bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Wax to Bits: Spoken-Word Recordings in Canada
Authors: Frost Corey
Published: June 2023

In trying to define the boundaries of spoken word as a genre, it would be tempting to invoke the “you had to be there” argument and to emphasize the live, ephemeral nature of the form, but spoken word is not purely a live phenomenon. Increasingly, writer-performers in Canada are making their work available through recordings. In the last few years, especially, there has been a flurry — not a blizzard, mind you, but a flurry — of CDs produced by both experienced and new spoken-word artists. The causes, ramifications, and results of this trend, and the way performers feel about recordings, all speak volumes about the nature of the genre itself.
S.O.S.: Skeena of the Skeena
Authors: Reece Skeena
Published: June 2023

Production Story: S.O.S: Skeena of the Skeena is made up of several streams of consciousness, put into one piece, about my desire to return home. The piece speaks for itself, but the style is somewhat representative of my aesthetic of creating order out of chaos.... A lot of my pieces written and performed are a form of “clowning” which is traditional of many First Nations cultures. Particularly, the Heyoka, or the Sacred Clown, has been influential on my understanding of performance. It was said that they said and did uncouth and backwards things to invoke emotion. Anger, sadness, fear and other feelings would come up in the course of these performances, and the audience would be forced to learn about their value systems and examine their beliefs, which were thought to be evolutionary in nature. For some Sacred Clowns, this could become a way of life. - Skeena Reece.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

When I started reading the articles for this issue on spoken word, I expected to encounter an intense interest in the textuality of contemporary poetry, borne out in skilled applications of advanced literary analysis. I imagined myself, a few weeks before the looming “due at press” date, sifting through clever dissections of poetic devices, thick descriptions of word choice and imagery, and exhaustive semiotic decodings of structure and syntax. However, the common theme that emerged in the articles for this section was not textual analysis but rather the conditions of production that govern the staging and circulation of contemporary spoken-word performance.
Bridging Opposites – Drama and Science – in the Plays of John Mighton
Authors: Innes Christopher
Published: June 2023

In terms of drama that deals with science, the award-winning Canadian playwright John Mighton is almost unique in being a practising scientist as well as a professional playwright. Indeed, he holds two PhD degrees: one in philosophy and one in mathematics. He has published a highly regarded book on mathematics, under the title of The Myth of Ability, and is the founder and coordinator of a highly innovative school program designed to help students who are having difficulty with math, called JUMP (which stands for “Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies”). He has also written six plays to date, which have been staged widely across Canada as well as being performed in Europe, Japan and the United States. One of these, Possible Worlds, has been turned into a film by the Canadian director Robert Lepage; and Mighton is currently working with Lepage again, adapting for the stage a science book, titled The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory – a title that demonstrates the ambitiousness of Mighton’s aims. He has also won a number of prestigious national prizes, including no fewer than two Governor General’s Awards for Drama. And, in 2006, he was awarded the Siminovitch Prize (the most prestigious and valuable theatre award in Canada).
Fathom
Authors: Theatre SaBooge , Essery Jodi
Published: June 2023

Copyright SaBooge Theatre and Jodi Essery. 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 authors. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. For performance rights, please contact SaBooge Theatre at #1-1819 Sherbrooke E., Montreal QC H2K 1B4 or company@sabooge.org .
HIVE – Clawing at Theatre’s Coffin in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
Authors: O’Donnell Darren
Published: June 2023

In Carl Wilson’s essay “The Party Line: Toronto’s Turn toward a Participatory Aesthetics,” he provides examples of artists who are managing to dismantle the distinction between producer and consumer, creating work where artistic import is manifest through inducing encounters between people. Wilson’s examination of this tendency in Toronto is, however, lacking examples from the theatre community. Too bad he wasn’t able to check out Vancouver’s HIVE, a four-day event staged by eleven theatre companies at the Chapel funeral home in the Downtown Eastside.
At Play: Matthew Jocelyn’s Production of The Liar by Pierre Corneille
Authors: Archbold Rick
Published: June 2023

The notion of shattering the comfortable complicity between audience and performers is not new, but a recent production at the Stratford Festival took the idea in some refreshing and provocative directions. The play at issue, Pierre Corneille’s comedy The Liar (Le menteur), might seem an unlikely candidate for postmodern experimentation. It is rarely performed in English – unlike the plays of Corneille’s comic successor, Molière (who reportedly decided to become a playwright after seeing Le menteur). In the hands of the Toronto-born-and-raised, France-based director Matthew Jocelyn, however, Corneille’s seventeenth-century classic became a thoroughly modern theatrical enterprise.
Responding: Self-scripting for Dialogue
Authors: Nolan Yvette
Published: June 2023

Come down the stairs with a little bag, a beer bottle: move cued from Linda Griffiths. Hand props to an audience member. Go get the little round table, place it extreme downstage right, again cued by Griffiths. Retrieve props. Open little bag. Remove papers. Unfold.

This is so unfair to ask me to do this. I was sitting in the back row writing until forty-five seconds ago. Making sense of this weekend on such short notice is - challenging.This is, of necessity, more of an observation than a report.
Revisioning Mother Malintzín
Authors: Wylam Lisa Wolford
Published: June 2023

The figure of Malintzín Tenépal, translator and mistress to Hernán Cortés and legendary mother of the mestizo people, has been a focus for such celebrated Mexican writers as Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, and more recently for revisionist work by Chicana scholars and cultural workers intent on rescuing this much maligned foremother from the distortions of patriarchal history. Nor the Cavaliers Who Come with Us, the first production by the exciting new ensemble company One Reed Theatre, enters into dialogue with these revisionist projects, restoring the woman the Spanish conquistadors called Doña Marina to a central place as active agent in the downfall of the Aztec empire.
The Theatre and Materialist Analysis
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: June 2023

This important new study provides both a useful overview and a series of provocative and thoughtful case studies, together constituting an excellent introduction to what has become in recent years one of the must productive areas of theatre analysis, what Knowles calls the “new materialist semiotics.” As cultural productions, Knowles convincingly argues, theatrical productions “are inextricably connected to the material, historical, and cultural contexts from which they emerge and to which they speak” (202). This, of course, is a dynamic process, since the constantly changing world in which theatre is produced results in a constantly shifting pattern of formations, relationships, delivery systems and modes of reception.
Dreaming Scout
Authors: MacLeod Joan
Published: June 2023

It’s Saturday night, I’m ten or eleven years old and I’m watching the film To Kill a Mocking Bird on our old TV in the basement. My family is upstairs watching Hockey Night in Canada on the new TV — the one that comes with a turntable and AM/FM radio, all wrapped up in an oak cabinet the size of a coffin. I follow the film pretty well for someone who doesn’t understand yet what rape is. Racism — another of the film’s big themes and also a concept that is new to me — is easier to grasp. The story of this film is complicated but clear, and the experience of watching it — it’ll be another three years before I read the novel in high school — contains everything that I now want children watching theatre to experience.
Finding “Self,” Finding “Home”: Drama in Education
Authors: Sahni Urvashi
Published: June 2023

In this article, I describe and discuss a drama project that I did with a group of grade-nine girls, all from very impoverished backgrounds in India. I discuss it in the context of the goals of teaching and learning as I have used them in my work. I also map the metaphysical and epistemological terrain that I travel, using Bond’s ideas of imagination and the self and the concept of home, connecting them to the ideas of self and reality as used in Vedanta in Indian philosophy and weaving both into my own idea of self. I describe, in this paper, how the students and I used drama to enable them to construct a more empowering idea of themselves in the universe — more at home in an otherwise hostile world.
You Fancy Yourself
Authors: Ardal Maja
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Maja Ardal. 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 authors. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. For performance rights, please contact Maja Ardal 132 Glenwood Crescent, Toronto ON M4 Β 1K2; maja.ardal@sympatico.ca .
Dollhouse
Authors: Benning Sheri
Published: June 2023

In autumn, as the schoo l bus pull ed away from our yard, Heath er and I would r un to the hou se, throw aside our schoo l outfits for our worn out “work clothes” and head to th e back forty of our farm, wh er e there was an old wooden granary. We spent hours cleaning that gr anary, though no amount of scrubbing rid it of th e mu sk of decaying wood, barl ey chaff, mou se shit and the debris of swallow nests. If asked wh at we were up to, we’d mutter some thing about playing “pioneer,” th ough this was more of an expedien t explanation than an actual indicator of what we were doing. Together, but isolated — both of us immer sed in our own imag ined worlds — Heather and I staged and restaged the granar y, with rain—bloate d furniture, torn books and knick—knacks th at we found scattere d in th e rock pile behind th e dug— out or in the attic of th e barn . If we got hungry, we’d raid th e ripe garden for food, dodging made—up enemies — wild animals and equally wild sto rybook “Ind ians.” In autumn, th e mer e scent of what’s almost ineffable — dusk air tin ged with stubble fire, cut clover — places me back in that granary. I’m reading Anne l’ Green Gables, while Heath er has qui et conversations with her favourite doll, who m she aptly calls, “Dolly.” I still tease Heather about how she and Doll y bear a funn y resemblance — th ey share reddish, matted curls, limbs scuffed with mud and grass, a few freckles and chee ky grins.
Common Plants: Youth Branches
Authors: Rudakoff Judith
Published: June 2023

From the circumpolar region in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, to Khayelitsha Township outside of Cape Town, at the southern most tip of South Africa, youth are listening to the same music (American hip-hop), complaining about bad weather, having differences of opinions with their parents. What happens if these youth are connected, asked to examine who they are, where they are from, and compare both what they share and what is unfamiliar in their daily lives? What happens when the questions is, “What or where is home?”
Eating at the Buffet of Love: “Consummating” Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding in Vancouver
Authors: Banting Sarah
Published: June 2023

Food and the communal consumption and enjoyment of food are a focal point of Italian wedding receptions in North America as in Italy (Harney 265), but food and eating take centre stage only briefly in Hoarse Raven Theatre’s Vancouver production of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. Vinnie Black, the caterer character, introduces the wedding feast, his “Buffet of Love,” with silly pomp: accompanied by dramatic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Vinnie lopes through the reception hall wrapped in an Italian flag and waving a plastic light-sabre toy and effuses into the microphone about how the buffet food has been lovingly prepared. But the fanfare quickly dies down. Even as the first table of audience members queues to load its plates with pasta, chicken, and salads, the antic, diffuse plot of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding continues to unfold. The food, in its comforting abundance, quietly gives up the spotlight.
Assembly: a Surreal Self-improvement Seminar
Authors: Fedy Emelia Symington , Kahre Andreas , Laurenson Andrew , Harris-McLeod Katy , Marchenski Billy , Ternes Paul
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Andrew Laurenson, Paul Ternes, Billy Marchenski, Katy Harris-McLeod and Emelia Symington Fedy. 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 authors. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. For performance rights, please contact radix theatre, #520, 119 West Pender Street, Vancouver, BCV6B 1S5; (604) 254-0707, ext. 1.
Flirting with Zuppa Circus
Authors: Stone Ben , Leblanc-Crawford Susan , McLean Alex
Published: June 2023

We come from different angles. We throw things at each other and wait for things to stick.

1. Chorus

Thursday, January 10

One of the greatest formative experiences in my theatrical life was when Dave McGoran and Ruth Madoc-Jones collaborated with my first-year class to create a large-scale puppet pageant. It was great.
Nor the Cavaliers Who Come with Us
Authors: Cox-O’Connell Frank , Flynn Megan , Mroz Daniel , Tellez Marc , Webber Evan
Published: June 2023

Copyright: 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 rights of the author have been asserted. For performance rights, contact Megan Flynn, One Reed theatre Ensemble, 505-1603 Bathurst St., Toronto ON, M5P 3J2.
Devised Theatre and the Unstable Audience
Authors: Cayley Kate
Published: June 2023

The significance of devised theatre lies in its relationship to the unexpected. In all forms of theatre, even the most structured, words like “risk,” “experiment” and “challenge” are used frequently, but often without considering fully the openness to both true instability and true failure that these words imply. Most theatre is created in rooms in which relationships are rigidly defined: relationship to the text, relationship to the director, relationship between actors, and all the hierarchies and protocols that have grown up around the professional theatre. This need for a template is understandable and perhaps necessary to a form of theatre in which rehearsal periods are limited and relationships between collaborators are often temporary. The template is also insurance against failure. This is not to say that plays do not fail; they often do. However, a template protects the participants against the sense of failure possible when they are in the state of total uncertainty that defines the genuine experiment. Because of the template, they are assured of their relationships to the work and to each other. The end result may be a failure, but the participants still know the steps that will get them to the end, even before the work begins. At its best, traditionally hierarchical theatre gives the practitioners and the audience a well-known and often well-loved form of storytelling. By the same token, it can be boring to create and to watch because, fundamentally, both audience and participants already know the end of the story in form, if not in content.
notes on falling and flying
Authors: Newman Michelle
Published: June 2023

MAN: Part three was the death of her insides. This was unlucky. She needed them but he made it up to her … Her insides were made out of bendy plastic & tranquilizer chewing gum, her insides were fragile neon & bound up with sellotape, her insides were radium atoms lit only by 40 watt bulbs, & he loved them. (Etchells, “Let” 136)
Talons of Desire: BoxWhatBox and HAWKS in Southern Serbia
Authors: Devine Michael
Published: June 2023

Over the past five years I have developed the tools of my performance workshop, BoxWhatBox (BWB), in two directions: performance training and production. In the summer of 2007 I was invited by the Open Arc Theatre of Serbia to stage an environmental piece in a village in southern Serbia. The HAWKS project grew out of the production of BoxWhatBox: I Forget, which I created and directed at the National Theatre of Serbia-Užice in 2005. In Užice I had worked with actors in the company for twenty-eight days to create an original production, in Serbian, that meshed together actors’ personal recollections of the circumstances surrounding photographs they had brought me with my own reflections on the themes of voluntary and involuntary memory.1 The following summer, in 2006, I was invited to work in Mokra Gora, a small town in the mountains of the same name in southern Serbia. Over five days with a group of ten actors, working outdoors, we were able to create an original thirty-five-minute piece entitled BoxWhatBox: I Dream.
Forwards: The Theatre Centre’s Residence Program
Authors: Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

We end this issue on theatrical devising in Canada by looking to the future. The previous articles make it clear that the term “devising” is, in effect, an index, a pointer, referencing a broad and widely varied field of activities. To date, this rich, unruly diversity has been the surest sign of its robust health and its exponential growth. Yet, as I noted in my “Forewords,” our editorial responsibilities required making some choices and establishing some parameters for our own subset of interests and aspirations for this issue. Similarly, other attempts are afoot to provide structures and frameworks to facilitate dialogue among like-minded (yet often wildly different) practices and practitioners. It’s to one of the key initiatives in this effort that I turn in these last pages: the Theatre Centre’s Residence Program.
Blown Speechless into the Raging Dreams of Children in a Violent Age: Theatre Gargantua’s Persistent Creation in Times of Crisis
Authors: Whittaker Robin C.
Published: June 2023

Raging Dreams — into the visceral. Conceived and directed by Jacquie P. A. Thomas; original text by Meryn Cadell and Jacquie P.A. Thomas; set and light by Michael Spence; costumes by Erica Buss. Enwave Theatre at Harbourfront Centre. 8-10 Nov 2007.

If the theatre is in crisis at this point, it has always been in crisis, as its goal is to instill an urgent turning point in the participants. (Causey, 182-3)
Jesters, Rabbits and Mavericks1
Authors: Cameron Ken
Published: June 2023

You can't swing a dramaturge in Edmonton without hitting a few playwrights. It seems as if every second actor is writing a show or, if she is taking a year off, is helping her buddy with his first playwriting venture.
Developing a National Drama at the Citadel
Authors: MacDonald James
Published: June 2023

Play development at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre has its roots in founder Joe Shoctor's vision of bringing world class theatre to Edmonton audiences. Shoctor was never averse to taking risks — in fact, he relished the opportunity to knock parochial Edmonton on its head. After luring John Neville from England in 1973, Shoctor gave his new artistic director carte blanche to bring a new style of theatre to Edmonton, which included productions of new Canadian plays, such as Babel Rap by John Lazarus (1974/5) and Crabdance by Beverly Simons (1976/7).
Phoenix Rising
Authors: Chan Marty
Published: June 2023

What started as a workshop of a play about a Chinatown fire was now ember and ashes, after the wildfire of dramaturgical questions from my actors and director. When a playwright neglects to fireproof his script, he's asking for trouble, and I had left a huge fire hazard in my script. I had tried to write a history lesson rather than a dramatic play and so, on the first day of the workshop, my cast and crew exposed the dry pages and frayed wires and sparked a four-alarm fire.
Gwen Pharis Ringwood at the University of Calgary
Authors: Dugan James
Published: June 2023

The Drama Department at the University of Calgary has produced an increasing number of Canadian plays since it was founded in 1967. We have never had an explicit policy regarding the production of Canadian or Alberta plays. The founding principle of Department production choices was to mount four plays per year from the various periods of western theatre history over a four-year cycle and to study these plays in the Dramatic Literature and Theatre History classes. Each year, a modern play and a contemporary play were to be produced, plus two plays from more distant historical periods. Students would, therefore, study theatre history in the context of production and, over four years, would cover all of western theatre history. The reason for establishing this model lay in the antipathy of the early members of the Department toward the typical chronological theatre history survey courses, which usually had no relation to plays being produced. Several of the first members of the Department had an interest in directing plays from all periods of theatre history, so the model worked fairly well for several years. Over time, with faculty turnover and the increasing interest of new faculty in Canadian theatre history, this model began to break down. Another major factor was the introduction of graduate programs in directing and design. Graduate students direct their thesis productions in the department's main season, and they typically are neither prepared for nor interested in directing period pieces. Successive generations of graduate students have demonstrated increasing interest in Canadian theatre. Furthermore, after the Canadian theatre history course was added to the curriculum in 1982, it was taught for many years by scholars who tended not to direct productions in the department.
Shoot the Indian: A Photo Essay
Authors: Pechawis Archer
Published: June 2023

Shoot the Indian was originally conceived in 2000 as a video game utilizing the Quake 2 engine, which, at that time, had been released to the public as open source. After some informal research I became daunted by the enormity of this undertaking and shelved the project. Then, when I was asked by curator Glenn Alteen to create a performance for the 2008 Magnetic North Festival HIVE event, I immediately came up with this version of the piece.
A Review of Palace Grand
Authors: Hennebury Erika
Published: June 2023

Vancouver’s Electric Company chart one man’s decent into madness with miniatures, multiples, lip synching and kitschy Canadiana in a break-neck solo written and performed by Jonathan Young. Set in a remote cabin in the northernmost reaches of the Canadian wilderness, circa the gold rush of the late nineteenth century, Young’s three-character solo offers a glimpse into human failure, isolation and madness.
Five (or Six) Things I Think We Accomplished at Magnetic North
Authors: Vingoe Mary
Published: June 2023

My title arises from CTR’s invitation to write a sequel to a speech I delivered at the 2008 conference of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, entitled “Five (or Six) Mildly Controversial Things I Learned at Magnetic North,” subsequently published under the title “All the Country’s a Stage.” Given that this issue of CTR is about the importance of festivals, I believe that what I need to write is a prequel to that speech and also, with a nod to my successor Ken Cameron, some thoughts about where the challenges might lie in the future.
Bridging the Gaps: The Puppets Up! International Puppet Festival
Authors: Ashby James B.
Published: June 2023

Puppet artists, from the fatherly Geppetto in The Adventures of Pinocchio to the more troubled Craig Schwartz in Being John Malkovich, are often represented as loners, pursuing their chosen art without any outside aid. The solitary puppet artist certainly exists, but as Steve Tillis points out, “[T]he opportunity for control that puppetry offers the artist is frequently taken up less for artistic reasons than for financial ones, at least in America”; and the situation is not markedly different in Canada: “[I]t is often only by working alone that an artist can earn a living” (33). Even the lone puppet artist — or indeed, perhaps especially she — can learn from exchanging ideas and techniques with other artists, however. Moreover, puppetry as a whole can only benefit from the intellectual and artistic cross-pollination that ensues when artists and companies come together in the same space, at the same time, to view and discuss each other’s work. A puppet theatre festival offers a rare chance for artists to do just that.
Vancouver’s PuSh 2008 and the Phenomenon of Festivals
Authors: Simas Richard
Published: June 2023

Montreal and Toronto are arguably Canadian arts festival capitals, boasting heady and never-ending streams of performing arts, film, jazz, winter, literary, new music and ethnic festivals and cultural-tourist events. However, it may be instructive to look thousands of kilometres due west to examine the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, located in the booming Pacific Rim and 2010 Olympic host city of Vancouver. Guided by executive director Norman Armour and co-founded with local theatre director Katrina Dunn, “the PuSh Festival engages and enriches audiences with adventurous contemporary performance … work that is visionary, genre-bending, startling, and original” (Press release). The organization’s October 2007 news release (“PuShing beyond the Borders”) and Web-site archives indicate that PuSh has grown exponentially in its six years. It now boasts a history consisting of two initial three-show seasons (2003—4) that morphed into festival formats in the last four years (2005—8), becoming an essential fixture on the Vancouver arts scene.
Canada’s Raciest Festival
Authors: Sadavoy Daniel
Published: June 2023

Theatre festivals are fun. Feeling hegemonically excluded from them is not. Just ask Andrew Moodie, a playwright whose work was rejected by the Shaw Festival ostensibly because of the number of black characters in the script.
Editorial
Authors: Lane Harry
Published: June 2023

To borrow a term from David van Belle’s contribution to this issue, Canadian theatre has been pervasively “festivalized” in recent decades. To most readers, Robertson Davies’s 1980 reminiscence would now sound quaint. We are offered festivals almost all year long and almost everywhere. True, not everyone would agree that this is an improvement on the remoteness (both geographic and cultural) of Davies’s enchantments. When Patrice Pavis came to revise his 1980 Dictionnaire du théâtre in 1996, he added an entry on “Festival,” in which he draws a rather damning distinction between “such traditional events” as the Athenian festivals of the fifth-century BCE and the proliferating festivals of today, lamenting that the ancient “solemnity of celebration” is too often “rendered meaningless by the proliferation and trivialization of modern festivals” (148). This issue of CTR presents a group of articles that collectively argue for a more flexible model of what a festival can be than that of Pavis, highlighting the varying functions of festivals in twenty-first-century theatre culture. While most aim emphatically at celebration, their “solemnity” may not be so obvious, if only because festivals tend to thrive on what is new and unexpected. A more important issue is one clearly articulated by van Belle in relation to festivals of performance work, but which applies to all: “[W]hile we are gathering information on what festivals are, we need to ask the question of what it is that festivals, as performance entities in and of themselves, do.”
Beyond the Cultural Perspective, Toward Transcultural Identities; or, Is Interculturalism Still Possible?
Authors: Féral Josette
Published: June 2023

This article is, in many ways, the sequel to an earlier study that appeared several years ago in my book on Ariane Mnouchkine and was presented at a seminar organized by Mitsuya Mori and Tomoko Saito in Tokyo (“L’Orient revisité”).1 At that time, I explored the Japanese influences at work in Mnouchkine’s creation of the Shakespeare cycle and considered how performances of the cycle were received in Europe, particularly the impression that the work showed specifically Japanese characteristics or at least what the European public perceived to be Japanese characteristics. Our Japanese hosts persistently maintained that, for them, the works contained no genuinely Japanese elements.
Tango’s Cross-Cultural Dance
Authors: Verdecchia Guillermo
Published: June 2023

I caught two neo-tango concerts in Toronto in the summer of 2008: Otros Aires at the Lula Lounge, “Canada’s Premier Live Venue for Latin Music,” in Little Brazil, and Bajofondo at the Mod Club in Little Italy. These concerts and the “world music” radio shows that alerted me to them, together with the existence of Little Italy, Little Brazil and the Lula Lounge, are obvious signifiers of the intercultural reality of Toronto. This, it bears repeating, is not an uncomplicated reality. The diversity of cultural practice in the city is embedded in a matrix of political, economic and material realities. My aim here, however, is not an analysis of intercultural capitalism, of the reification of identities, or of civic discourses that celebrate (or capitalize on) immigrant communities and ethnic enclaves, but a consideration of tango as (varieties of) cross-cultural performance. My reflections are inspired by the performances I saw, in particular the Otros Aires concert.
The Intercultural Complexities of Shoot The Indian: An Interview with Archer Pechawis
Authors: Flamme Michelle La
Published: June 2023

Shoot the Indian is a performance geared specifically to a mixed (read “non-Native”) audience. Presented during the Magnetic North Festival HIVE event, Shoot the Indian is an audience participation piece, where attendees have the opportunity to shoot a real Indian (Pechawis) with a paintball gun for five dollars. Riffing on the circus freak, vaudeville and old “Wild West” shows, this piece is a commentary on violence against Native people – a clown show, in other words. Pechawis stands in front of a 30-foot wide video projection wearing a beautiful Tsimshian mask (carved by Simon Reece) and a white painter suit. The mask serves a dual purpose: a challenge to the audience (will they shoot such a powerful cultural symbol?) and protection for Pechawis, as he has reinforced the mask with fiberglass. The video footage comes from old westerns edited down to the salient bits, namely Indians attacking whites. Pechawis includes a few sections of cowboys and cavalry playing in reverse. Shoot the Indian is available as a touring performance. Go to the web site to view the video footage of Shoot The Indian, HIVE, Vancouver BC, 2008 (adapted from “Shoot the Indian”).
The Modern in Modern Times
Authors: Knowles Ric
Published: June 2023

“Modern Times” is, perhaps, a strange name for a theatre company that, in its early years, was dedicated to staging adaptations of ancient Persian fables, and whose current mandate focuses on the blending of Middle-Eastern and western theatrical forms.1 But the name is appropriate: central to the company’s activity is the rethinking of modernism itself. Indeed, Modern Times Stage Company can be understood to be working, in its modest way, towards the completion of what Jurgen Habermas in 1980 famously (and controversially) called “the unfinished project of modernity” – the extension of the larger humanist project of Enlightenment through the creation of a rational and democratic public sphere, one that includes the arts as well as science and morality. According to Habermas, modernism held “the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would not merely promote the control of the forces of nature but also the understanding of self and world, moral progress, justice in social institutions, and even human happiness” (45). Habermas is sceptical about the project’s potential success, citing “Three Conservatisms”–antimodernism, pre-modernism, and postmodernism – that work against it (53). Modern Times is more optimistic, and, circumventing many of the critiques levelled at Habermas’s gender blindness and his Eurocentric defence of the Enlightenment and its ravages, extends this extravagant expectation to all of the world’s peoples, whatever their genders, sexualities, races or ethnicities.
Professionally Ethnic
Authors: Del Rio Bobby
Published: June 2023

(2 guys are arguing. They are WILLIAM [20s, ethnic] and KYLE [20s, white]. They are shooting hoops with WILLIAM’s mini basketball hoop above his garbage can.)

WILLIAM: That play was shit.

KYLE: I found it fascinating.

WILLIAM: How could it get nominated for a fucking best play award?

KYLE: It was an interesting story. (Hits a basket.) White boys shoot 3s. I think it’s in our genes.
Mining History – Working with Paul Yee and Pangaea Arts: A Cross Cultural Dramaturgy
Authors: Avila Elaine
Published: June 2023

This dialogue was the kick-off. Heidi Specht and I were chasing our small children around Vancouver’s Coal Harbour playground, the glorious North Shore Mountains in the background. George Vancouver first noted coal here in the 1790s. Now Coal Harbour is home to a housing co-op, a Performing Arts Lodge and some of the most expensive real estate in Canada. Little did we know how much coal was about to become our study and our inspiration.
Women’s Theatre in Quebec: Reimagining the Stage
Authors: Bickis Heidi
Published: June 2023

With this unique two-volume anthology, Louise H. Forsyth offers the English Canadian reader a glimpse of theatre in Quebec, written, starring and produced by women. By creating a space for the transformative voices of Quebec women playwrights within an English-language setting, Forsyth has opened the door for an intercultural encounter between two theatre traditions that don’t often have a chance for dialogue and exchange. The anthology also documents some of the intercultural happenings within Quebec theatre, first with a 努women’s culture” taking its place onstage and secondly, in volume two, with immigrant and First Nation stories making themselves heard. The collection invites readers to engage with a realm of theatre unfamiliar to them and takes the first step towards putting these plays on English Canadian stages.
Review of Someone’s Going to Come
Authors: Wolfe Graham
Published: June 2023

Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, though widely produced in Europe, is a voice almost entirely new to the Canadian stage. In its recent production of Someone Is Going to Come (newly translated by Harry Lane and Adam Seelig), Toronto’s One Little Goat Theatre Company gave us a valuable opportunity to experience the subtlety and poetic openness of Fosse’s work as well as the challenges it poses for spectators.
The Peripatetic Audience
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: June 2023

I have always been interested in the context and experience of theatre audiences and, in my book on this topic, outlined a range of activities and knowledges that formed what I called, following reception theory, an “horizon of expectations” that spectators necessarily brought to the theatre. My argument there suggested that this horizon of expectations, held both individually and collectively, would be affirmed, revised, disavowed and so on, in light of the performance the audience saw in the theatre. While the density of the spectator’s experience was, of course, during the actual performance, an interactive engagement with the onstage world in the act of meaning making, I suggested that the idea of the theatrical event extended far beyond the specifics of the play. It seems useful now to think about how this preliminary theorizing about the theatre audience applies, or not, to an expanded context of theatricality in the world. Certainly, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are audiences for a much broader performance environment than the play produced in a building identified as a theatre. In the period since Theatre Audiences was first published (1990) and, indeed, particularly since its second and revised edition (1997), more and more people have come to experience performance outside of conventional theatre spaces.
Talk-backs, Relatability and the Pedagogical Challenges of Performance Analysis
Authors: Alvarez Natalie , Harrower Natalie
Published: June 2023

Years of anxiety, awkward silences, averted eyes and damaged egos compel us to raise the question: Why is the talk-back so consistently dreaded and dissatisfying? Why, in the words of a colleague, does it “never seem to work” and finally, how can we account for the rarity of a felicitous talk-back? The anxieties surrounding post-performance discussions are perhaps symptomatic of a lacuna in the discipline of performance analysis that has, arguably, inhibited its widespread integration into post-secondary theatre studies curricula, which has long privileged dramatic literature and methods of analysis derived from literary criticism. How have post-secondary theatre curricula accommodated the disciplinary tide that has shifted away from dramatic literary models to performance studies, and concurrently, from an analysis of literary texts to “performance texts”? The dearth of courses devoted to developing the analytic skills necessary to effectively “read” a performance event is, we suspect, a by-product of philosophical problems in the field of performance analysis and debates concerning the merits of a universal discourse and its application. As Patrice Pavis writes, performance analysis is a “fallow field that has as yet failed to develop a satisfactory method of universal application. In order to assess the current situation and future possibilities … we have to run the risk of treading on the odd mine” (2).
2 Kapote Kapades
Authors: Wex Michael
Published: June 2023

Badkhones, the jesting performed at a traditional Jewish wedding by the badkhn or wedding jester, is slightly more healthy than vaudeville today. The pre-war modernization of Eastern European Jewish life, the fatal Hitler-Stalin one-two of the ’30s, ’40s and early ’50s, and the attendant decline of Yiddish (not to mention the rapid assimilation of North American Jewry) – all these have left the badkhones more a memory than a living reality almost everywhere outside of hasidic communities. Mention the word badkhn to any elderly Jew of East European origin: he or she will give you back a sigh, a wistful look and an earnest declaration: “Fun a gutn badkhn hot men gekent gor oysveynen oygn, A good badkhn could make you cry yourself blind.”
Drag and Popular Culture
Authors: Gilbert Sky
Published: June 2023

In this discussion of drag and popular culture, I should make it very clear at the outset that I will be discussing drag in the context of gay culture. This does not mean to say that drag does not exist outside of gay culture, or that every person who dresses in drag (male or female) is gay or lesbian. But, first of all, my specialty is gay culture, and secondly, much of the drag we see in popular or avant-garde art comes from that world. And finally, I’m just dreadfully tired of turning on the television and watching drag artistes on interview shows who are asked whether or not they are gay, replying “I really don’t think sex is that important, do you, that it has to enter into everything? I love women very much, and I’m dating a very lovely woman at the moment, thank you.” The fact of the matter is that many drag artists are gay and this is quite simply because drag is a significant element in gay culture. So much time is wasted (as is always wasted around gay matters) with men defending their so-called “masculinity” that it’s time to redress the imbalance and talk of drag in the context of its roots. (Keep in mind that when I suggest that drag has its roots in gay culture I am referring to modern western culture of the last 500 years. Obviously in Asian cultures and ancient cultures there are different cultural and sociological factors involved.)
Boom, Baby, Boom!
Authors: Rubess Baņuta , Gotham Nic
Published: June 2023

Caution: © Baņuta Rubess. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and all performances are subject to royalty. Rights to produce, film or record, in whole or in part, in any medium and in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by Baņuta Rubess. Interested persons are requested to apply for permission and terms to Baņuta Rubess, 13 Fennings St., Toronto, Ont., M6J 3B9.
Gender, Sexuality and Theatre To Become The Ideological Function of Gay Theatre
Authors: Wallace Robert
Published: June 2023

Since Canadian Theatre Review published a special issue on homosexuality and Canadian theatre in 1976, the changes in gay life in North America have been enormous. While the social stigmatization of homosexuality and the concomitant oppression of lesbian and gay peoples still exists as much in Canada as in other countries, the gains of the gay liberation movement, both here and around the world, have led more Canadian artists to openly address the impact and significance of homosexuality in and on their work. Discussing the topic in a panel organized by CTR in 1975, playwright and director John Palmer stated an attitude prevalent amongst gay people working in Canadian theatre at that time: “Nobody minds that you are gay… . As long as it isn’t mentioned” (Freed 12). And Ed Jackson, then arts editor for The Body Politic, Canada’s national gay magazine, which has since closed its doors, answered the question “Could a gay theatre get funding?” by adroitly assessing the situation of gay theatre in Canada then and now: “I think you would have to try twice as hard… . There are always people who will jump on a government funding agency for giving money to homosexuals. They’ve done it in the past and they’ll continue to do it for some time … (Freed 12). Jackson also acknowledged, however, that “Things have changed, and are continuing to change. That’s why it might now be possible to have a gay theatre here” (Freed 11).
New Directions: An Interview with Kate Weiss
Authors: Thompson Peggy
Published: June 2023

Kathleen Weiss, Artistic Director of Tamahnous Theatre, Vancouver’s only experimental company, has after three seasons decided not to renew her contract. Her recent decision makes this introduction to my already planned interview with her an appropriate venue for an overview of the Weiss years at Tamahnous. National audiences may recognize at least two of the titles of shows created during her tenure: the highly acclaimed The Haunted House Hamlet, an environmental staging of the Bard adapted by her husband Peter Eliot Weiss, which was presented to Eastern audiences during Montreal’s prestigious Festival of the Americas in 1986, and Simple Folk, Songs Of A Generation, a collective creation looking back on the late sixties. Simple Folk became the first Western Canadian theatre production to visit Russia.
Collaborations / 1: Theatreblitz! Alberta Theatre Projects’ outreach to adolescents
Authors: Potts Marilyn
Published: June 2023

They come to Calgary’s Centre for the Performing Arts from sixteen high schools in and around Calgary on a snowy Friday night in February. The 150 students are here to participate in Alberta Theatre Projects’ (ATP) fourth Annual THEATRE-BLITZ! As orginally conceived by ATP’S former Artistic Associate, Allen McInnis, THEATRE-BLITZ! is an opportunity for high school students to work collaboratively under the guidance of theatre professionals on new scripts written by their peers. Professional directors, designers and acting coaches work with the students during the weekend in a series of workshops. The focus of the weekend is on the playwriting process, although the weekend does conclude with presentations of the works in progress.
Professional Solutions / 2: Theatre Street
Authors: Lok Christina , Leiren-Young Mark
Published: June 2023

When Rob played “street scum” on a recent episode of the TV drama, 21 Jump Street, there was no acting involved. As an extra he was supposed to hang around and look dangerous. “I’ve done that before in my life,” he says with a smile. Rob knows he’s someone people might just cross the street to avoid. He’s been “street scum.”
Circuit fermé Théâtre de l’Atrium
Authors: Dancoes Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

Alain Fournier’s Circuit fermé was created in 1986 for Theatre de l’Atrium. The theatre’s mandate – to “touch, gently or brutally, the eye, the ear and the heart of adolescents” – is certainly realized in this piece, the touch in this case leaning toward the brutal. The play’s central characters, Johanne and François, are adolescents who have turned to the street for a home and their bodies for income. Teachers, parents and social workers are discussed but appear only as voices off; what we do see are johns, producers of pornography, and Real, a man of 40 who attempts to lure François into his life and heart. There are no pat or easy solutions or even possibilities meted out, just a strong message that the streets are not the place to be and your “will” the only way out.
Zeke and the Indoor Plants
Authors: Smillie Ruth , Randall Jan
Published: June 2023

Caution: ©1986 Ruth Smillie and Jan Randall. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and all performances are subject to royalty. Rights to produce, film or record Zeke and the Indoor Plants, in whole or in part, in any medium and in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by Ruth Smillie. Interested persons are requested to write to Ruth Smillie, Catalyst Theatre, 601, 10136-100 Street, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 0P1..
A Soviet Designer Tackles Man and Superman Eduard Kochergin at the Shaw
Authors: Garebian Keith
Published: June 2023

His celebrity is awesome. A gold medallist at the Prague Quadrennial international theatre design competition, an Artist of Merit of the Soviet Union, chief designer at the Gorki Grand Academic Theatre and the I.J. Repin Institute of Painting, Architecture, and Sculpture, 52-year-old Eduard Kochergin has designed over 150 productions throughout the Soviet Union, Finland, East and West Germany, Hungary, Poland and the United States. Yet he would, on the surface, hardly seem to be the ideal designer for George Bernard Shaw, who is performed as rarely in the Soviet Union as Gorky is in Canada. Kochergin would need to put aside his own Soviet biases in order to be open to Shaw’s ideas and passions. Shaw’s is an essentially Victorian world and not analogous to Czarist Russia. How would Kochergin’s tactile constructivist sets and minimalist use of props accord with Shaw’s scrupulously detailed drawing rooms? Kochergin’s inner poetics would appear to be at odds with Shaw’s musical rhetoric, especially because the designer’s poetic truth is achieved (as Soviet critic Khmeleva contends) by a formal art technique, tonal painting of half-light, half-dark, and the use of natural materials.