bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
eARTh Project
Authors: Singh Rebecca
Published: June 2023

I’m an actor, though these days I often go by the label “emerging artist” or “creator/performer.” I started going to theatre regularly fifteen years ago, have been a member of Equity, the professional performers association, for almost a decade and a member of ACTRA for longer and have worked for cultural institutions in whatever capacity I could, because the theatre is my home away from home. I like to be in a theatre. In between finding and creating opportunities for performance, I have done front of house stints for many of the major players — Canadian Opera Company, National Ballet of Canada, Cirque du Soleil, Toronto Symphony Orchestra — worked as an artist educator for Canadian Stage Company, and had residencies or gigs as an actor or writer for many companies in Toronto and Montreal. I served the English theatre community for three years working at the Quebec Drama Federation and have long been an avid supporter, creator and performer in the indie scene. In 2002 I founded the Montreal All-Star Cheerleaders.
Alberta Playwrights-in-Residence: Home on the Stage
Authors: Massing Conni
Published: June 2023

Everybody needs a home. Even playwrights. Okay, especially playwrights. Shakespeare not only had a home, he had a whole company at his disposal. Many of the most accomplished playwrights of the last few centuries have benefited from an ongoing relationship with a company: Chekhov, Sam Shepherd, Caryl Churchill, to name but a few. In this country, we can point to a long list of acclaimed writers who credit their time in the Tarragon Theatre Playwrights Unit as a key factor in their career.
CBC Radio Drama in Alberta: Featuring Wild Rose Writers
Authors: Boss Allan
Published: June 2023

Tom Stoppard has been credited with saying that the greatest time for radio drama was the year 1936, implying that technological change pushed radio dramas out of the mainstream and into the swamp. More recently, due in part to the advent of podcasting and on-line streaming, shifting audience interests and listening behaviours have forced the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to adapt its programming of radio drama. In 2007, they stopped broadcasting regular, hour-long, stand-alone drama programs; shows like Sunday Showcase and Monday Night Playhouse were replaced by thirty-minute, episodic, limited-run series, broadcast in slots with higher listenerships. Afghanada1, a series about Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, has been particularly successful and an original four-episode commitment has finally reached its conclusion at episode thirty-nine.
No Apologies: Leni Riefenstahl's art and politics in Mieko Ouchi's The Blue Light
Authors: Papoutsis Natalie
Published: June 2023

In the acknowledgements to the published script of The Blue Light, Mieko Ouchi comments on the artist's relationship to her audience, observing that “as artists we will always be judged. By those who are here. By those who come after. By history. By taste. By politics. By hindsight” (6).1 How we judge Leni Riefenstahl is a central concern of Ouchi's play. Riefenstahl filmed Adolf Hitler's Nuremberg rallies (most notably in Triumph of the Will [1935]) and the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Olympia [1938]); yet she denied that these films were politically motivated and refused to take any kind of responsibility (even with the benefit of hindsight) for her role in Hitler's rise. While she is recognized as a cinematic pioneer, even lauded by some as a trail-blazing woman in a male-dominated industry, her work remains inextricably linked to fascist aesthetics and politics.2 Ouchi writes that “Leni Riefenstahl holds a perplexing place in my heart. I look at her with admiration, revulsion, reverence and horror” (“Acknowledgements” 6). The Blue Light does not attempt to reconcile Ouchi's “awe” and her “dismay” at the film-maker's notorious complicity, but it does offer a dynamic representation of the contradictions of Riefenstahl's life (6).3
One Yellow Rabbit's Nostalgic Romp with Fascism: Review of Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp
Authors: Bennett Melanie
Published: June 2023

“Nazis. We love them.” Tony Barta, on Hollywood's fascination with fascism1

Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp kicked off One Yellow Rabbit's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. A dark musical satire, the play follows the travels of Usa (Denise Clarke) and the Colonel (Michael Green), two Nazis whose quest for Hitler's lost offspring leads them to the small community of Eckville, Alberta and to Holocaust denier Jim Keegstra (Andy Curtis). All the performers from the original 1987 production return to the stage, including live musicians, composer David Rhymer and violinist Karl Roth. Writer—director Blake Brooker, together with Rhymer, conceived Ilsa in 1987 as a response to the real-life case of Jim Keegstra, a high school teacher in Eckville, near Red Deer, who was teaching his social studies students that the Holocaust never took place. Keegstra, a former mayor, was stripped of his teaching certificate and charged with promoting hate speech.
Vertical City: Staging Urban Discomfort
Authors: Solga Kim
Published: June 2023

When we set out to “stage” the city, just whose version of the city are we staging? As metropolitan centres around the world adopt the thinking of Richard Florida, the urban-policy’ theorist behind the now-ubiquitous “creative city” paradigm, civic politicians, arts administrators and private investors alike have begun to make the connection among wealth, clout and the power of performance. Thanks to Florida, it should be happy days for theatre artists in “creative” cities everywhere; in practice, things aren't always quite so rosy. In practice, an event like Toronto's high-profile Luminato festival wins $22.5 million in provincial funding, while the Ontario Arts Council, benefactor to hundreds of culture workers around the province, must make do with less than a quarter of that pot (Taylor). Increasingly, “staging” the city means what real estate agents think it means: fluffing the town for the global tourist gaze, getting the façade ready rather than supporting the structural backbone of the place. But with Richard Florida now ensconced at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and his “creative city” the talk of the town, what are the alternatives, in Toronto or beyond?
Accidental Encounters with Big Budget Ambush Art: Slow Dancing at Luminato
Authors: Barton Bruce
Published: June 2023

At the stroke of midnight (or so memory serves) they vanished. As if in a fairy tale, the luminescent princes and princesses disappeared into the dark of night, never to return. Evaporating, just as the evening dew began to settle, their timeless performances surrendered to temporality, their massive presence reduced to the faint, lingering play of shapes on retinae.
(P)re-viewing Projekt Putz - Direct from Berlin, 1986
Authors: Hansen Pil
Published: June 2023

The Putzes de-mystify the German divided-experience. As twins, they suffer (and indeed embody) the heretofore unocknowledgeable undergrowth of east/west collaborationalism. The screams of this divine homunculus articulate an erotic landscape of potential catastrophe. They announce: it is time for something… -qtd. in “Bio,” Projekt Putz’s Press Kit
Target Marketing
Authors: Dempsey Shawna , Millan Lorri
Published: June 2023

A performer steps onto a stage, bare save for a single microphone. She is dressed in black with a white target printed on the chest of her shirt. This target pattern is a replica of the human targets marksmen use to practice shooting. The everywoman manifests her interior monologue – she talks frankly about what’s been bothering; her in a rambling, free-associative way. As she speaks, from time to time, a prop is lowered from the ceiling to her hand. She stops speaking; as the props descend and reascend. The pulleys that move them creak as they move the objects through space. The only props that do not come from above – deus ex machina – are the red buttons which the woman removes from her hip pockets.)
Unruly
Authors: Dempsey Shawna , Millan Lorri
Published: June 2023

The performance begins with a video. It can be accessed online at < http://wwwfingerinthedyke.ca/super-fiminiscmov.html >. It has the look, sound and feel if the opening sequence if a 1970s television series, as if the superhero UNRULY has her own show. The one-and-a-half minute video shows our heroine bending steel with her bare hand; lifting bad guys off their feet, pummeling them, karate-chopping them and knocking their heads together; and generally running and jumping to the rescue. The images described above are intercut with graphics of Batman-style words, such as Zowee! Kerpow! and Super-Duper!)
A Festival by Any Other Name: Eastern Front’s On the Waterfront Festival Goes SuperNova
Authors: Overton David
Published: June 2023

Back when I taught dramaturgy, I always used to spend a class or two talking about character names and how important they were to the way we perceived the characters themselves. Our names are our destinies, I used to say to my students, only half-jokingly. We all have associations with names, likes or dislikes, preconceptions that we have to overcome before we get to know any individual or character. We are programmed to respond to names in our own particular way.
Intercultural Bodies: The Forbidden Phoenix and ANIME in Edmonton
Authors: Frey Heather Fitzsimmons
Published: June 2023

From 2001 to 2008, Edmonton was the site of two very different intercultural theatre projects. The Forbidden Phoenix by Marty Chan and Robert Walsh looked to American musical theatre and traditional Peking Opera for aesthetic inspiration, while ANIME by Keith Wyatt drew from feudal Japan and a contemporary, Japanese, anime version of an apocalyptic near future. In conversations with members of the artistic teams, I learned about their decision to create and their struggles with making story, music and mise-en-scène choices, but what fascinated me the most was how the projects dealt with the performing bodies – the actors.
The Tao of Translation: Interpreting the Life of an Unsung Champion of Canadian Theatre
Authors: Sing Turner Valerie
Published: June 2023

ToyoshiYoshihara. Though he isn’t a household name in Canada, he ought to be – at least among those who value Canadian theatre. Because this slight, retiring Japanese gentleman has literally translated his passion for Canadian plays into a thriving theatre industry in Japan. Case in point: nine of his translations are being produced in Japan in 2009, eight of which are Canadian plays: Anne Chislett’s Another Season’s Promise, Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched and Carole Frechette’s John and Beatrice, all of which are receiving their Japanese premieres; Colin Thomas’s One Thousand Cranes, George F. Walker’s Filthy Rich, Frank Moher’s Odd Jobs and Lee MacDougall’s High Life; and Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations, which, along with Scorched, will be the first Canadian play their Japanese producers have ever programmed. And those are just eight of the forty-three Canadian works he’s translated over the years, along with nineteen British, American, South African and Australian playwrights.
Rising Tide Theatre: Communication and Paradigm
Authors: Turner Mark David
Published: June 2023

Founded in 1978 by Donna Butt and David Ross, Rising Tide Theatre has come to serve as one of the bedrocks of a contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador theatrical tradition. Unlike many of its counterparts, Rising Tide has embedded itself in the province as a cultural institution, responsible for developing and sustaining an infrastructure upon which multiple generations of theatre artists, musician s and an entire community (Trinity) have come to rely. The distinction here is an important one, particularly within the context of this issue of CTR, as, in order to come to some understanding of the company’s communication paradigm, we need to acknowledge and account for the manner in which it has historically come to envision its operations and mandate as something larger than a theatre company – as a locally rooted cultural institution. Ultimately, this mandate and the communication paradigm that arose from it have been shaped in equal parts by the locations of theatrical performance and by audience perceptions of those locations, as they have been by Donna Butt’s goal of helping to establish a professional Newfoundland and Labrador theatrical tradition.
Walterdale Theatre Associates and the In(ter)vention of the Audience
Authors: Whittaker Robin C.
Published: June 2023

On the fifth day of 2009, one year into his position as Globe and Mail theatre critic, J. Kelly Nestruck posed the following question to his online blog: “Are student productions worthy of coverage by the mainstream media?”
The Circus’s New Golden Age
Authors: Bouissac Paul
Published: June 2023

The Cirque du Soleil proclaims on its posters: “We reinvent the circus.” This is certainly true for Canadian audiences, weary of fairground shows, hit-and-run operators and the usual lack of artistry which seemed to be one of the rules of the genre. But, on a world scale, this bold claim must be qualified. The renewal movement started in the Western World during the ’70s, first in Europe, then in the United States. Somewhat earlier, as Cold War tensions were diminishing, the Soviet circus had shown that circus performances need not to be gaudy and vulgar in order to be true to the nomadic arts. Carefully staged programs, aimed at presenting the sunny and smiling face of the socialist system, travelled the world. Large western audiences could admire daring animal and acrobatic acts, beautifully choreographed and accompanied by classical music. Many circus goers, however, protested that this was not the real circus as they fancied it. The often influential clamour of nostalgic circus fans convinced showmen to counter this novelty with a marked return to the turn-of-the-century good old style: sequin shimmers and spangles, brass marches and popular tunes combined more than ever with emphatic rhetoric, popcorn and pink lemonade, as if the circus was to survive only by imitating itself. But the drawback of this strategy is that it overlooked the fact that societies are evolving, tastes are changing, even the whole ethos sometimes shifts to a completely new set of standards and, as a consequence, traditional patterns of performance become obsolete.
1 Celebrating Shadowland
Authors: Gaysek Fred
Published: June 2023

The language is visual, percussively driven, and at any given moment, the overall wallop of the experience is as primary as heated dance. The configuration of images vibrates and dangles. All around, banners and sets and props are paraded. The action flows through the crush of the crowd. The music is ceaseless, and the atmosphere seems to rise up and swallow the very height of the buildings on Toronto’s University Avenue. Even though you know most of those dancing around you, it is almost impossible to recognize them individually, their faces masked, their costumes animated. Yet no matter how exaggerated things get, no matter how intense the colour or out-of-scale the size, the images remain linked to you in gestures of mortality and in the heartbeats of revelry. Large puppets dance above you, and the summer sky frees your heart from all worry. You are celebrating. You are part of the message. You are in the midst of Toronto’s annual Caribana parade. You are a dancing character, thematically costumed by Shadowland.
Le Syndrome de Cézanne, Passer la nuit
Authors: Canac-Marquis Normand , Poissant Claude
Published: June 2023

To mark the tenth anniversary of its founding in 1978 by brothers Francois and Marc el Hebert (and the twentieth anniversary of the journal of the same name], the respected publishing house Les Herbes Rouges has launched a drama collection (“Collection Theatre”], the first two titles of which are here reviewed. The establishment of this series is good news indeed, coming in the wake of the temporary collapse and as yet only partial recovery of Editions Lemeac, so long associated with publishing dramatic texts in Quebec.
Sortie de secours Petit à Petit
Authors: Theodore Dennie , Day Moira
Published: June 2023

The thematic and stylistic sophistication of theatre for young audiences has increased dramatically over the last decade, reflecting the fact that childhood has become an increasingly complex and prolonged rite of passage, beset with dangers undreamed of by the Beaver Cleavers of the Fifties.
What’s New about Newhouse? / 1: The Words Are Too Important
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Necessary Angel’s Newhouse is a significant departure from the norm of political theatre in Canada. Its treatment of AIDS removes the issue from the politics of personal relationships and medical treatment and places it in the arena of public social policy. The text projects a near-future society in which an unnamed sexual plague has reached epidemic proportions. The controversy becomes the focus of an election campaign in which the audience assumes the role of the mass electorate. The performance strategy of the play recaptures the public voice of classic tragedy, in which private scenes take place in public spaces. The audience’s experience of the tragedy is mediated by the constant presence of the mass media, who follow the leaders in scrums and televise the scenes onto the banks of monitors that surround the playing space. The essentially medieval configuration of the space allows the audience to move from platform to platform, and brings the action to the floor as actors cross the arena.
John Hirsch 1930-1989 A Remembrance
Authors: Hendry Tom
Published: June 2023

Janos Stefan Hirsch, to give him his correct Hungarian name, died on August 1, 1989. Too short a time has passed to enable the profession to grasp the full extent of the grievous loss we have sustained. He left us at the height of his powers. Realizing this, one is at once saddened and cheered, reminded of Prospero, one of John’s favourite characters.
Two Solitudes: A Bilingual Romeo & Juliette in Saskatoon
Authors: McCall Gordon
Published: June 2023

In July 1988, Nightcap Productions was completing its fourth successful season of our Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival. Our production of The Taming of the Shrew was playing to sold-out houses on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River in downtown Saskatoon. Throughout the first four years of our history, we had managed to attract a large and loyal following – not just from our community, but from other parts of Canada and a number of American states – for our uniquely Saskatoon versions of the Bard’s great works. During this time, we had also had the good fortune to receive critical acclaim while remaining financially “in the black.”
Winnipeg Publishing Confessions
Authors: Shillingford Gordon
Published: June 2023

In the fall of 1987, two English Literature students at the University of Winnipeg, across Portage Avenue from their classes, in the basement of the Union Centre Building, in the Union bar, decided that there existed a serious dearth of Canadian plays in print. And as can happen so often when momentous realizations occur between rounds, a momentous decision followed.
The Neptune Story
Authors: Perkyns Richard , Brunner Astrid
Published: June 2023

Richard Perkyn’s 25-year history of Halifax’s Neptune Theatre and its eight artistic directors is thoroughly researched, lavishly illustrated with black and white photographs, badly bound, and timidly written. Perkyns is an orderly, well-disciplined scholar, but not the emcee for Neptune’s birthday celebrations. One comparative glance at Harry Bruce’s Happy Birthday, Dear Neptune, written fifteen years ago to celebrate the theatre’s 10th, will confirm this observation.
The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre
Authors: Banham Martin , Rubin Don
Published: June 2023

A rose may certainly be a rose by any other name but what precisely, I’ve been wondering of late, makes a Guide a Guide? or a Companion a Companion? Or an Encyclopedia an Encyclopedia?
Surviving the Nineties: Who’s Going to Pay?
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

This issue was originally planned as a nuts-and-bolts look at the administrative techniques that Canadian theatres are evolving to carry them through the next decade. Very quickly it turned into something else.

The recurring theme through this issue is the ominous funding climate, made even more threatening by the Free Trade Agreement and the Goods and Services Tax. To this CTR can add our own apprehension: the federal government’s recent move to eliminate postal subsidies for Canadian magazines threatens the survival of small-circulation periodicals. These issues are not trivial. For cultural organizations on marginal budgets (that is to say, most of them), the government’s cost-cutting measures raise the spectre of unprecedented crisis.
(Re)Appropriation as Translation
Authors: Godard Barbara
Published: June 2023

To describe adaptation as a mode of transformation is not surprising in light of its standard definition, “to modify, alter.”1 To categorize it as translation is more problematic, however, given the common understanding of translation as a process of copying that results in an isomorphic text in a second language. Indeed, the semantic field of the term “translation,” which stems from the Latin translatare, or metaphor, foregrounding its hermeneutic activity, highlights the focus on the identity of meaning in two texts in that it primarily connotes the circulation of translinguistic contexts conceived as separate from the language in which they have been expressed, language being understood as a pure translative medium. Such a poetics of transparency or equivalency maintains that a message may be transferred from one language into another so that the meaning of the message is preserved and there is an identity of content on the two texts: “La traduction consiste à produire dans la langue d’arrivée, l’équivalent naturel le plus proche du message de la langue de départ, quant à la signification, puis quant au style.”2 There is perceived to be an isomorphism between the two texts, a complete parallelism of content and expression, of meaning and sound IMounin 97). Such a translation is characterized by the way in which cultural traces and self-reflexive elements are eliminated from the text so that the translated text is dehistoricized, detached from its foundation in events. The elimination of self-reflexive elements results in the suppression of signs of the author-function and also of the translator-function since her manipulative work on these elements is rendered invisible in the resulting conflation of the two texts to the profit of the “original.” In this imbrication of texts and signs, translation is conceptualized as a signified with several signifiers (Se/Sal, Sa2) along the lines of the complex signs of irony and metaphor.3 By extension, such a theory understands meaning to be unitary and recoverable.
Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots
Authors: Mojica Monique
Published: June 2023

Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots was developed through grants from the Canada Council and the Toronto Arts Council. It was originally workshopped by Nightwood Theatre in a co-production with Native Earth Performing Arts in May 1989, and was read at the Weesageechak Festival of New Work by Native Playwrights in the Backspace of Theatre Passe Muraille in June 1989. A workshop was seen at the Groundswell Festival of New Work by Women produced by Nightwood Theatre in November 1989 and received a full production in the Backspace February 9 to March 4, 1990.
Toronto The Tarragon and the Doras: a Perfect Match?
Authors: Goldie Terry
Published: June 2023

The list of the nominees for the Dora Mavor Moore Awards provides an interesting comment on the way theatre has gone in Toronto. The Doras’ “small theatre division” makes some of the old alternatives seem very established. Given the Toronto Free’s transformation into the Canadian Stage they no doubt deserve it, but I get slight pangs to see Theatre Passe Muraille and Tarragon treated this way. Are they really “the big”?
McClure; The Dressing Gown; The Rez Sisters
Authors: Scott Mumoe , Gilbert Sky , Highway Tomson , Peel William
Published: June 2023

Taken together, these three plays inspire reflection on the wide-ranging diversity of the modern Canadian landscape of experience. Monroe Scott’s one-hander McClure is an exercise in Canadian hero-making, Sky Gilbert’s The Dressing Gown explores various ins-and-outs of the Toronto gay scene, and Tomson Highway’s Dora Mavor Moore Award-winning The Rez Sisters provides a spirited portrayal of a group of Canadian native women caught between a marginalized existence and their dream of escape.
Alberta Voices / 2, Alternative Vision and the True Nature of Change
Authors: Johnson Lise Ann
Published: June 2023

Media influence perception. We understand our world through the way we present it and the way it is presented to us. Any cultural medium has the potential to shape our vision of how things are or how things should be. Our understanding of power, for example, and how power is acquired and distributed in our society, is influenced by how we depict it on television, in theatre, and in song. Mainstream culture, which relies heavily on “believable” forms like gritty realism, tells us that “the ability to produce an effect” is accessed through wealth. As televisions imagine it, those with money have power. In tracing the shape of society, power is located at the centre, and absence of power in the margins. The centre does not desire change and the margins are unable to change. If this were true, Ruth Smillie would have to penetrate the centre to acquire power. But she hasn’t. Currently the artistic director of Catalyst Theatre in Edmonton, Smillie has remained, throughout her career, in the margins, living in Western Canada and focusing on social action theatre and theatre for young audiences. Her career shows both her commitment to the margins and her use of language and theatre to change perception. “I need to present an alternative view or an alternative vision. Thematically, that is why I write.” Smillie reveals the margins as able to change and the mainstream as needing change. It is through theatre that she acquires an “ability to act.”
Peter Hinton’s Baroque Hints
Authors: Mirzoev Vladimir , Vitkin Marina
Published: June 2023

1 I have heard more than once how important, how simply indispensable, it is to create a “national Canadian theatre.” And each time I have felt uneasy. Because theatre in the modern global village cannot but be part of the world cultural process, Canadian culture does not have the option of becoming “national” by entering complete self-isolation, as did, for example, mediaeval China and Japan, and then for centuries painstakingly developing its canon of national art.
New Wave Clowns / 3: A Collective Tribute Richard Pochinko 1946 – 1989
Authors: Cashman Cheryl
Published: June 2023

Richard Pochinko was raised on a farm in Lockport, Manitoba, the youngest of three brothers and two sisters. His father died when he was eight months old. His mother and his eldest brother and sister maintained the household. It was as if he had two mothers. When he was a child, he would go in the barn and make miniature stages and circuses, and fill them with tiny actors and performers.
Politic Reflections on L’Affaire Tartuffe
Authors: Lieblein Leonore
Published: June 2023

L’Affaire Tartuffe, though conceived several years ago, was revised and performed in post-Meech Lake Quebec. As Iwrite this, the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future (the Spicer Commission) is planning to travel across the country, and the hearings of the Bela nger-Campeau Commission on the future of Quebec are in full swing. In the circumstances, it is hard to think of a more timely script than L’Affaire Tartuffe, which imagines the encounter of French and English cultures at a founding moment in Quebec history. All the ingredi ents are there: langu age, of course, and independence; individual and collective rights, even the influence of the Americans. Hen ce I was surprised when my intermediate-level students at McGill (who on the whole enjoyed the Centaur Theat re production I agreed with each other that the play was not “political,” just as I was surprised to learn that Mar ianne Ackerm an and Clare Schapiro, founding co-artistic directors of THEATRE 1774 have repeatedly claimed of their company: “This company is not a political act” (Bell).
Honour Dance for Rene Highway: Voices of his colleagues
Authors: Mojica Monique
Published: June 2023

By the time this issue of CTR is on the news stands, it will be nearly one year since Rene Highway passed into the Spirit World. In many of the Native traditions, this is when the spirit is released; when those of us on the earth come together, acknowledge this person who has left us, and no longer mourn.
In the Mother Tongue: Issues of Language and Voice
Authors: Merasty Billy , Mojica Monique
Published: June 2023

Why is it that we (Native performers) have had to create our own voice? When a Native artist creates a piece of work in English we are already speaking with a different voice, so when we are working in the Native languages aren’t we really talking about a double different voice?
Almighty Voice and His Wife: A play in Two Acts
Authors: Moses Daniel David
Published: June 2023

A nation is not defeated till the hearts of its women are on the ground. Cheyenne saying Almighty Voice and His Wife received a workshop reading at the Banff Playwrights Colony in May 1990. Almighty Voice / Morris Panych White Girl / Christine MacInnes Dramaturge / Kim McCaw
Collaborators
Authors: Hollingsworth Margaret
Published: June 2023

In 1985 I wrote an article for this journal entitled “Why We Don’t Write” in which I looked at some of the reasons for the underrepresentation of women’s work in the dramatic repertoire. The situation has not changed a great deal in this country since I wrote the article; it has, if anything, worsened, although a few women have achieved prominence, and their plays are widely produced, thus swelling the percentages of productions in what would, otherwise, be a very dismal scene. At a recent meeting of the Women’s Caucus of the Playwrights’ Union, it was decided to take yet another survey of the situation across the country, in the hope that the figures might give ammunition to begin to redress the balance. Statistics didn’t help much in 1983 when Rina Fraticelli produced her report on the status of women in Canadian theatre, and we were doubtful that they would help now; however, those present at the meeting were at a loss to know what more they could do. This led me to think that we really don’t have an understanding of the dynamics of present-day theatre in Canada. All the women present agreed that they were writing plays and feeling frustrated that they were not produced; or, if they were, that they rarely generate more than one production. None of us was able to come up with an analysis of exactly what is going wrong. Is it that audiences are not interested? There’s no evidence that women’s plays are less well attended than those written by men. Is it quality, as the artistic directors contend? We’ve heard the argument that quality is the eye of the arbiter, and that when men are the arbiters, they bring their own values and prejudices to deciding what measures up. While this is certainly true, I want to play devil’s advocate and suggest that the men may be right; perhaps women’s plays are qualitatively not as good as those written by men. If this is the case, what is the reason?
Writing in Turmoil: An Interview with Nina Sadur
Authors: Much Rita
Published: June 2023

Nina Sadur was born in 1950 in Novosibirsk in Siberia. She graduated from the Institute of Literature in Moscow in 1983 and is the author of numerous poems and short stories, as well as several novels. Her published plays include Let’s Go, The Wolf of the Moon and The Bastard. Ms Sadur was in Toronto in May of 1991 to attend the Second International Women Playwrights Conference.
“Disattending the Play”: Framing and Frame Breaking
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: June 2023

The role of framing devices – some conscious scenographic decisions; some incidental to the time and place of the play’s writing or staging; some implicit in the art form itself – seems central to the theatre. Because theatre presents spectacle at some remove from its spectators, it is naturally “framed” spatially and ceremonially, but the notion of framing as part of the semiotic coding of performance and as the skeleton on which many other codes rest is somewhat more involved. Indeed, because drama is a literary form, complex linguistic framing devices function in all dialogue, establishing lexiconic and syntactical markers to direct the auditors, but also placing subtle cultural parameters on the utterance, introducing allusions and figures which open the frame to larger implications (thereby including or excluding categories of spectators), coding the sjuzet with limiting signs which direct the audience’s interpretation beyond plot, initiating hermeneutic and semic codes, establishing or evading literary patterns, and so on. But as drama is more than a literary form, non-linguistic framing devices function equally (or perhaps more) importantly to establish that a particular art form is being viewed, that the action is, indeed, mimetic rather than “real”, that it is theatrical within certain known conventions of the stage and day, that it allows certain sets of social, religious and cultural intertexts and that it denies others. A scenographic approach recognizes the necessary interrelationship between these two orders of frames and also recognizes that the drama takes place before people in an auditorium.
Scenography: Stage Magic and Visual Poetry
Authors: Perina Peter
Published: June 2023

There are very few words in the theatrical language which can arouse so many mixed and often passionate reactions as the word “scenography”. Yet the problem is clearly not the word itself, but what it may mean. To me the word, or what it means in different parts of the theatre world, is unimportant. The important thing is the quest for responsible theatre. Still, it may alleviate some of the stigma associated with the word to look at its meaning. Let’s first address it historically.
VideoCabaret and the Subversion of “Scenography”
Authors: White Michèle
Published: June 2023

A basic working definition of Video-Cabaret International, the brainchild of Deanne Taylor, Michael Hollingsworth, and company, might be that it marries elements of high-tech minimalism with theatrical extravaganza within a poverty aesthetic that says “we find it on the streets”.
The History Cycle: The Parodic Seen / The Parodic Scene
Authors: White Michèle
Published: June 2023

For playwright Michael Hollingsworth history is a visual experience. He attributes the genesis of his multi-part play cycle The History of the Village of the Small Huts to a single still image, the photo of the Queen handing Canada’s patriated constitution to Prime Minister Trudeau in 1982. In Hollingsworth’s view, it is the moment when Canada acquired nation status.
Fair Play: 12 Women Speak, Conversations with Canadian Playwrights
Authors: Rudakoff Judith , Much Rita , Drennan Barbara
Published: June 2023

The blurb on the back cover of Fair Play indicates that, notwithstanding the range of differences (regional, stylistic, career) which delineate Canadian playwrights, the essential questions this text seek to answer are: What is the nature of play-writing? Feminism? Canadian identity and culture? These are extremely serious questions given today’s cultural climate: obviously, Judith Rudakoff and Rita Much were not contemplating a light-hearted lark when they developed this project. Consequently, as reader I approached this collection of interviews with the reverence of a silent servant at an imposing, well-planned dinner party.
The Designer’s Process / 1: De/Sign/ificant Assumptions
Authors: Watts Allan
Published: June 2023

In the early years of my career I was frequently surprised and, to be honest, a little hurt by the response I often received upon acknowledging that I was a theatrical designer. “Oh yea, you’re the guy who paints the scenery, right? You work behind the stage. It must be fun. What do you do during the day?” Often my replies were silly, self-important, and defensive. Occasionally I would launch into lofty explanations of script analysis, the importance of the plasticity of theatrical space for the designer, or some other contextually inappropriate dictum. When the eyes of those listening to my diatribe glazed over, I knew I had confirmed their initial suspicion – that I really was a crazed aesthete with an over-active imagination who had probably failed to get a part in the play and had been told he could paint the scenery instead. I soon learned to smile benignly and mumble something affirmative but noncommittal.
Whale Riding Weather
Authors: MacDonald Bryden
Published: June 2023

Caution: © 1992 by Bryden MacDonald. 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. Change to the script is expressly forbidden without the written consent of Bryden MacDonald. Rights to produce, film, or record, in whole or in part, in any medium, in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by Bryden MacDonald. Interested persons are requested to apply for permission and terms to Christopher Banks & Associates Inc., 219 Dufferin Street, Suite 305, Toronto, Ontario M6K 1Y9.
Toronto Donny Does Joseph
Authors: Snyder Liz
Published: June 2023

When I was seven, I fantasized that Donny Osmond would drive to my home in a red MG convertible in the middle of the night and whisk me away in my bouffant hairdo, pink chiffon dress and white high heels for a romantic midnight wedding. I now realize that Donny Osmond is not that much older than me and wouldn’t have been able to drive at the time but the fact is, Donny was an escape. He was my knight in shining armour: my hero.
Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800-1914
Authors: Saddlemyer Ann , Ripley John
Published: June 2023

Early Stages, the eighth theme study in The Ontario Historical Studies Series, explores in six thoughtful essays the evolution of Ontario theatre from 1800 to 1914. Historian J.M.S. Careless sets the stage with a background study titled “The Cultural Setting: Ontario Society to 1914”, in which he analyses the role played by “the growth of settlement, the rise of towns and cities, constant improvements in communications by land and water, and the sweep of technological advance”, all of which created the conditions which made theatrical activity viable. Leslie O’Dell chronicles the activities of the regimental theatrical troupes which, between 1815 and 1870, provided the garrison towns of Kingston, London, and Toronto with a major source of entertainment. Robertson Davies surveys the theatrical menu offered audiences, reminding us that “the hopes and the fears and the unfocused terrors of our forebears show through the lace curtains of their plays as they do not always show through their novels or their poetry”. In upholstered productions of Shakespeare, costume dramas, melodramas, comedies old and new, farces, and operas grand, light, and bouffe, Ontario entertainment proclaimed at once its bourgeois prejudices and its kinship with the age. The bulk of theatrical performances were provided by touring companies, and Mary M. Brown casts a knowledgeable eye over the circuits, proprietors of local theatres, itinerant actor-managers, and the stars, native and foreign, who were at the heart of the system. Gerald Lenton-Young, in a remarkably well-researched and informative piece, ventures into the neglected field of variety, which, in the early decades of this century, serviced in Toronto an audience five times larger than that of the legitimate theatre (183,000 weekly capacity as compared with the legitimate theatre’s 35,000). His account of the puppet shows, panoramas, menageries and circuses, minstrel acts, dime museums, burlesque and, latterly, vaudeville extravaganzas offers a welcome antidote to the pervasive overemphasis by historians on Canada’s legitimate theatre. The volume’s final study, Robert Fairfield’s record of Ontario’s major theatres and performance halls over a 140-year period, is statistically satisfying, yet wonderfully readable. We come away with a solid sense of construction costs, architectural styles, the size and seating arrangements of auditoria, the depth, breadth, and height of stage areas. Even sanitary facilities (or, more often, the lack of them) are not overlooked.
Crow Made the World
Authors: Yashinsky Dan
Published: June 2023

So said my friend Angela Sidney, a Tagish woman living in the Yukon. She was 89 years old the last time I visited her. We spent a weekend side by side (“Don’t tell your wife!” she teased), on the occasion of the fourth Northern Storytelling Festival. We sipped tea in a friend’s house, or sat by the river in Whitehorse – and I listened as she recreated the creation of the world.
Jerusalem The Israel Festival, 1992
Authors: Ajzenstadt Michael
Published: June 2023

There was not much straightforward theatre in the 1992 Israel Festival, Jerusalem, which took place last spring in the country’s capital. And in a way theatrical influences were more prominent in dance and opera than in a rather disappointing theatre bill. Festival director Omry Nitzan, a theatre director himself, selected companies from Israel, Romania, Germany, France, Hungary, and Canada for last year’s event which was on a rather small scale compared to past events.
A Bran Nue Dae for Australian Theatre?
Authors: Emeljanow Victor
Published: June 2023

In 1988 the bicentennial of Australia served to focus world attention on the fact that a country once regarded as a refuge and a refuse heap had survived 200 years and had something to say. It also served to focus the attention of Australians upon themselves and to invite them to assess not only where they had been or what they were but also what they are and what they might become. The scrutiny was at the time and still is an uncomfortable one. It has revealed that the Anglo-Celtic cultural base is being rapidly eroded, that multiculturalism is demonstrating the inappropriateness of accepted critical traditions (though they are fighting an obstinate rearguard action), that the energy of the Australian theatre is being provided by the marginalized and the outsiders just as Australian financial energy is being provided by the Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Japanese.
The Black Hole of Our History: A Conversation with Louis Nowra
Authors: Makeham Paul
Published: June 2023

With plays such as Inner Voices, Inside the Island, and The Golden Age, Louis Nowra has established a reputation as one of Australia’s foremost playwrights. Part of the generation which succeeded the “newie” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Louis is known for a stylistic inventiveness which places him outside the tradition of realistic playwriting in Australia. The international outlook of his plays, the fact that he is not preoccupied with Australian settings and subject matter, has often been a focal point of critical accounts of his work. As well as his own plays, he has written adaptations and translations for the stage, and scripts for radio, TV and film. He is the author of two novels. In the early 1980s, together with Jim Sharman and Neil Armfield, Louis was Associate Director of Lighthouse, the State Theatre Company of South Australia. The experimental work undertaken by this ensemble produced some of the most innovative theatre seen in Australia in the 1980s. He recently performed in one of his own plays, Summer of the Aliens, for the Melbourne Theatre Company. This is an edited version of an interview recorded for CTR in Sydney on 22 April 1992.
Arabian Nights – Part 2
Authors: Petch Steve
Published: June 2023

The Arabian Nights is among the best known and least known of the world’s great classics. We’ve all heard of it, and may even remember a tale or two from our childhood story books (“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, or “Aladdin”). But the unabridged, unexpurgated 1001 Nights is a massive work: a dozen volumes, thousands of pages. Not a quick or an easy read. Also, the stories it contains were meant to be performed by a professional storyteller; like most performance literature, they can seem pretty lifeless when pinned to the page.
Le Dernier Délire permis, Considérations sur l’alcool et la ponctualité
Authors: Messier Jean-Frédéric , Gingras Pierre , Ruprecht Alvina
Published: June 2023

Le Dernier Délire permis can be found in the collection “Théâtre”, a new series devoted to experimental texts by young playwrights published by “Les Herbes rouges”. The founding editor of the series, theatre critic Gilbert David, was succeeded in 1991 by Paul Lefebvre, artistic director of the Salle Fred-Barry, one of the most important experimental theatre spaces in Montreal. The play by Pierre Gingras is also published by Les Herbes rouges and it appears in a special issue of their literary journal of the same name.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood (North); or The Trials of the Oppositional Director
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

The politicized director in Canada is faced with many hurdles. This is particularly true of a director who not only wants to change what people think, but to make it possible to think in different ways, to have an impact on the forms and structures through which thought and meaning are produced and by which the possibilities of thought are circumscribed. In spite of the popular impression, itself ideologically coded, that we live in an age of “director’s theatre”, in which directorial concepts serve as the central and determining principles around which all other aspects of theatrical production revolve, it quickly becomes apparent in practice that the ways in which a particular theatrical production communicates meaning, together with the meanings it communicates, are often predetermined or contained by the training, rehearsal processes, traditional wisdoms, and organizational and funding structures within which it operates.
Radical (Self-) Direction and the Body: Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s Performance Art
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: June 2023

In the traditional hierarchy of theatrical production, the director functions as a medium through which the textual body comes to exist on and by the physical body of the performer. As “the afterimage of processes set in motion” during rehearsal, performance includes the invisible presence of the director (Letzler Cole 2).1 It is also the apparatus which affords real, live – that is, visibly present – bodies (the audience) the privilege to gaze at the embodied text, to read, decode, and judge its possible meanings. Wherever we might locate ourselves (our bodies) in this creative process, we are almost certainly unable to control all its bodies or all its meanings (actual and potential). But, as Susan Bordo reminds us, the body is “a medium of culture” (13) and cultures insist, in protection of their own vested interests, that, as such, the body – with its very particular powers to mean – be monitored and controlled. As Michel Foucault has persuasively argued, control is produced by a discipline which “increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (History of Sexuality 138). Since the act of performance is also an act of desire (for, among other things, a willing and collective body identified as audience), cultures have, throughout history, been vigilant as to how such desire can be staged and how its performing bodies might be contained within a matrix of economic utility and political obedience. The traditional hierarchy of theatrical production is one such manoeuvre and the director has, in the twentieth century at least, been afforded the authority of surveillance. What Foucault calls the “panoptic modality of power” operates in the discipline/production of theatre as the director’s prerogative (Discipline and Punish 221).