bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
WANTED in Whitehorser: An Interview with Playwright Sally Clark
Authors: Whittaker Robin
Published: June 2023

WANTED, by Sally Clark, premiered at Nakai Theatre (Whitehorse, Yukon) 26 March 2003, directed by Michael Clark. It then toured Watson Lake, Mayo and its historical setting of Dawson City.
Where We Are Now: Festival de théâtre des Amériques, 2003
Authors: Sidnell Michael J.
Published: June 2023

Making its début in 1985 and continuing in alternate years, the Festival de théâtre des Amériques (FTA) was held for the tenth time in 2003. Under the direction of Marie-Hélène Falcon from the beginning, its achievements have been remarkably consistent: It has regularly brought to Montreal outstanding avant-garde directors and productions; it has included openings of some of the most renowned theatre from Quebec, including FTA co-productions and important new plays; and it has deployed not only established theatres and new ones but all manner of playing spaces, indoors and out. Falcon’s canny choices have amounted to an acute sense both of trajectories in the theatre and of the historic moments that its performers and audiences have found themselves in, socially and politically. For twenty years, the FTA has been a strategic seeing-place from which to survey our certitudes, expectations, apprehensions and ideas of community and commonality, our alliances and oppositions
Honouring the Word
Authors: Mandiela Ahdri Zhina , Sealy-Smith Alison , Sears Djanet
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright for this script remains with its creators, and copyright for the individual scenes remains with the playwrights who are identified as authors; in the case of material where publishers acquired rights, those rights remain with the publishers. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes are forbidden without the written consent of the creators/author(s)/publishers). Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the creators/author(s)/publisher(s). The moral right of the creators/author(s)/publisher(s) has been asserted. For performance rights contact the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada. All previously published material is reprinted here with permission. The plays were first published by Sister Vision Press (dark diaspora . . . in dub); Scirocco (Riot, Harlem Duet); Talon, for Blizzard (Consecrated Ground); Playwrights Canada Press (Angélique, yagayah, Prodigals in a Promised Land, da Kink in my hair, Sistahs, Whylah Falls); Mercury Press (Coups and Calypsos); and Gutter Press (Lambton Kent).
Black Theatre Aesthetics
Authors: Harrison Paul Carter
Published: June 2023

In the most simplistic appreciation of culture, it is possible to think of aesthetics as the opposite of anaesthetic; the former experience turns one on, while the latter turns one off. A culturally specific experience discerned as “groovy” in one culture may not find a groove in another culture.
Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd
Authors: Clarke George Elliott
Published: June 2023

Nationalism and fascism begin at home and take their sustenance from the family undergoing a crisis, particularly one of identity. Given the brutal tragedy of the four-century-long African slave trade (with its bloodily efficient exploitation, sexual and economic, plus often liquidation, of its human capital), its diasporic survivors, especially intellectuals and artists, focus necessarily on the situation – read plight – of the Black family. Certes, the nouns family, identity, and crisis are virtual synonyms in the literature of the African Atlantic, a cultural geography that includes Canada (as much as it does the better-known ‘Neo-African’ spaces of the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and Western Europe). Of course, a signal balm for these familial identity crises involves the efficacy – and risks – of cultural nationalism. Thus, two dramas by African-Nova Scotian – or Africadian—— playwright George Elroy Boyd depict Black familial strife that provokes acts congruent with nationalism – and fascism. Boyd’s teleplay Consecrated Ground (1983, 1996) relates the struggle of a Black woman, Clarice, to bury her dead infant son in Black community space, despite the objections of a white-controlled metropolis. His play, Gideon’s Blues (1996), narrates the events that prod a Black mother to murder her adult son and only child. Boyd examines the African-Canadian family and its race, class and gender issues, to excavate the tensions between an attractively protective cultural nationalism and a sorrowfully deranging, self-destructive fascism.
Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, Volumes 1 and 2
Authors: Elam Harry J.
Published: June 2023

Djanet Sears’s Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, volumes 1 and 2, proudly proclaims the viability and variability of African Canadian drama. While Sears, in her introduction to volume 1, praises the resiliency of African Canadian theatrical production, she also remarks on the poor funding available at present for contemporary Black theatre companies and the limited recognition that African Canadian drama has garnered within the annals of Canadian theatre history. To rectify this absence, Sears has collected ten plays in volume 1 and nine additional plays in volume 2 – plays by a total, in the two volumes together, of some twenty different playwrights. (Some of the works are co-written, and three playwrights, including Sears, appear in both volumes.) Together, these works boldly announce the diversity of contemporary African Canadian drama in form and content. These nineteen plays speak imaginatively to the multiple ways that Blackness and African Canadian identity have been constructed and repeatedly reconstructed in Canada, past and present.
This Ain’t No Time for Innocence: Québécité,
Authors: McNeilly Kevin
Published: June 2023

Aside from producers and performers, I was one of the few people able to attend both stagings of Québécité, a jazz opera composed by Ottawa native (now New York-based) D.D. Jackson, with a libretto by Governor General’s Award-winning poet George Elliott Clarke. The premiere at Guelph’s River Run Centre on 5 September 2003 was the main event of the tenth Guelph International Jazz Festival, for which it was commissioned. This performance was recorded by the CBC, which has broadcast portions of it several times over the past few months. The opera was mounted again in Vancouver for two nights in October at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, a much more intimate venue. A comparison of this scaled-down performance with the grandiose version at Guelph – a remarkable and significant contrast, despite their obvious continuities – points up the demands of form and scale in this emergent musical genre. Jazz opera – with few, but powerful, antecedents in such works as Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha; Duke Ellington’s suite Black, Brown and Beige; and Wynton Marsalis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields – can mix volatile improvisation and recalcitrant narrative, a blur of freedom and stricture, to create what Clarke, in the libretto’s prelude, names “rhetorical ambition,” a phrase I take to suggest the reach of words and music beautifully, and sometimes perilously, exceeding their grasp: the jut and leap of extemporizing across well-heeled verbal and melodic lines.
The Dramaturgy of Stage Management: A Constructed Conversation
Authors: Campbell Naomi , Janssen Shauna , Robichaud J.P.
Published: June 2023

I brought three of Toronto’s seasoned stage managers together, at the 2003 Mini-Conference on Dramaturgy, to discuss their dramaturgical contribution to the rehearsal process. The conversation was eye opening to many of the conference participants, some of whom (new and established alike) admitted to never having thought of the stage manager as a creative partner. During the conference session, Naomi Campbell, Shauna Janssen and J.P. Robichaud spoke eloquently about the myriad ways they contribute, far beyond setting schedules, corralling personnel and running shows. It was a potent reminder of how valuable the stage manager can be, particularly on new work Naomi, for instance, was so central to my production of Jason Sherman’s Reading Hebron that I insisted she be credited as the Assistant Director, in addition to her work as the stage manager. Casting your stage manager can be as vital as any other artistic choice. Here are further thoughts, culled from an extended e-mail conversation among the three artists.
Creating the Form: Rule Plays and Svengali’s
Authors: Bettis Paul
Published: June 2023

Rule Plays were developed, by myself, as a way of creating original theatrical entertainments. And – over rather more than thirty years – they have become, I suppose, a personal method of playmaking. They are not the only thing I do; but they are a favourite professional pursuit.
Spektator
Authors: Su-Feh Lee , Mcintosh David
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Lee Su-Feh and David Mcintosh. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For performance rights contact the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
“Into the Darkness of the Stage”: Epic and Ghost Hitlers
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Is this the face that launched the master-race And burned the topless towers of Rotterdam? Why, it’s a face like any other face Among a sea of faces in a mob – A peasant’s face, an agent’s face, no face At all, no face but vegetarian blob! A.M. Klein, The Hitleriad (6)
The Matka King
Authors: Irani Anosh
Published: June 2023

Copyright Anosh Irani. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film, or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For performance rights, contact The Bukowski Agency, 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202, Toronto, ON, M5R 1A9.
Little Reckonings in Great Rooms
Authors: Duchesne Scott
Published: June 2023

In her review of Sasha Cagen’s Quirkyalone: A Manifestofor Uncompromising Romantics for the Toronto Star, poet, novelist and cultural journalist Lynn Crosbie concludes that reading Cagen’s textbook for ind ependent and “cheerful oddballs” is “a slightly creep y experience, comparable to pouring over the folkwa ys of Klingons” (D12). This apparently peculiar connection seems to represent a broader consensu s regarding the activities of not only those who identify as Klingons, but those who move in the same world as them. For example, Crosbie’s glib depiction shares many similarities with the approach director Roger Nygard takes in his 1997 documentary Trekkies, in which a procession of quirky and cheerful “oddballs” enthusiastically expound on their devotion to Star Trek. Where Crosbie obviously intends to be derogatory, however, Nygard aims to foreground the notion that Trekkies are comfortable with, and even proud of, their oddball status.1 despite a lack of understanding, or even contempt, from “mundanes.”2
Enacting This Is for You, Anna
Authors: Scott Shelley
Published: June 2023

In the spring of 2004, I had the opportunity to direct a student production of the play This Is for You, Anna at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. The play was done in our black box theatre with seating for about 200, as part of Theatrextra, a “second season” of plays intended to offer smaller or more “experimental” shows. In this article, I will consider how the play attempts to re-enact the circumstances and context of a real-life crime in a non-realistic, yet evocative, manner. I will also consider the fact that to perform This Is for You, Anna is, to an unusual degree, to re-enact the history of the play’s creation through collective process. Finally, I will comment on the effectiveness of enactment as a tool of feminist pedagogy with student actors.
Laura Nanni’s Automatic Tourist 2004
Authors: Shaver Andrew
Published: June 2023

Maybe it’s the nature of the beast: As a middle-class institution, tourism generally resists posing any real challenges to its clientele. After all, the point of travelling is to escape from work, isn’t it?
Using the Arts as a Tool for Healing, Self-Discovery, Empowerment and Catharsis
Authors: McCarthy S. Siobhan
Published: June 2023

The absolut theatre company was founded in 1997 by Managing Artistic Director / Producer S. Siobhan McCarthy and became a registered not-for-profit society in 2003. The mandate of the absolut theatre company is

To write, workshop and/or produce original Canadian scripts. To create: educational, political, bizarre environmental performance theatre in various key locations throughout the Lower Mainland and beyond, so that we may highlight our Canadian identity. To provide skills and opportunities for women and youth within the industry. To share cross-cultural learning and insight with schools and to the community at large through workshops, discussions and presentations and to collaborate with like-minded artists and organizations whenever possible. (absolut theatre)
Renegotiating Space in Canadian Theatre: A Review of Three New Play Anthologies
Authors: Bickis Heidi , Moira Day , Yvette Nolan , Andy McKim
Published: June 2023

The notion of space is one with which the theatre is always engaged, whether it be the concrete space of the stage and performance venue, the more abstract space of time and history, the imaginary space of a community or character’s mind, or even the space around which social and theatrical boundaries are established and broken. Ultimately, space finds itself part of the discussion and analysis of the conditions in which Canadian theatre artists work and significantly informs the theatre produced. The theme of space is useful in this review of three new anthologies, Yvette Nolan’s revised edition of Beyond the Pale, Moira Day’s The West of All Possible Worlds and Andy McKim’s compilation of shorts from Tarragon Theatre, Snappy Shorts at Tarragon Theatre, each of which focuses on different Canadian theatrical spaces: work by First Nations writers and writers of colour (work that inhabits the space beyond established boundaries), Western Canadian theatre and Andy Mckim’s office at the Tarragon Theatre, respectively. In addition to highlighting the work of playwrights across the country, each anthology also draws attention to the reality of working conditions for Canadian theatre artists, whether through the plays’ subject material, the use of alternative venues for performance or the development of new formats in which plays are created and performed.
Dance and the Rodeo: Partners at the Party
Authors: Doolittle Lisa
Published: June 2023

A man, submerged in deep blue light. Shoulders as if rippling through a heavy current. He upends, cool-like water pouring, street moves in slow motion. In the midst of a tangle of swiftly passing dancers, one leaps backwards and we just catch at the top of the leap her shaking, trembling joy. Something animal in the air. Luminescent tensile red threads connect dancers mouth to mouth across the space. They can’t possibly be counting this music, but two dancers drop to floor and in sudden synchrony shapeshft together. Men toss themselves through space; women slide over their shoulders like friendly fishes passing in a school. When one stops (Did they ever really pause? They must have because of the sense of calm and lightness, but they couldn’t have because of the sense of urgency and power), others wash over on an unseen current. One woman, serenely slow, dancing centre stage, while another circles in super fast-forward, the juxtaposition a magical means of giving us, simultaneously, boundless energy AND all the time in the world. Revelation /Elation.
Body, Language, and Audience:Virtuosity and Self-Indulgence in Boca del Lupo and San Banquito Teatro’s The Suicide
Authors: Pullen Kirsten
Published: June 2023

Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo and Mexico City’s San Banquito Teatro’s adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide (1929) retains the plot outline of the original but pastes astonishing physical work, multi-linguality and a video coda on Erdman’s play. Erdman’s comedy, banned in the Soviet Union until 1987 for its “subversive” potential, follows unemployed Semyon (Lucas Myers), his wife Maria (Diana Karenina) and nagging mother-in-law Serafima (Camille Gingras), as a host of political and aesthetic extremists try to convince Semyon to commit suicide in honour of their own agenda.
I Forget, I Remember: A Canadian Director in the Serbian Theatre
Authors: Devine Michael
Published: June 2023

Since 1995, my theatre career has increasingly been focused overseas, in the countries of eastern and central Europe. I direct for state theatres, from mid-sized to very large; I conduct workshops on acting, using a method I developed called “BOXWHATBOX”; and I attend conferences on Canadian Studies as an invited speaker. Thus, all my activities abroad involve being a Canadian in a foreign culture and articulating, explicitly or implicitly, what that means.
Can I Get a Witness? Performing Community in African-Nova Scotian Theatre
Authors: Moynagh Maureen
Published: June 2023

In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha reminds us of the extent to which ambivalence “haunts the idea of the nation,” fracturing efforts to imagine unity and coherence, so that narratives of nation remain partial and incomplete (1). Alan Filewod echoes and extends this idea in his claim that “Canadian theatre can as a whole be considered as a meta-performance that enacts crises of nationhood” (xvii). If those crises of nationhood may be understood to include the place of racialized and sexualized “others” in the nation and the place of the “regional” within an imagined national culture, then African-Nova Scotian theatre enacts the ambivalence, the crises of nation(hood) of which Bhabha and Filewod speak. In fact, many African-Nova Scotian plays intervene in what Bhabha terms “those justifications of modernity — progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past — that rationalize the authoritarian, ‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest or the ethnic prerogative” (4). In part, this intervention is made through an abiding concern with history in the work of playwrights as diverse as George Elliott Clarke, George Boyd, Walter Borden, DavidWoods, Louise Delisle and Lucky Campbell, who cover the spectrum from professional theatre to the grassroots. But whether the play has a historical or contemporary focus, the interventions these plays make in the ways Canada is imagined are enabled by a performative structure of witnessing that forges a politically alternative community at the scene of the performance.
Michel Tremblay at Ralph Connor House
Authors: Borody Claire
Published: June 2023

It is a frosty January night in Winnipeg. People are scattered throughout the foyer, parlour and dining room of Ralph Connor House, sipping drinks and commenting on the architecture and the artefacts on display. The event underway may appear to be a cocktail reception, but it is not. Although spectators may not be aware of the fact, Avera Theatre’s1 Stories for Late Night Drinkers has begun. The performance can best be described as a theatrical collage, in which spectators are moved from room to room in a kind of Boulevard-style progression and which uses a collection of short stories as its point of departure. As such, it needs a setting and a structure that immediately alter the expectations of the spectator. From the moment that spectators walked through the front door, the undeniable character of the twenty-three-room, 11,0000-square-foot Jacobean Revival house, placed a focus on the space as a principal element of production. Spectators were also immediately made aware of the fact that they had entered space with a history, representative of another time, with a different reality. They were encouraged to explore the ground- and lower levels of the house prior to the start of the performance but not the upper floors. The conspicuous lack of formal markers to suggest the boundaries of the performance space, such as a raised stage area or theatrical lighting, further altered performance expectations. Spectators were thus offered the suggestion of possible boundaries rather than given a clear indication of actual boundaries. The staircase to the second floor remained unlit until characters descended to the ground floor to wander among the gathering spectators. This action served as a transition to the official opening of the performance and as a means to establish conventions that would be used throughout the performance: staircases as one of the signs indicating a shifting reality, the dissolution of physical boundaries between actors and spectators and the notion that actors would react to spectators without inviting interaction. Ralph Connor House thus set the context of the performance and provided the concrete framework for the spectator’s journey.
Vasily, Hamlet and Fred: Site-Specific Work in Vancouver, 2005
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: June 2023

Theatre requires a balance between literary text and physical representation — a symbiosis and differentiation toward which the contemporary separation of the terms drama and theatre gesture. One danger in site-specific work is that intriguing possibilities in the site may so override other considerations that the fiction is lost in a display of theatrical pyrotechnics. This can result in an enjoyable, even dazzling, entertainment, but in a less than satisfying play. The best of such work, however, integrates the fiction into the space, making the physical a metaphor for, and an extension of, the narrative. Of course, non-site-specific work is also acted out in a space that prompts the reception of its audience. Whether conscious or not, the space of performance is always a unit in the theatrical semiosis. This means that all performance spaces somehow affect the narrative, even in plays not created for a specific site.
Comfortable Uncertainty
Authors: Keating Trenna
Published: June 2023

The summer of 2000 brought trepidation. Upon completing my Fine Arts degree at the University of Regina, I was faced with the daunting question … now what? I wanted to be hired as an actor. Instead, I was selling leather pants to middle-aged women and settling into a terribly depressing routine. However, it wasn’t long after my convocation that I was introduced to an alternative type of theatre — theatre that uses a found space as the starting point for creation, what I now know as “site-specific” or “in situ” theatre.
The Digital Play Book: An Environment for Interacting with Play Scripts
Authors: Sinclair Stéfan , Ruecker Stan
Published: June 2023

Based on a consideration of the vast majority of electronic texts currently available (especially on the Internet), it would be easy to conclude that electronic texts are merely digital counterparts to print-based texts, albeit in a much more convenient format for indexing (as Google does) and interlinking (as HTML – the common formatting language of the web – allows). Such a conclusion would be a natural and justified perception of how electronic texts are generally represented, but — we would argue — these representations lamentably belie the potential of electronic texts for other types of rich processing and display. Underlying this potential is the fundamental nature of all that is digital, that is, all that is stored as a collection of discreet units of information (bits) and therefore infinitely reconfigurable and modifiable.
A Conversation with Andy Jones
Authors: Chislett Anne
Published: June 2023

“My performing experience came from the oratorical contests held at St. Bon’s. Greg Malone and I were rivals for top honours and Greg usually won. He and I go back to 1954, and I’d say Greg’s been the most influential person in my career. I did Brutus’s speech; The High way Man, by Alfred Noyes; The Children’s Hour , by Longfellow; and a lot of British comedy. I knew Beyond the Fringe by heart. Greg says I wasn’t the class clown though. He was. I was too busy trying to be a good boy. I could make people laugh with the Stanley Holloway classic, Albert and the Lion. I loved doing Albert and the Lion.
The Many Faces of Live Bait Theatre
Authors: Burnett J.A.
Published: June 2023

Does disaster strike only at the most inopportune times? Or do ordinary events become disasters largely as a result of their timing? Take the Great Flood of 2005, for example. If the hot water heater at Live Bait Theatre in Sackville, New Brunswick, had burst at a time when someone was around to notice, there might have been no crisis. Some one would just have turned off the water supply and called the plumber.

Instead , the plumbing let go late on a grey March afternoon, just after everyone had left the theatre for an early supper, planning to be back in a few hours for the opening of Little Shop of Horrors, being presented that night by Black Tie Productions, a Mount Allison University student company. By the time the receptionist in the doctor’s office next door noticed a small stream winding across her waiting-room floor, water had been spewing from the broken tank for more than an hour, soaking everything within reach: carpets, walls, stairs and box upon box of props and costumes, scripts, posters and memorabilia.
The Fly Fisher’s Companion
Authors: Melski Michael
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Michael Melski, 2 May 2005. 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, contact Pam Winter, Gary Goddard Agency, 10 St. Mary St., Toronto ON. 416-928-0299.
Reasons and/or Excuses for the Past, Present and Future: A Conversation with Daniel MacIvor
Authors: Quint Cordula
Published: June 2023

This interview with Daniel MacIvor focuses on the artist’s current works in progress, his upcoming performance series at Buddies in Bad Times, reflections on style and his unique and innovative approach to performance, personal and artistic transitions, his move back to Nova Scotia and the future of his production company — da da kamera.

Cordula Quint: During your recent visit to Mount Allison University, you presented a very engaging excerpt from a new work in progress - Reasons and/or Excuses for My Current Career. You had explained at the time that you are planning on a trilogy. Can you tell us a little more about the “reasons and excuses” for this biographical project?
Trudeau Previews in the Heart of Rural Nova Scotia
Authors: Clarke William
Published: June 2023

Amidst the lush greenery and centuries-old stone of Acadia University, an audience of Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholars received a preview of a new jazz opera on 16 June. It was also a visiting public’s first opportunity to hear the latest collaboration between Halifax poet and scholar George Elliott Clarke and New York composer DD Jackson.

Clarke, Jackson and a trio of singers arrived at the university town of Wolfville, about an hour east of Halifax, where the Bay of Fundy meets the Annapolis Valley, for a workshop of Trudeau:LongMarch / Shining Path.
Voicing Individuality: Creating a Hybrid Identity in First Nations Theatre
Authors: Bennett Melanie
Published: June 2023

The four plays reviewed here concern First Nations characters who wrestle with conflicting identities. All of the plays succeed in challenging what Robert Appleford calls the “limiting definitions of the authentically Native” (71) by shifting Native discourse and creating a unique hybrid identity. Darrell Dennis’s two plays focus on young urban Aboriginals who struggle to have their own distinctive Native voice in an environment that expects them to behave in a stereotypical, traditional “Indian” way. The characters struggle to balance the tension between their urban identity and their Native heritage. The plays by Penny Gummerson and Constance Lindsay Skinner concern characters who attempt to find a synthesis of their interracialness once they discover they arc part Native.
Nature, War and Will: New Plays from the Past
Authors: Philpott Wendy
Published: June 2023

If there is a point of agreement suggested by the three plays discussed here, it’s that history never goes out of style. Taken together, the plays present a tour of review and revision through Scotland in 1899, Canada and England during World War II and Elizabethan England. While the attractiveness of historical context may be an initial hook, the veteran writers represented here reconfirm that contemporary concerns are often most clearly viewed through the lens of a true or imagined past.
GitooklSay It: An Anishnaabe Perspective on Spoken Word
Authors: Akiwenzie-Damm Kateri
Published: June 2023

My spoken word arises from Anishnaabek art, literary and oratory traditions and practices that encompass songs, chants, oratory, storytelling, poetry, speeches, stories and music as well as other art forms, both old and new. Some of the non-traditional or newer forms of Anishnaabek art that influence and inspire my work as a spoken word artist include jazz, hip-hop, rap, dance, media arts and, even more, the fusion of Anishnaabek arts with the arts and cultures of other Indigenous peoples as well as the many arts and cultures around us. As an artist, I am heavily influenced by my immediate environment — the people, places and natural/supernatural world that surrounds me. My spoken word did not develop from within the spoken word genre, nor has it been much influenced by any other spoken word. For me, “spoken word” was a natural progression in my work, a way of creatively expressing myself in a way that made sense to me and came about spontaneously as a result of what I was already doing, what I knew and who I am.
Consuming Language: Embodiment in the Performance Poetry of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery
Authors: Hussain Nasser
Published: June 2023

What separates spoken word as an art form from the interminable spectacle of hearing a poet read a poem (be she amateur or professional) is the extent to which the artist brings a sense of performance to the event — by which I mean not only the theatrical presentation of the poem but also the manner in which the “eventness” of the poem is taken into account in the moment of its production. A public reading of a poem is often offered as a presentation of a finished work, to be appreciated by an audience, much like a painting on a wall. Spoken-word practice, in contrast, is informed by the much longer tradition of oral poetry (which I would like to call “performance poetry”), in which the audience is implicated in the social construction of meaning: rather than gazing at the painting, we are witnesses to and conspirators in its creation. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to even casually sketch out a history of what I call “performance poetry,” I believe that the example set by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in 1982, with their performance piece The Language of Performance of Language is a touchstone, not only for avant-garde practice, but also for the more mainstream work being carried out by today’s performance poets, and deserves consideration as such.
Tools of Poetry in Performance in Canada
Authors: Ferrier Ian
Published: June 2023

This essay is a glimpse into the process I use to evaluate the work I see on the road while touring and the work that passes through the Words & Music Show in Montreal, a show 1 have been curating and producing for the past six years. Like many of the people who look at the work of a lot of poets, evaluation across genres is something I do unconsciously all the time. In the Words & Music Show, there is no telling what genre of performance to expect, but there is certainly a way of knowing which performers are worth hearing once every four years, which never again and which bring something new and powerful each time they come through the door. This essay tries to define a few of the facets of poetry in performance, to show how they arose naturally from a number of other, related media and to give a few examples of how they’re used in current practice.
What’s All the Yap? Reading Mirha-Soleil Ross’s Performance of Activist Pedagogy
Authors: Salah Trish
Published: June 2023

Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly one of the hardest working. A Toronto-based performance artist, film- and video-maker and activist on a wide range of issues, Ross is also the chief architect of Counting Past 2, the first festival of transsexual and transgender art and performance in North America.1 In this paper, I look at Ross’s most ambitious and professionally successful performance work to date, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, a sequence of performance monologues in which Ross brings together her concerns with sex-worker, animal and transsexual rights and reflects upon her fifteen years as a prostitute and activist.2 Straddling the genres of spoken word, dramatic monologue and multi-media performance, Yapping Out Loud utilized video footage of coyotes living in the wild and being hunted, live music and voice recordings by prostitute- and animal-rights activists to create multiple, shifting frames for Ross’s monologue in seven acts.
The Very First Elephant on the Very First Day: Nicholas Billon’s The Elephant Song Trumpets at the Stratford Regime
Authors: Whittaker Robin C.
Published: June 2023

Nicholas Billon’s playwriting career, born, of all places, on the stage of the Stratford Festival of Canada, has already performed an important moment in the history of Canadian theatre. His play, The Elephant Song, will be remembered not only for its intelligent and efficient dialogue but also for its significant position as the festival’s first world premiere of the very first play written by an emerging Canadian playwright.1 Its inclusion in the festival’s 2004 season begins to answer the vocal challenges posed by mid-twentieth-century theatre nationalists, who viewed the festival as a colonial dinosaur near extinction. It is a striking new work, chosen for production by the festival with the intention of cultivating the promising voice of a new playwright. And as a (contained) critique of institutionalized discourse, The Elephant Song, at its premiere, may be regarded as a (contained) critique of the Stratford theatre regime.
Public Dialogue on Science: Theatre as Mediator
Authors: Baillie Caroline
Published: June 2023

In her recent book, Science on Stage, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr points out that science plays may be the contemporary way of bringing politics back to the stage. She suggests that, because scientific controversies over ethical issues are very much in the public eye, bringing these debates to light through theatre has “restored to the stage much of its former status as an influential art form” (10). According to Shepherd-Barr, the political implications of scientific and technical developments have become an important part of the drama in these plays. Furthermore, she believes that science playwrights share a common interest in the concept of justice and, following Dürrenmatt, that “justice is a question of what to do with the power that stems from scientific knowledge” (for Dürrenmatt, see Peppard 72).
Toward a Humanistic Science Education: Using Stories, Drama and the Theatre
Authors: Stinner Art
Published: June 2023

[W]hat Quintus Horatius Flaccus said some 2000 years ago in his Ars Poetica (“Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo,” which translates as “delighting the reader at the same time as instructing him”) is also true today What is wrong with learning something while being entertained? In other words, why not use drama to smuggle (with a substantial dose of theatricality) important information generally not available on the stage into the minds of a general public?
Contemporary Social Justice Theatre: Finding, Sharing, Healing
Authors: Mae Naila Keleta
Published: June 2023

This article’s sub-title, “Finding, Sharing, Healing,” is taken from a passage in bell hook’s essay, “Healing Darkness,” in which she writes, “Though many of us recognize the depth of our pain and hurt, we do not usually collectively organize in an ongoing manner to find and share ways to heal ourselves” (4). This article draws on examples from Canada, the United States and South Africa to explore how Canadian playmakers might push boundaries of “personal/accepted experience” by adopting philosophies of revolutionary theatre, symbolic reversal and the Sarungano. It is my hope that these philosophies will offer playmakers more tools to assist in transforming our complex global realities into tangible dramatic stories that function as key points of collective discovery, of reconciliation, of healing and thus of an aspect of contemporary social justice. It is my hope that this article supports all those involved in the creation and dissemination of such plays – playwrights, actors, directors, administrators, producers, granting officials, board members, professors, teachers, critics, volunteers, audiences and others.
“Hedda Gabler Remains a Question Mark”: A Conversation with Judith Thompson
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: June 2023

On 30 June 2006, during the Ibsen Centenary Year, and again on 20 February 2007, I spoke with Canadian playwright Judith Thompson about Henrik Ibsen’s feminist—modernist classic Hedda Gabler (1890), which Thompson first adapted and directed for the Shaw Festival in 1991 and then revisited in 200S for a Volcano production in Toronto. She is currently preparing a third version of the adaptation for an upcoming production by the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre in June 2007. The following is an abridged and edited transcription of our conversations about the play.
Am I Seeing Double, or Is This Shakespeare?
Authors: Renders Kim
Published: June 2023

THESEUS: Well then, let them perform their play! SERVANT: Oh let them not! Truly it is not a pretty sight. These players embody the very definition of the word coarse. To call them rank amateurs would be to praise them. To call them hams would be to flatter them. They are an affront to the notion of what we call culture. Their histrionics amount to no more than does the screeching of alley cats. They butcher language with less finesse than what is required for the shovelling of manure, although the smell is no different. Indeed, what they dish out onstage has the consistency of dung. No sir, in the name of Thespes, let us not blaspheme the profession by calling them actors. They are clods, buffoons, dim wits, morons, imbeciles and simpletons. Oh sir, they are bad, awful, they stink, reek…. What they do is an insult to good taste and sensibility. I could go on and on…. (Renders, Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1, 27)
Fifty-One Suitcases: Traces of Hana Brady and the Terezin Children
Authors: Zatzman Belarie
Published: June 2023

The suitcase is a provocation. First, to a group of young people in Tokyo and their teacher, Fumiko Ishioka, at the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Centre; then to Karen Levine, producer at the CBC; and later, to Allen MacInnis, artistic director, and Emil Sher, playwright, at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People (LKTYP) in Toronto. Sher’s new script (2006) is an adaptation of Levine’s book Hana’s Suitcase (2002) and is a superb piece of children’s theatre. Sent from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 2000 as an artefact for Ishioka’s new Holocaust Centre, the suitcase prompted questions: “Who was Hana?” “Where did she come from?” “What happened to her?” (Levine 5). Urged on by the children from Tokyo, Ishioka embarked on a journey across Europe to solve the mystery of Hana’s suitcase, a search that ended with the discovery that Hana’s only sibling, George, had survived the war and was living right here in Canada. MacInnis notes, “What drew me to Hana’s Suitcase and made me want to stage a play version is the wonder that Hana dreamed of being a teacher and, even though she perished at the hands of the Nazis, her story sixty years later is teaching children” (3). Since its publication, Hana’s Suitcase has been translated into over thirty languages and has won more than twenty awards internationally. In Canada, in addition to its two sold-out runs at the LKTYP, Hana’s Suitcase has played at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton and the Manitoba Theatre for Young People. Sher’s adaptation held its American premiere at St. Louis’s Metro and was mounted at First Stage Children’s Theatre in Milwaukee this fall. During the 2007—8 season, the play will also tour to the Green Thumb Theatre in Vancouver; to Geordie Productions in Montreal, and back to Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre for a return engagement.
TYA in Canada: Navigating the Paradoxes
Authors: Bannerman Marian White
Published: June 2023

In Donald Barthelme’s hilarious and provocative short story, “Me and Miss Mandible,” a thirty-five-year-old man who has “misread” important cultural signs as an adult finds himself back in grade six, for re-education. This time around, it is clear, he must learn to read the subtext, the messages implied, as opposed to those overtly stated, by his culture. Remembering a surreal but formative experience, the protagonist takes an important first step in this complex decoding: “I kept wondering why. Then something happened that proposed a new question…. I wondered: Who decides?” (60). In many ways, these two questions — Why? Who decides? — are key to understanding the unique culture of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) in Canada. Young theatre audiences, in turn, may be key to an accurate picture of the country itself. As Leslee Silverman, artistic director of Manitoba Theatre for Young People, points out, young audiences have replaced adult audiences as the true cross-section of Canada (Personal interview). Because it tours to all parts of the country, plays to young people and their caregivers and is primarily performed in and for schools whose students are drawn from a wide range of economic, social, geographic, linguistic, religious, ethnic, intellectual, physical and family backgrounds, TYA boasts not only one of the largest but also the most diverse and representative audience in the country. This audience is important. But why is theatre important for this audience?
The Housing Project: Working Collaboratively with Adolescents in Theatre and Education
Authors: Savage Naomi
Published: June 2023

The Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) Theatre in Education Co-op was first introduced to the former Toronto Board nineteen years ago by Kathy Lundy, who was then an instructional leader for Dramatic Arts.1 The mandate of the program is for students to work with a director from February until June to create collectively a thirty- to forty-five-minute play that will tour approximately thirty TDSB middle schools. Typically, the play addresses a social issue that is relevant to a middle school audience. Students meet at a designated rehearsal space from nine until four daily. Theatre Co-op is designed as a work placement opportunity and participants earn four Co-operative Education credits through their home schools.2 The program runs alongside a two-credit theatre program that became a dance program in 2007. The director does not grade the students but provides ongoing feedback and performance evaluations for their teachers. Each student must audition and interview to be accepted into the program, and it is open to every student who is eligible for Co-op in the TDSB. This is my fourth year serving as Artistic Director for the program and what follows is an account of the program and process, with specific references to the 2007 piece, The Housing Project.
Uses of Disorder and the Citizen Spectator
Authors: Ferguson Alex Lazaridis
Published: June 2023

Very broadly speaking, since the 1950s, in the west, there have been two contrasting visions of the theatre experience. These visions can be thought of as complementary or competitive, depending on how you view the associated value systems and the way public and private resources are divvied up between them. Theatre that adopts the well-ordered, institutional model takes place in specialized buildings and carefully separates the outside world from auditorium and stage. Such theatre is generally supported by the middle and upper classes and reflects the values of its patrons. The other model, which is often considered (by theorists and practitioners) to reflect an anti-institutional impulse, seeks a looser definition of theatre and constructs models that allow for a greater degree of spectator involvement. The first kind of theatre, in addition to limiting disruptive (or instructive) variables by isolating the audience from the outside world, seeks to dislocate the spectator from the particularities of local civic dynamics and situate her in a generic social “subset” that is like similar social subsets in other theatres and other cities. It creates a kind of “gated community” for its privileged patrons and virtually prohibits surprising encounters with difference. The material presented onstage may speak of difference, but audience demographics reveal sameness of social class.
Cultivating Process
Authors: Frey Heather Fitzsimmons
Published: June 2023

When Amber Borotsik (facilitator, director, performer, choreographer) and her dance theatre company Dammitdance Theatre of Edmonton, Alberta decided to create Scythe, she did not expect the project to become a three-year journey; nor did she plan to engage in an evolving devised theatre process. All she knew was that the piece would be about leaving the family farm, a personal topic for Borotsik, who herself chose theatre over farming. Working from that premise, and from naïve, twenty-something gumption, she and the dancers, actors and musicians she gathered together for Scythe grinned and said, “Let’s do it!”
Empowering Actors: Devised Theatre Training at Humber College
Authors: Belshaw Diana
Published: June 2023

When I started teaching in the theatre program at Humber College in 1998, I had never heard the term “devised theatre.” We talked vaguely about “physical theatre” or “creation-based training,” and even then most people didn’t know what we were talking about. Was it Lecoq? Was it Grotowski? Was it collective creation à la Passe Muraille? Where did it come from and why would anyone want or need to train in it? My understanding of this vaguely named, and even more vaguely defined, approach was rooted in the work of Primus Theatre in Winnipeg, fed by a number of productions that surfaced occasionally at Toronto’s World Stage Festival and wrestled with over long conversations (and bottles of Irish whiskey) with Richard Fowler. Devised theatre became a term applied to productions — but where was the training that made it possible? Was it only for artists of seemingly superior intellectual capacity or did it contain something that could speak to a wider and more disparate community? Somewhere in the mists of my brain an idea started to form that would bring several of my passionate beliefs about contemporary theatre training together.
All That Remains
Authors: Yamamoto Maiko Bae
Published: June 2023

More than forty years ago on a crisp spring day, my father waited in a train station for a woman who never arrived. He was a young lad of twenty-one, on a visit to his mother’s hometown near Kobe in the Kansai region of Japan. The young woman’s name was Eiko. For about six hours, my father sat on a bench in Sannomiya Station, watching people and maybe eating a bowl or two of noodles, which he bought from a local stand. Maybe he read the newspaper while he waited.