In fact, cowboy poetry has become a truly popular phenomenon across Western North America.
No Knowledge College
Authors: Keleta Mae Naila
Published: June 2023

I became a theatre practitioner eight years ago, after years of performing spoken word in an era when the art form was both oblivious and resistant to tradition. I discovered that Canadian theatre was radically different: hard fought for and highly revered by its practitioners, steeped in tradition and cloaked in bureaucracy.
New Technology, New Technicians and an Ancient Art
Authors: Court Paul
Published: June 2023

The use of technology is as old as our species. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would not have survived without tools, and every society in human history has had a technological base that was essential to its survival and integral to its culture. Technology is such an essential part of human society that most of it has become invisible to us. I have been in several meetings in which the use of “technology” was on the agenda, but the word “technology” actually referred to nothing more than the use of computers. The real technological triumph of the meeting itself, conducted inside a heated building in winter and far from a tropical zone, was unacknowledged. The fact that we had not convened out of doors – naked and freezing within walking distance of our burrows – was taken for granted.
Moral Adaptations: How Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Arab’s Mouth became Belle Moral
Authors: Walker Craig
Published: June 2023

For an artist to return to and successfully revise work that has been completed years before can be tricky. To be sure, there are examples – such as James Joyce’s early novel, Stephen Hero, revised to become Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or John Fowles’s novel The Magus, first published in 1966 but re-published in a revised version in 1977 – where there seems to be a general agreement that the mature artist’s revisions have yielded a more powerful and satisfactory work. But, for every such example, we may find at least one or more in which the older artist’s revisions are deplored as meddlesome intrusions by those who know and cherish the younger artist’s work. For instance, W.H. Auden’s attempts to transform his early poems into works he could stand by in maturity seem, from this distance, both a little desperate and ultimately futile.
Adding it Up Takes More Than Just Numbers
Authors: Dalby Krista
Published: June 2023

In 1982, Rita Fraticelli wrote her seminal report on the status of women in Canadian theatre, pointing out the vast gender inequities in our country’s theatre industry. At the time, I was far too busy to read it. It’s not that I didn’t care, but I was consumed with negotiating the politics of the fifth grade, not to mention my extracurricular theatrical pursuits. It was about this same time that a few girls who lived down the street and I started putting on plays in our basements. Nobody told us we couldn’t. We performed skits stolen from summer camp, air band extraordinaire, and distinctly unmagical magic shows; our dutiful parents politely showed up time after time. We made sets out of cardboard and costumes out of tablecloths. Necessity is the mother of invention, and to me, creativity has always been one of the few necessities of life.
Nightwood Theatre: A Woman’s Work Is Always Done
Authors: Scott Shelley
Published: June 2023

Nightwood is the pre-eminent women’s theatre company in Canada. Over the years, the company has presented itself as a producer of new works by Canadian women, as a provider of opportunities for women theatre artists, as an inclusive theatre company committed to producing work by women of colour and as the “home company” for some of the biggest names in Canadian theatre. Ann-Marie MacDonald is probably the best example of a “big name,” since her 1988, Chalmers- and Governor General’s Award—winning comedy Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is one of the most frequently produced of all Canadian plays. But I would argue, in fact, that almost every woman playwright in the country has had some connection with Nightwood, whether through its Groundswell festival of new work, its sponsorship of the annual Five Minute Feminist Cabaret or its playwright-in-residence and various play development programs. Since Nightwood’s inception in 1979, the company has produced both collective creations and plays by single authors, mounted tours, collaborated with other companies and sought out many ways to encourage new work by women. Because of its unique status as a women’s theatre company spanning the period from 1979 to the present, Nightwood can be examined as something of a microcosm for developments in feminist theatre and the production of women’s work.
Editorial
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

When the editors of CTR were mulling over topics for issues, the suggestion was made that the report on the status of women in Canadian theatre might be the occasion to consider women’s employment as theatre practitioners. Heads turned me, “Ann, do you want to edit that issue?” The presumption, not entirely without foundation, was that “women and theatre” was my “beat.” One of my first publications—“The Politics of the Script”—appeared in CTR 43, the first issue of the journal devoted to considering women and theatre. The genesis of the issue was Fraticelli’s report on the status of women in Canadian theatre. That report, in turn, was the genesis of Adding It Up: The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre, which sought to provide measures to assess whether the condition of women practitioners had changed in the almost twenty-five years since the Fraticelli report.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

You enter very conscious of your strength; you are handsome, clever, you arrive as a conqueror. You go to do something which is important in your eyes for demonstrating this strength and superiority, … but you cannot manage it! The ring master, acting as referee, asks you what is the matter? Are you sure you can do it? Have you practiced hard? Are you doing it for the first time? Or have you just worked with amateurs? Jacques Lecoq 145—6
Diner Theatre: A Site-Specific Exploration of Life, Death, Consumption and Survival in Radix’s Box and Box
Authors: Leung Parie
Published: June 2023

The Templeton Diner in Vancouver’s downtown immerses patrons in an environment of post-war nostalgia. Complete with a long counter, bar stools, separate booths, old coffee and milk-shake machines, a jukebox and an open kitchen, the diner is the place to go for a pleasant experience of the atmosphere of the past. Filled with vintage features, the diner theatrically evokes the late forties and early fifties in the present, while its costumed cook and servers entertain with a performance of culinary skill, service and iconic resemblances to the post-war days. Their audience — the customers — gleefully consume samplings of the past, all the while remaining securely in the present.
Theatre à la Carte!
Authors: Harvey Dustin Scott
Published: June 2023

I am sitting at a table in a popular North End diner in Halifax, looking at a menu for Café DaPoPo, a theatre event created by Garry Williams, when an actress comes up to me and asks me if I am ready to order my performance. “Just to let you know the specials are listed on the back of the menu,” she says, “and we have no one act play tonight.” As a regular theatregoer, I feel rather confused. On the one hand, I have never ordered my theatre before, so I cannot pretend to know how to do it. However, the menu clearly lists the scenes as starters, mains, and deserts, and I must confess that I am a big fan of food. The fact is, I have never had to make this kind of choice. Not only am I taken out of my normal, comfortable position of audience member; I already sense an emerging theme to the evening — the role of the spectator in the hybrid performance space — in which I am going to be involved. Suddenly, another actor begins intimately reciting a Shakespearean sonnet for a couple seated at a table in the corner. He is whispering into their ears, and it looks rather enticing. “I’ll have one of those to start,” I say. The actress replies, “Would you like to add a German hand puppet to that for an extra dollar?”
Re: Viewing Feminist Theatre in the (Re)Main(s)
Authors: Burton Rebecca
Published: June 2023

Re: Producing Women’s Dramatic History: The Politics of Playing in Toronto is the first book-length solo effort from D.A. Hadfield, co-editor of Canadian Drama and the Critics and teacher of English, drama and theatre at the University of Guelph and St. Jerome’s University (Waterloo, ON). A reincarnation of her doctoral dissertation, Hadfield’s text offers a comprehensive rendering of the strategies employed by seven feminist productions staged in Toronto during the 1980s and early 1990s. As the title suggests, the productions are thematically linked by content concerned with a re-visioning of women’s history and historiography. The book’s emphasis is not literary, however; rather it focuses on how the productions negotiated “a complex journey through both pages and stages” (9), generating “historiographical remainders” (10), successfully accessing the mainstream and reproduction and consequently gaining admission to the annals of Canadian theatre history. As the title further indicates, Hadfield’s interrogation is a political one. By analysing “textual residues” (publicity materials, photos, programs, reviews, box office receipts and theatre records), the author explores how “the politics of the theatrical process influences the quality and the type of historiographical remainders” (10) and how these, in turn, affect visibility, reception, publication and the assumption that what is being produced is “quality” theatre. This approach, outlined in the preface, provides the means for tracing “the process of creating a theatrical ‘success’” (9).
Killers, Outcasts, Avengers and Action Heroes: Staging the Full-Blooded Woman
Authors: Hadfield D. A.
Published: June 2023

On the library shelf, Shelley Scott’s new book presents itself as a slim volume, clothed in attractive pink and white. The stereotypical feminine coding of the artefact, however, contrasts rather shockingly with the title of the book, The Violent Woman as a New Theatrical Character Type, as well as the large cover photograph, which shows a line of identically dressed young women, each pointing her finger as if it were a gun.1 This disjuncture is tremendously appropriate for a book that takes as its subject recent Canadian drama that seeks to understand the profound shock and discomfort that results when women behave in ways that fail to conform to socially constructed stereotypes of femininity.
FIRST SEQUENCE: Collaborators Collaborating from Coast to Coast (Duets)
Authors: Hill Steven , Taylor Heidi
Published: June 2023

In April 2007 Leaky Heaven began work on a new piece, inspired by a survivor’s account of the 1816 sinking of the French naval frigate Medusa and Géricault’s subsequent painting depicting the raft-borne survivors. Looking to bring in new perspectives to the process, and with the support of the Playwrights Theatre Centre, we drafted Heidi Taylor as production dramaturg to follow the development of the piece through three iterations and over the course of a year. Heidi brought in a fresh set of eyes and was able to describe back to us the methods that we had developed; she also generously offered her own inventions and structures and brought along an acute sense of organization — something vital in the chaotic binge of creation.
All Seams: Some Information from One Reed Theatre Ensemble
Authors: Webber Evan , Cox-O’Connell Frank , Flynn Megan , Mroz Daniel , Tellez Marc
Published: June 2023

Information from the Innocent

We imagine ourselves waiting in a room. On a side table are pliers, a scalpel, a length of rubber hose. Before us, on a plain desk, a pad of yellow paper. We wait. What we are thinking is, “How do we create a document that deals somehow with this question, why? When we’ve only just begun, when so much is unknown, for what are we being called to account?”
Making Theatre with Horses
Authors: Shook Estelle
Published: June 2023

For the last three years, we at Caravan Farm Theatre have been engaged in a theatrical experiment that utilizes horses as staging devices to explore the themes of progress, power and poetry contained in three full length narratives: Linz Kenyon’s The IOU Land, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and a musical comedy by Peter Anderson, The Blue Horse.
Devising Twenty-First Century Approaches to Actor Training in Central Canada
Authors: Wylam Lisa Wolford
Published: June 2023

In one of his final fully developed essays, “From the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle,” Jerzy Grotowski suggests that theatre educators invested in the rhetoric and technique of Stanislavsky’s system of actor training do a terrible disservice to young actors by replicating within theatre schools the brief rehearsal times characteristic of commercial practice. “How is it possible to study Stanislavsky for two or three years and prepare an opening in four weeks …?” Grotowsk asks. “Stanislavsky would never have accepted it. For him, the minimum period of work on a performance was several months, and the opening took place only when the actors were ready” (117). Rather than mirroring those aspects of the entertainment industry most inimical to the development of creativity and maturation of technique, Grotowski saw the possibility for college and university theatre departments to model a different kind of process, one that emphasized the importance of ensemble work in developing creativity.
Altering Perception: small metal objects
Authors: Zimmer Jacob
Published: June 2023

Devised and performed by Simon Laherty, Sonia Teuben, Genevieve Morris and Jim Russell, directed by Bruce Gladwin. Presented by Back to Back Theatre. In New York, as part of Under the Radar Festival, January 12, 2008; in Toronto, as part of World Stage, January 23, 2008; in Vancouver as part of the PuSh Festival, February 3, 2008.
17 Dog
Authors: Chambers Ron
Published: June 2023

(A greasy, third-rate auto wrecking business, housed inside a leaky old Quonset. Car parts are everywhere, on shelves, on the floor, hung from the ceiling, stacked, racked, pushed into piles, abandoned, cobwebbed, rusting, teetering. In one area is the “service counter,” which consists of one or two rickety old tables covered with more parts stacked as high as they will go, except for one spot where the parts have been pushed aside to provide enough room (barely) for a bit of counter space to conduct business, and to house the cash register. Parts are stashed underneath these tables as well. There is no organization whatsoever. Behind all this is a poorly built partition with a doorway, separating the “showroom” from the shop/garage in the back. Both ancient and current girlie posters and calendars adorn the few blank spots available in the curved walls. At lights up, CAL, JOE, and lots of barking from the two dogs outside in the yard.)
(Re-)Presenting the Past with Style
Authors: Owen David
Published: June 2023

In 2002/3, I took part in Workshop West's Playwrights’ Garage with Vern Thiessen. Since this “garage” took place during the build-up to the premiere of his Governor General award—winning play, Einstein's Gift, I not only heard him talk about his process but also saw the finished product on stage shortly thereafter. As I watched Einstein's Gift, I realized that Thiessen excels at taking straightforward, “true” stories and re-imagining them to highlight the emotional journey of the characters and the implications of their actions. Given this opportunity to review his two latest publications, Vimy and The Courier and Other Plays, I am eager to see if my theory holds true and also to see the progression of this playwright's skills, as represented by several plays that span his career. Vimy, which premiered in October 2007 at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, is Thiessen's most recent play, while The Courier and Other Plays is a collection of four previous texts: The Courier (1987), The Resurrection of John Frum (1990), Valentine (2001) and Back to Berlin (2005).
Selecting Performance Art: Curating vs. Programming
Authors: Couillard Paul
Published: June 2023

Performance art is often understood to exist in an in-between place, traversing a murky territory that overlaps the “visual” and “performing” arts. Alongside recent theorizations of its history and origins as a twentieth-century phenomenon stemming from a western visual-art tradition (see, for example, RoseLee Goldberg), performance art is also often understood as a trans-, multi- or interdisciplinary practice involving time, space, bodies and a relationship to an audience. In this second understanding, performance art is linked to broader notions of “performance,” and potentially, by extension, to formal elements from various traditions, including the performing arts, political activism, sports, ritual practices, social occasions and personal behaviour. Such an understanding may be of particular value in approaching the considerable performance activity currently evident in Aboriginal, Third World and other non-western cultures. Thus, performance art might be thought of, not as a discipline, but rather as a contested series of practices that are subject to change over time and across cultural boundaries — in other words, as a temporary classification for creative projects whose formal concerns extend beyond the current limits of recognized disciplines.
Editorial
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

This is the first issue of CTR to focus exclusively on performance art, a medium that has served as a halfway house of sorts between art and everyday life, between theatre and other artistic disciplines. This positioning has made it extraordinarily difficult to define, to delineate, and ultimately to write about. A number of influential performance theorists have helped to chart the “conceptual territory” of performance art over the past few decades by mapping out some of its central passions and preoccupations. Yet, as I hope that this issue will demonstrate, these rather confident cartographies often fail to register the complex ways in which the interdisciplinary medium is practised and understood.
“Zombies in Condoland”
Authors: Levin Laura , Solga Kim
Published: June 2023

Zombies in Condoland is a series of night actions that mimic a film … set for a low-budget horror film such as the type made famous by George Romero whose latest film, Diary of a Zombie, was filmed in Toronto. Anyone can participate and be a zombie. Zombies are encouraged to come in character—nurse zombie, business person zombie, geek zombie, sports zombie. They are encouraged also to do their makeup en route, in cafes, bars, and mass transit. There will also be make-up tents and zombie clothing available on site. Instructional videos are included on the Website: jillianmcdonald.net/zombie .
Views and Reviews
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

The first two articles in the Views and Reviews section look at Canadian festivals and discuss the particular urban niches that they fill. Bruce Barton and Pil Hansen describe their experiences at HIVE2, a series of eleven performances, staged by major experimental theatre companies in Vancouver and nestled within the 2008 Magnetic North Festival. Moving back and forth between critical commentary and a more phenomenological, in situ account of their experiences as spectators, Barton and Hansen paint a vivid picture of an audience-oriented festival, one that aims to generate intimate encounters with spectators as fully present and “differentiated individuals.” Their description of the jam-packed HIVE2 events — where the number of spectators far exceeded the audience capacity given for each show (some permitting only one spectator at a time) — resonates with Heather McLean’s view piece on the over-programming of the Toronto Nuit Blanche festival, an annual all-night celebration of contemporary art. McLean reads large-scale arts festivals like Nuit Blanche in relation to the creative-city model that Toronto has adopted in recent years, a model driven by new and disconcerting forms of inter-urban competition. Here, she draws on her own experience as a (potential) presenter at Nuit Blanche — originator of the satirical, interactive performance, Assbook — to reflect on the larger curatorial, civic and spectatorial interests that animate the festival.
Assbook: Nuit Blanche, Vulgarity and the Race to Compete with Arts and Culture
Authors: McLean Heather
Published: June 2023

In Toronto’s 2007 Nuit Blanche festivities, people searched the streets for a non-existent, interactive performance piece called Assbook. One blogger wrote, “[B]ecause it sounded irreverent (and because we thought we might get to see some skin) we scoured Kensington Market for Assbook, but the exhibit was nowhere to be found” (Rockr and Junkii). One of the supposed Assbook artists, I was approached all night by people asking about the artwork. Where is it? Why aren’t you going through with Assbook, Heather? How on earth did something called Assbook end up being such a popular discussion piece at the “art carpet-bombing”1 event known as Nuit Blanche? How did such a juvenile idea find its way into the prestigious, all-night, place-marketing spectacle?
La Pocha Nostra Performs at MOCCA: A Radical Critique of Colonial Relations
Authors: Kugelmass Karen
Published: June 2023

Divino Corpo is the latest piece by the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, performed in 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA). The performance is configured as a living diorama with the audience standing in the middle of the gallery looking out at scenes located on all four sides of the room. At one end, there is a body covered by a Canadian flag. At another, there is a man wearing nothing but a camouflage headband and a diaper made of gauze. The middle of the diaper is painted red, as are his limbs. Beside him stands a glamorous woman with platinum blond hair in a tight black dress. Across from them, a man in a drag and wearing a tribal headdress, sits on a chair. A naked woman pulls a rope to which he is attached. A woman in a silver cardboard corset inhabits the final side of the stage. The area around her stomach is translucent, and inside we see red. Her “set,” if you will, is a tall wooden post and a small stand bearing a cross. The audience stands squished together in the middle of the room. We manoeuvre around each other to watch the performances. Sadly, this hinders our ability to see, but it also heightens our awareness of each other and of our own bodies. We, too, are part of this performance.
The “Inter” of Intercultural Exchange: A Review of New Canadian Plays
Authors: Bennett Melanie
Published: June 2023

Concerns in recent intercultural theatre revolve around breaking down the distance between ourselves and the other and poking holes in old stereotypes. Rustom Bharucha’s idea of interculturalism in theatre is that it should imitate the swing of a pendulum in a back-and-forth movement (241). Bharucha’s pendulum models interculturalism as reciprocal, moving back and forth with cultural sources respected equally and with awareness of power differentials, to achieve a form of consensus. According to Bharucha, the answers to creating a more authentic hybrid is found in the in-between of the exchange: “It goes without saying that the real challenge in writing about interculturalism lies in figuring out the ‘inter,’ the space in between polarities, the dynamics between different points and locations” (241). Each of the play-texts in this review were chosen on the basis of their intercultural premises and of the ways they adopt Bharucha’s metaphoric pendulum.
Introduction
Authors: Freeman Barry , Gilodo Karen , MacArthur Michelle , Wilkinson Lydia
Published: June 2023

In December of 2006, an article in Time magazine discussed the shift of control in politics and entertainment from the “few” to the “many” and proclaimed the person of the year to be “You.” Musing about how the “millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy,” Lev Grossman writes,

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentais? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion? The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time‘s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Creating a BUZZ: Connecting Artist and Audience Development
Authors: Gilodo Karen , Wilkinson Lydia , McKim Andy , Jain Ravi
Published: June 2023

BUZZ is a new play development initiative at Theatre Passe Muraille that aims to engage audience members in the process of creating new works. Editors Lydia Wilkinson and Karen Gilodo attended BUZZ on 10 March 2009. The program featured Kilt Pins by Catherine Hernandez, Purple Don’t Cry by Boona Mohamed, Brimful of Asha by Ravi Jain, and Refined by Lisa Codrington.
(Per)Forming Ourselves and Others in Toronto’s Multicultural Caravan Festival
Authors: Taucar Jacqueline
Published: June 2023

As a first-generation Canadian, my home is filled with performances that gesture “back home” — or what my father calls the “old country,” a place that is only alluded to in the smells of the kitchen or when my mom forgets the English word and tells me to grab her a bunyak. As Dad sits in a sunny kitchen window, he reminisces about being back home in Croatia. “It’s like being home in Krk,” he says, referring to the home that he left almost fifty years ago, only returning for a few visits since then. Dad replays his memories for a very particular audience: his children and grandchildren. Although I’ve only been to Krk twice, Dad’s performances, albeit nostalgic and ideal, act as a touchstone for my perception of self and family history. By watching his performance, I become a part of a larger community and feel connected to a place and a people outside of Canada. At the same time, however, Dad’s performances also carry the hardships of immigration. The process of learning English was slow, and his accent remains an auditory reminder of the elements that refuse to assimilate to his new home, marking him as different, symbolically reflective of the ways he clings to the “old country” or rather, how the “old country” clings to him. Yet the idealized home Dad longs for does not actually exist except in his performances. Performing what I call the “homeland imaginary” signifies an incomplete relationship or communion with the “new country” as well as the “old country,” for both actor and audience. Dad’s performances are always marked by his partial assimilation to his new home, and I, in attending to his performance, am only partially connected to another place.
Blue Note
Authors: Julien Martin , Quirt Brian
Published: June 2023

Blue Note was inspired by a love of choral music and the desire to invite the audience into an intimate experience of a vocal ensemble at work. To create this piece, we explored choral repertoire with an ensemble of singers, actors and composers, searching for musical selections that would reveal the inner workings of both an ensemble and the music it performs. As we developed Blue Note, it became clear that much of what is most exciting about choral music is the way individual voices combine to create a unified piece of music. We determined that the best way to bring an audience inside that process was to create a performance piece set inside the rehearsal of a vocal ensemble.