bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Monstrous Ejaculations – Sky Gilbert’s Ejaculations from the Charm Factory: A Memoir
Authors: Grignard Christopher
Published: June 2023

Sexuality is something that we ourselves create – it is our creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it is a possibility for creative life. Michel Foucault (28; emphasis mine)
Views & Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

If we think about how history becomes important to us personally, how an event from the past becomes embodied, we venture into the domain of memory. For memory surely is our personal echo chamber to the past. There are the obvious remains of the past, the archives of important objects and the historical records, but even when we think about our knowledge of these, how we approach and understand them, we must also think about how we perform the equation between past and present, between materials and events that shape them and how our performative relationship to history is often based on what remains, but also on what remains differently as it is embodied through the act of remembering.
Disability, Theatre and Power: An Analysis of a One-Person Play
Authors: Shain Alan
Published: June 2023

Disability has been stereotypically seen as a weakness, as a flaw within the individual that must be overcome. My pet peeve has always been people who tell me I’ve beaten my disability – as if this were a compliment. My disability is part of me. I am beautiful; I am whole; I am powerful. This beauty, wholeness and power includes my disability. Therefore, there isn’t any way I can beat my disability, unless I become a different person.
Building Communities: Disability Arts Festivals in Canada
Authors: Johnston Kirsty
Published: June 2023

Disability arts festivals showcase and celebrate the voices of a distinct and talented community of artists. Several such festivals have been held in Canada since 2001, and theatre has played a prominent role in each. Together, the festivals have built connections with, and contributed to, a growing international disability arts culture. The term “disability arts” is drawn from the work of several artists, artistic facilitators and leaders in the movement. They use it to describe and connect art work created by people who determine a strong link between disability experience and their art. Many are careful to explain that such work is not the mere by-product of art therapy. Rather, it is intentional artistic work. Disability arts festivals provide a forum for community building by allowing artists who work in different locations and operate in different artistic media to connect their works around the concept of disability. Although the range of ways in which artists interpret, involve and experience disability and disability arts is vast, festivals create venues in which artists and audiences can express and connect their ideas. In short, they organize time and space in which communities can form and gather momentum.
Views & Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

In this issue devoted to an examination ofthe int ersection oftheatre and disability culture, I have chosen to revive a Canadian Theatre Reviewtradition and give myself carte blanche with the Views ’ Reviews section, in order to offer overdue coverage ofsome ofthe noteworthy texts I have received lately. I begin with this idea from Lukacs because of his unique vision of the role of the avant-garde artist in society and because his way of identifying the avantgarde so often reminds me of the process of reviewing and/or editing the reviews for this publication. For Lukacs, the avant-garde was profoundly realist; that is, for an artist to be considered avant-garde, she or he had to be not only prophetic but accurately prophetic, anticipatory even. An avant-garde work, then, can never be identified as such until enough time has passed to allow for the work of critics, reviewers and editors in the process of verifying the work’s propositions. Given the passage of time in this process, an artist can only ever “have beenreviews-article avant-garde. I think th is accurately describes the reviewing in this section ofthe Canadian Theatre Review,especially with regard to written material. Publishers kindly send me some truly remarkable texts, and I do my best to see that they get into the hands of capable reviewers, but this process takes time, and one is reminded of continually arriving late to the discovery of an important new vision.
Canadian Actors’ Equity: Recognize What Is “Canadian” about Theatre Practice in This Country
Authors: Gilbert Sky
Published: June 2023

I was amused, recently, to hear of the conflict, in Toronto in January 2005, between Canadian Actors Equity and The Blue Man group. Equity took full advantage of the situation to differentiate itself from its American counterpart. Executive Director Susan Wallace pointed out that Canadian Actor’s Equity and American Actor’s Equity are very different organizations: “It’s absolutely a different playing field here in Canada,” she said; and “They’re coming into a new community that has new standards” (Ouzounian). I am not so certain that is true. Canadian and American Actor’s Equit[ies] may quibble on certain fine points, but the fundamental philosophies that govern these organizations are frighteningly similar. And though Canadian Actor’s Equity has made some headway during the last twenty years in understanding the differences between Canadian and American theatre, I think it is important to know that they have a regrettable history of ignoring those differences.
Working in Whitehorse
Authors: Clark Michael
Published: June 2023

“Whitehorse is a small city 1000 miles west of Vancouver. Its also somewhat north.” Nakai Theatre has put that line in postings for a general manager, to attract people with a sense of humour and a sense of adventure. These are probably the qualities most necessary to working at creating professional theatre in Whitehorse, especially if your company is dedicated to producing new plays.
The Charlottetown Festival Young Company: Training Performers for Musical Theatre
Authors: Jones Thomas Morgan
Published: June 2023

There remains a need in our system to bridge the gap between educational study and professional career. The college and university programs commit to a term of study for a three to four year period. Upon completion, the young artist has a strong, if somewhat generalized, understanding of the musical theatre art form. This varies per program and individual. They are then left on their own to begin their search for employment in our chosen profession.
Heterogeneous Performances
Authors: Ellis Jim
Published: June 2023

Bravo! FACT has, in its ten years, commissioned over four-hundred short films by Canadian artists for broadcast on the Bravo! arts channel and presented programs of these shorts at the Rodeo. One of the mandates of the foundation is to encourage the development of innovative ways of presenting the arts on television, which has resulted in a wide range of hybrid forms and some very successful, award-winning films. The shorts shown in this year’s program included dance films, music videos, live action shorts, a travelogue and animations.
A Nation of Distinct Selves: From Collective Identity to the Individual in Québec Drama
Authors: Leroux Louis Patrick
Published: June 2023

There was stunned silence, followed by awkward glances back and forth. Someone’s face puckered as if in reaction to an unfortunate smell. I had breached the decidedly unhip topic of “identitaire” drama in Québec. My culturally astute colleagues in Montréal wondered why on earth anyone would be interested in such a topic in this day and age. “It’s a commission for an English Canadian journal,” I managed to plead. Ah! That explained it all…
Creating an MT Space: Multicultural Performance beyond Folklore
Authors: Bou-Matar Majdi
Published: June 2023

When I first came to Canada in January 2003, I had very little knowledge about Canadian theatre. I knew, however, that I was coming to a country that distinguishes itself by being a home for people from all over the world, a country with respect for diversity; not a “melting pot,” like the United States, but a rich mosaic.
Domestic International Theatre Festivals
Authors: Morison Thomas
Published: June 2023

The FTA is a biannual theatre festival that presents work by national and international artists/companies. There are three categories in which the shows presented can participate: the “principle” shows, the secondary, “off” performances for emerging Québec companies (called Nouvelles Scènes), and a workshop series of works-in-progress.
Editorial Canadian, eh?
Authors: Knowles Ric , Lane Harry
Published: June 2023

When Canadian Theatre Review was founded in the heady nationalist days of the 1970s, the place and position of Canadian in its title was clear. A young Englishman, Robin Phillips, had just been appointed artistic director of the Stratford Festival, which occasionally billed itself as Canada’s national theatre, and CTR’s editors (including founder Don Rubin, then a recent American draft resistor) were throwing down the gauntlet to defend the honour of a truly Canadian theatre. In subsequent issues and years, CTR set out to chart the emergence of this national theatre “from the colonial twilight,” as Rubin and Alan Richardson put it in volume 30 (Spring 1981). The project was unquestionably noble, unquestioningly nationalist and unquestionably resistant to anglo- and American cultural and economic colonization.
This Page Is a Site: Site, Artist and Audience in Four Recent Performances
Authors: Householder Johanna
Published: June 2023

Seen from above the room is a page. Robin Brass is in a room at Mysteria in Regina, Saskatchewan. We stand throughout the gallery, on the page. Brass begins to write on the floor, making ink from a block and a cup of water. She draws, writes with the block on the clean wood floor. Her action is deeper than writing though; she is on her hands and knees, putting her whole body into the script. She inscribes Saulteaux and some Cree syllablcs, with English words (route, scout, diver, root, return), interspersed. As she writes, she speaks, but she is not reading what she is writing.
Un-specific Site
Authors: Donaldson Andrea
Published: June 2023

Summer in Toronto is disgusting. It’s sticky, smelly and bloody hot. Its severity demands escape, air con or a total surrender to a constant sweaty film. The mid-size theatre companies end their seasons, and aside from Shakespeare shows crammed into any cavity or waterfront space the city will agree to, there is opportunity aplenty for the penniless, inspired, emerging, established, desperate and different to take over in festivals such as Dusk Dances, the Fringe (Theatre and Dance) and Summer Works.
Urban Research, Collective Report, Audience Encounter: Darren O’Donnell Discusses the Benefits of Talking to Strangers in Diplomatic Immunities
Authors: Zaiontz Keren
Published: June 2023

Surveillance cameras rarely inspire theatricality. Lodged in ceiling corners like house spiders, cameras and monitors are part of our technological ecosystem. We seldom associate the mediatized image that stares back at us at the bank, convenience store or gas station with “representation,” but Toronto-based theatre company Mammalian Diving Reflex has set out to convert those “unmarked” moments that constitute daily life to source material for Diplomatic Immunities, a series of shows dedicated to life outside the theatre. (Indeed, that stunted, fluorescent lit image of waiting in line at the bank or convenience store is ripe with representation.)
Exposure in Liveness: Exposure in Liveness
Authors: Bickis Heidi
Published: June 2023

In our increasingly mediatized society, liveness has earned a prestigious status. Even within the context of the media, the live is often held above the recorded. Liveness implies immediacy, a happening in real time, and tends to be associated with watching an event or performance in real time: live celebrity trials, live episodes of TV talk shows or live news coverage. In this sense, live also suggests the real; what we see live is real life, unrecorded, unedited and unfiltered by the media (whether this is, in fact, the case or not). To consider theatre with this idea of liveness in mind is almost paradoxical. Theatre may be a live event, but it is not real, nor are the events on stage necessarily happening in real time. Often, what we see on stage are retold experiences, retold stories. Theatre is live, but it is already secondary, a re-presentation placed on the stage.
Liveness and Mediatized Performance – Beyond Contradiction
Authors: Graham Catherine
Published: June 2023

Can theatre, as we know it, survive mediatized performance? For a large part of the twentieth century, theatrical performance was implicitly defined in opposition to performance in film or other recorded media. In the general public’s perception, theatre was a form of dramatic performance that was “live,” meaning that the performers were right there in front of you interpreting a piece of dramatic literature as you watched. Such a definition was useful to the average spectator in marking the difference between experiences of theatrical performance and experiences of similar kinds of performance on film or television. In the latter two forms, we, as spectators, know that what is in front of us is a series of images of a performer, pieced together in an unseen editing room and presented to us without the actual presence of the performers whose images we see on the screen. But these strict distinctions no longer work in the early years of the twenty-first century, where the boundaries between theatre and other art forms, between recorded and live, im-mediate1 and mediatized forms of dramatic performance are increasingly blurred, both in practice and in theory.
Claybank Voices: The Specificity of (T)Here
Authors: Moffat Ellen
Published: June 2023

In my initial field trips to the Claybank brick facility in southern Saskatchewan, I was struck by the quiet hauntedness of the site. It was a ghost factory. Wind-swept. Empty buildings. Inhabited by swallows. Lit by beams of light. Pallets of recycled bricks lining the corridors of one enormous stock shed. Ten beehive kilns. Like ziggurats. The quiet made me think of Brecht’s poem “Who Built the Pyramids?”
Strata for Crossfiring: Immersive Interactivity with Sound
Authors: Fox Charlie
Published: June 2023

Crossfiring was a dynamic multidisciplinary art event, involving a dedicated and inventive group of contemporary artists in the creation of dance, theatre, performance art, music and installation art. Presented at the Claybank National Historic site, just outside the village of Claybank, Saskatchewan, Crossfiring was organized by the innovative collective Knowhere Productions, August-September 2006. One of the main features of Crossfiring was the commissioning of a diverse group of artists to create site-specific artworks, including audio-based artworks. The commissions challenged each artist to develop new, unique work that responded to the history and striking presence of the Claybank historic site and the surrounding prairie landscape of the Dirt Hills and Regina Plain; Crossfiring presented me with an opportunity to develop a new installation artwork that would contemplate the historical and geographical layers of this remarkable site. The enthusiasm and interest level of all of the artists was high, and the collaborative opportunities many, turning the Claybank factory and surroundings into a beehive of creative activity.
Site of Slam
Authors: Matthews Kevin
Published: June 2023

Poetry slam, practically described, is simply a format for a performance poetry event, an ostensibly competitive format in which five audience members, who are selected as judges, rate each performance and eventually choose a winner. The slam rules are more detailed — there is a three-minute time limit, after which artists are penalized, and no props or costumes are allowed — but the point ratings and competition are what make it unique as a format. The competition creates tension and provokes strong reactions from audience members, who are welcome to be very vocal in response to both the performances and the scores. As a result, the audience tends to identify with the artist and thus feels entitled — sometimes obliged — to give feedback and participate in the moment of performance Slam is one of a range of events where the spoken word is the artistic medium.
Standing in the Shadows of America: Afro-Diasporic Oral Culture and the Emancipation of Canadian Hip-Hop
Authors: Thompson Cheryl
Published: June 2023

The origins of hip-hop can be traced back to the South Bronx, New York, in the late 1970s, appearing at a crucial juncture of post-industrial stagnation, increased family dissolution, and a weakened struggle for Black economic and political rights (Rose). While initially rap was deemed a passing fad, today, hip-hop is one of the dominant forces in popular culture. The terms “rap” and “hip-hop” are often used interchangeably, but “rap” is the active verb referring to an artist rhyming over top a rhythmic beat. “Hip-hop” refers to the culture of rap music, which includes three other elements — break dancing, graffiti and DJing — in addition to rap.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

To be unaware that technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. . . . Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress.
Building the HIVE / Disrupting the Plan
Authors: Templeton Andrew
Published: June 2023

Vancouver must be one of the most planned geographical spaces in the world. The city’s planning department is hailed internationally, and there is even something called the “Vancouver model” (it has to do with condos). The principles that govern Vancouver can seem rather Sim-City in their tidiness: citizens can sleep in this zone, party in this zone and get sick in this zone. At some point, the planners seem to have designated Granville Island the “performance zone.” So it’s here that you’ll find many of Vancouver’s theatre spaces and companies, including two stages for the Arts Club (one given in perpetuity to Theatre Sports), the Waterfront Theatre, Performance Works, Playwrights Theatre Centre (and their performance space), Carousel, Arts Umbrella and so on. The idea of putting all these companies and venues in close proximity sounds wonderful in theory. The only problem: no one actually lives on Granville Island and – despite being central – it’s a pain in the ass to get to. In the imagination of the city, Granville Island is not a cultural centre – it’s a farmers’ market, a year-round craft fair and a place for seagulls to shit on tourists.
Editorial
Authors: Stephenson Jenn
Published: June 2023

The observation that we are surrounded by rapid technological change is a truism. One need not look very far to count recent products of scientific and technological innovation. Just as I look around my office, the newcomers include a desktop computer (and all that entails), MP3 player, laser printer, cell phone, microwave, Gortex jacket, polyester fleece gloves (it’s February), recyclable plastic lunch container, debit card, streaming radio, the list goes on . . . and this is hardly a technological paradise. These are what we take to be ordinary objects. So, to note that the world has changed is to state the obvious. What is not as obvious and what has never been more important to consider is how we deal with that change. New knowledge requires new perspectives. Often these new perspectives on scientific discovery and technological innovation inspire a kind of joyful wonder. On the other hand, the uncharted territory of the newly discovered also inspires a certain amount of anxiety, as we contemplate difference and we contemplate change. Wonder and anxiety as they relate to scientific “progress” are a central theme for this issue of CTR.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

In the last few decades, we have witnessed a crucial blossoming of feminist critical inquiry, fed by an impassioned exploration of gender as an important socio-historical category. The best of this kind of probing analysis can be seen in the work of “Equity in Canadian Theatre: The Women’s Initiative,” here reviewed by Kim Renders, which uses the lens of gender to examine systemic inequalities in the Canadian theatre industry, both in the form of women’s exclusion from professional positions (and especially positions of power) and in the male-centred material produced on national stages. Certainly, the report reminds us, we live in a country where theatres continue to churn out white male seasons and where Harold Blooms continue to champion the white male canon. And certainly, this means we must continue the feminist struggle. This may be the case more than ever at present, in an age of post-feminist cynicism and, more perniciously, at a time when young women seek out liberating feminist “experiences” in the form of productions like Girls Gone Wild.
Henry V versus Polonius
Authors: Ackerman Marianne
Published: June 2023

Political conventions are a great way to meet people. You can’t avoid it. I came away from the recent Liberal fest, held 29 November —3 December 2006 at the Palais des congrès in Montreal, with a pocketful of business cards and the possibly skewed impression that Canadians are a gregarious and inquisitive lot, fired by passionate concern for the future of the country. It’s a phenomenon you notice at traffic accidents, the tendency of people to look each other in the eye and say something. Under the dance-floor lighting of the convention hall, I was tempted to try out various identities.
Quality Theatre for Young Audiences, Featuring an Interview with Playwright David Craig
Authors: Swartz Larry
Published: June 2023

Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) is a special art form, different from adult theatre, with its own dynamic and rewards. Unlike books, television, DVDs and CDs, which help shape the cultural development of young people, theatre-going is a special event mainly because it is a live, “in the moment” experience. Since it is adults, for the most part, who are responsible for bringing theatre and child together, this responsibility challenges grown-ups to consider the quality of the play they are inviting the young people in their lives to experience. Our chance to invite children to enjoy the art form, and the art form’s ability to affect children, are limited and so we need to make careful choices. This is not to suggest that a quality production ensures a quality experience for the full range of audience members, both children and adults. Quality for an adult may be different than quality for children. So what plays will we select?
“Scrounge” and “Exploit”: Amiel Gladstone Stages Invention and Intimacy in Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays
Authors: Zaiontz Keren
Published: June 2023

Arn ie! Gladstone. Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007.

Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays represents the first published volume of work by the enterprising Arnie! Gladstone, co-founder of Victoria-based Theatre SKAM. Currently an associate artist at th e Caravan Farm Theatre, Glads tone is the second Theatre SKAM artist to be published by Coach House Books. The first, Sean Dixon, the company’s “playwright out of residence” since 1998, so titled because he is based in Toronto, published a volume of plays in 2002, AWOL: Three PlaysJor Theatre SKAM. Gladstone’s collection includes three plays : The Wedding Pool, which made the rounds as a SKAM production at the 2003 Summerworks Festival, in Toronto, and the 2004 Per formance Works sho wcase, in Vancouver, and has since been performed in Victoria and Colmar, France; Lena’s Car, staged at Performance Works, in 2003, as a piece commissioned by the Solo Collective; and Hippiesand Bolsheviks, first produced by SKAM, in 2005, at the University of Victoria, and subsequently dramaturged and staged at the 2006 Alberta play Rites Festival.
Editorial
Authors: Gallagher Kathleen
Published: June 2023

When I was six years old, my sixteen-year-old sister used to sit me down in her bedroom and rehearse monologues to me. It was all very mysterious. I heard about the lascivious life of Blanche Dubois, and I learned all kinds of profanities I’d never heard. My mother was not impressed when I later chanted these to her, but I was ever more enthralled by my big sister, who donned costumes and put on accents and lit candles in her bedroom because she was in grade-eleven Theatre Arts. The year of the monologue.
Dinner Theatre
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: June 2023

In his editorial to Canadian Theatre Review 44, a special issue on “Alternatives,” Robert Wallace wrote, “Although dinner theatre has increased in popularity across the country so that it now commands a major portion of the theatre-going public, it still is ignored or dismissed by most reviewers, a fact that Reg Skene’s article on the Winnipeg franchise of Stage West reveals is unfortunate” (4). More than twenty years later, Skene’s contribution to the CTR issue remains a rare discussion of dinner theatre in a Canadian city.
“To Be Honest, We Devised Theatre Companies Are Kind of Like Gangs”
Authors:   The Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Published: June 2023

At least it seems like that, out here in the West. The bars out here are filled with swaggering Devised Theatre Companies, each with their own distinctive hairstyles and peculiar ways of wearing their pants that proclaim their colours or totem animals (Green Fools, One Yellow Rabbit, Old Trout) — each scruffy gaggle a strange species to itself, composed of lifelong comrades who have thus hewn their work to their love, and their love to their work.
Collective Creation on the West Coast
Authors: Wasserman Jerry
Published: June 2023

In the mid-1990s, Vancouver gave birth to three companies that have changed the face of theatre on the West Coast: Electric Company Theatre, Boca del Lupo and neworldtheatre. All three collectives have helped shape Vancouver’s rich new theatrical ecology by virtue of their original, self-created work and unique performance protocols, reinvigorating what had been a pretty moribund local scene through the introduction of new styles of physical and political theatre, site-specific performance and innovative uses of theatrical technologies.
The Reflection Forums at Moving Stage Lab
Authors: Hansen Pil
Published: June 2023

In 2005 Bruce Barton and I were commissioned by the Danish chapter of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) to design and facilitate an ambitious laboratory on theatrical devising. The intentions and framework given by the ITI were to foster exchange between twenty-four professional stage artists from the Scandinavian and Baltic countries through a physical workshop with an online reflection component. The participants included playwrights, dramaturges, directors, choreographers, performing artists and designers. The workshop, known as Moving Stage Lab (MSL), was held in the summer of 2006 as part of the Nordic Theatre Days Festival in Copenhagen.
In the Room the Women Come and Go, Talking of Growing Old
Authors: Renders Kim
Published: June 2023

I asked my son, “Did you study ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in school?” He paused for a moment and answered, “Is that the one where the guy measures himself with spoons?”

I wanted to create a piece about aging and dying - specifically about women aging and dying - but was having difficulty finding my starting point. I like to tell stories, I just don't like to write plays …
Forewords
Authors: Barton Bruce , Wells Ker
Published: June 2023

I recently found myself sitting in a Toronto apartment surrounded by good food and good friends. The company was made up of a number of high-profile Canadian and American physical theatre practitioners, all of whom were teaching with Humber College’s Theatre Performance program, along with a slightly smaller number of recent graduates from the same unit.
Dramatic Initiatives at the University of Alberta
Authors: Bessai Diane
Published: June 2023

In the University of Alberta's hundredth anniversary year of 2008, it seems appropriate to review some of its historical contributions to the support and development of theatre in Edmonton and also, with its early extension programs, throughout Alberta, including the founding of the Banff School of Arts (1932). Early in its history, the university provided leadership and outreach, encouraging the production of good plays at the amateur level through the University Drama Society (UDS) (1911) and the Edmonton Little Theatre (ELT) (1929), which it helped found. The university continued to cultivate taste for good theatre in Edmonton with the founding and growth of Studio Theatre (1949) and the establishing of a BFA Drama (1964), which led to serious training at the professional level. Over the years, the university (U of A) created the environment for theatre and later trained the personnel who would one day give rise to the professional theatre of modern Edmonton.1
Views and Reviews
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

The Views and Reviews section in this issue primarily explores recent developments in Alberta theatre, covering a broad range of theatrical forms that currently thrive in the province. While readers will encounter a number of performance genres in the articles that follow — from memory plays to theatre for young audiences to theatre for incarcerated women – they will also find significant points of intersection in their concerns, themes and arguments. Each raises important questions about the relationship between art and social/political engagement and investigates, either directly or indirectly, the responsibility of artists to the community in which they are enmeshed.
Boom or Bust? A Survey of Theatre for Young Audiences Activities in Alberta
Authors: Hanson Nicholas
Published: June 2023

Data from the 2006 Census confirmed some obvious realities about recent demographic trends in Alberta: the province was the fastest growing in Canada, with the youngest median age and among the highest percentage of people under the age of fifteen (Statistics Canada). Between the robust economy and the high concentration of young families, one could logically presume that the conditions were in place for Alberta to become a highly fertile landscape for Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) activities. Of course, a dynamic boom in one industry can trigger a catastrophic bust in another — How have TYA practitioners in Alberta weathered the storm of rapid provincial expansion? This article aims to explore how Alberta's boom has affected TYA activities; as well, this piece surveys a few general TYA trends across the province and highlights some of the exceptional work presented by regional companies.
Editorial
Authors: Nothof Anne
Published: June 2023

Since the last issue of Canadian Theatre Review on prairie theatre (Spring 1991), a great deal has changed on the Alberta theatre scene, but some things have not. The conservative political agenda remains as entrenched as the Rockies, and playmakers continue to create diverse imaginative landscapes peopled by a wide range of local and extra-territorial characters. The essays in this issue speak to the long history and the wealth of creativity in the province: Diane Bessai excavates the beginnings of Edmonton theatre in the University of Alberta's drama program; Scott Sharplin demonstrates the seminal role of amateur theatre at Edmonton's Walterdale Theatre; Allan Boss highlights the importance of CBC radio drama for the early careers of Alberta playwrights such as Sharon Pollock. By the 1980s, graduates from the University of Alberta theatre program were collectively developing new plays and theatres dedicated to the production of Canadian works: Theatre Network, Workshop West and Alberta Theatre Projects have nurtured playwrights who have probed the political, social, and environmental history of the province, and tackled contentious issues of race and gender, the ethical conundrums of war, and the social responsibilities of art. As David Mann pointed out in an interview in CTR 66, being part of a Western theatre community in the 1980s “that has developed its own cadre of actors, directors, and playwrights who speak about us and the people we know and the people we grew up with and about our culture and society” (qtd. in Houston and Philpott 54) was for him the most important kind of theatre activity at that time. In this issue, playwright Conni Massing, who worked closely with director Stephen Heatley at Theatre Network in the 1980s, underscores the importance of a supportive “home” for theatre artists. But Alberta theatre is not bound by its communal roots or defined by its “region.” It is not limited to the “expression of historical and geographical particularity” (Filewod): its subjects may be local or global — and often both. As John Murrell suggests, in an interview with Moira Day, the inspiration may come from a particular place, but its scope may be international.
The Young Pretenders
Authors: Heather Warren-Crow
Published: June 2023

Sociologist John Barron Mays begins his 1965 book, The Young Pretenders: A Study of Teenage Culture in Contemporary Society, with an explanation of its title:

Young people today are, in fact, pretenders in both senses of the word. They are youthful heirs waiting to come into their inheritance. … But they are still mere understudies rehearsing in the wings for the parts they will one day have to play on the adult stage. They strike first one pose, then another. They toy with the props to find out what fits and becomes them most; what external façade is most engaging; what stance or swagger attracts the requisite amount of attention.(7)
Ripped Raw: Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End Leaves Audiences Shaken and Stirred
Authors: Hernandez Catherine
Published: June 2023

“was surprised how different is a human neck from a dog neck,” says a soldier in reference to leashing her Abu Ghraib prisoner. “With dog necks you can pull and pull and they keep on going not with humans. They necks is soft.” This is, to me, an essential line in Judith Thompson’s gut-wrenching work, Palace of the End. Produced in 2008 by Canadian Stage Company, it consists of three distinct monologues that explore the horrors of the war on Iraq, beyond the filter of the headlines.
Without a Map: A Cautionary Tale of Interactivity
Authors: Stroich Vicki
Published: June 2023

Alberta Theatre Projects (ATP) has a lot of personality for a “big” company. We have a long-standing dedication to the creation and dissemination of new work through the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays, we love to take programming risks in our Cornerstone Season and we have a very engaged relationship with our audience and community through a series of programs called LEGACY (Lifelong Education and Growth for Audience, Community and Youth). There is nothing we love more than doing backstage tours and talkbacks. We even invite the audience to fill out feedback forms (the old-fashioned paper kind and online) about the new plays we premiere in the Enbridge playRites Festival because we want to interact with our audience.
A Global Perspective on Theatre for Social Change
Authors: Shawyer Susanne
Published: June 2023

A mask workshop with incarcerated offenders. An AIDS education play in rural Zimbabwe. An interactive drama about racism and refugees in northern England. What do these performances have in common? All are examples of applied theatre, a vibrant and expanding field that blends theory and practice in efforts to use theatre for social and political change. The Applied Theatre Reader adds a global perspective to the growing library of academic works investigating how theatre workers put into practice the theories of Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal and educator Paulo Freire. This anthology of short articles by academics, artists and facilitators presents a wide variety of recent applied theatre projects around the world. The breadth of the book demonstrates the diversity of the field, while at the same time revealing that questions of efficacy and ethics remain crucial issues for any theatre concerned with social transformation.
Lorena Gale, 1958–2009
Authors: Wasserman Jerry
Published: June 2023

Lorena Gale was a huge talent in a small package. Just 5’1”, this smart, beautiful, multifaceted dynamo had great presence on- and offstage, playing doctors and DAs, police lieutenants and military officers, Goneril, Hecuba, the Acid Queen in Tommy, and the powerful priestess Elosha in Battlestar Galactica. One of the busiest actresses in Canada, with 126 entries on imdb.com as well as dozens more theatrical and voiceover credits on her resume, she was also an important dramatist, whose plays Angélique and Je me souviens contributed significantly to the contemporary Canadian theatre.
Theatresports / 1: Loosening
Authors: Cahill Dennis , lozzi Deborah
Published: June 2023

In 1976 Keith Johnstone and a group of his students formed the Secret Impro Group to perform noon-hour shows at the University of Calgary. The following summer they regrouped to form The Loose Moose Theatre Company which is currently at the forefront of the theatrical activity known as Theatresports. Loose Moose was created with specific goals, namely to create a theatre with a distinctly Canadian identity based on Keith Johnstone’s techniques of improvisation, a theatre that relies on and develops the skills of local performers and talents, that is affordable as well as responsible and accessible to a diverse public, a theatre that entertains, involves, and energizes its audience.
3 Fringe Daze
Authors: Nothof Ann
Published: June 2023

For nine frenetic summer days between August 13 and 21, Edmonton once more celebrated itself with a theatre festival in the Old Strathcona District, just south of the North Saskatchewan River. On fourteen stages, found or constructed within an area of five square blocks, in the street between the Chinook and Walterdale Theatres, and in two parks, a crazy kaleidoscope of public exhibitionism attracted 175,000 people. The heart of the event was Gazebo Park, a green slope in front of a covered bandstand, framed by spotlights and multicoloured flags, by booths for vendors of knitted Sneeks and theatre subscriptions for the “regular” season. Here in continuous succession between noon and midnight, performed the Mud Bay Jugglers, the Mugs Mullen Show, SAK Theatre, and the Noonday Demons. In the “midway” adjacent to Gazebo Park, a block closed to traffic between 103 and 104 Streets, the information tent noticeboard posted the latest additions or cancellations, the sold-outs and the for-sales. Ranged on either side of the street was a smorgasbord of sushi and satay, oyster burgers and ice-cream. The Fringe midway offered more than one kind of grazing experience. For sale were black leather briefs; for signing were petitions from The Canadian Peace Pledge. And competing for space with audience and extension cords were minstrels and mimes, flautists and violinists. A full house was always evident in the large beer tent erected beside Gazebo Park. This venue afforded a view of the street theatre, and was itself a boisterous celebration of the arts.
Welcome to the NHL, Footprints on the Moon, Refugees
Authors: Williams Alan , Hunter Maureen , Rintoul Harry
Published: June 2023

Announcing itself as “Western Canada’s newest publisher of modem drama,” Blizzard Press is based in Winnipeg. It is not clear from these plays whether the press will live up to its name and take the country by an awesome, dazzling prairie storm. All three of these plays set their sights at a modest range, if not lower, as Harry Rintoul’s defiantly lower-case title proclaims. Alan Williams, by far the most experienced writer, manages to produce a bracing spring breeze; Maureen Hunter has a sensibility where terms like “zephyr” seem more appropriate, and Harry Rintoul occasionally whips up a dank November draught. His play does, however, contain an exchange that seems significant to Canadian drama in general, and to the drama of isolated regions with a harsh climate in particular:
Politics of the Gaze Challenges in Canadian Women’s Theatre
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: June 2023

The creation of a model of theatrical communication has been central to semiotic investigations in theatre. Not surprisingly, as a result of this focus, the theatre audience has been accorded an increasingly important role. Keir Elam concludes: “It is with the spectator, in brief, that theatrical communication begins and ends” (96-7). Yet importance, or even centrality, has not brought about a widespread emancipation of the audience. Even with their new status, audiences are generally isolated in the auditorium with only the traditional recourses to collaboration in theatrical performance – the silent activity of decoding and the audible response of applause. The spectator is active in interpretation, yet virtually passive in behaviour. Most audiences are, in effect, a cluster of individual spectators and the maintenance of such rigid boundaries (stage to spectator, spectator to spectator) denies the potential (creative) power of the collective.
Revisions of Probability: An Interview with Judith Thompson
Authors: Tomc Sandra
Published: June 2023

This interview took place on Tuesday, 24 January 1989 in Judith Thompson’s home. The general question I was interested in pursuing was, what is it to be a woman writing for the theatre? We rapidly narrowed it down. Sandra Tome: Youhave two small children. When do you find time to write?
The Company of Sirens: Popular Feminist Theatre In Canada
Authors: Bird Kym
Published: June 2023

The Company of Sirens is a popular, feminist theatre troupe formed in Toronto in 1985. They are engaged in collaborative theatre whose main objective is to “heal their audiences through humour” and educate them with respect to social and political issues, history, and ideology. The Working People’s Picture Show and Foul Play are performed regularly in union halls, women’s shelters, high schools and universities across the country and are adapted to the concerns of particular groups, sometimes with members of these groups helping to create the new scenes. Mother Tongues falls into the considerably more esoteric genre of the performance piece but is nevertheless concerned with the same political issues and attitudes that inspire The Sirens’ more specifically pedagogical works.
Banff Masterclass Theatre
Authors: Kaplan Jon
Published: June 2023

Not many theatre ventures really begin with a group of actors sitting around someone’s living room and hashing out what needs improving in Canadian theatre. But that circumstance gave birth to Masterclass Theatre in early 1984, when Toronto actors Patricia Hamilton, Martha Bums, Elva Mai Hoover and director Jackie Maxwell came up with the idea of a training program in which professional actors could, as veteran performer Hamilton notes, “ stretch their acting muscles.”
Around the Festivals / 4: I Saw the Future at the Children’s Festival
Authors: Goffin Jeffrey
Published: June 2023

It was the end of May. I found myself at the Olympic Plaza in downtown Calgary. Instead of a handful of office workers enjoying their lunchtime reprieve in a quiet sunny spot, there were thousands of children. Colourful tents, balloons and banners decorated the block. Clowns, jugglers, singers, mimes, musicians and artists lead the children in various activities. Even the adjoining Centre for the Performing Arts and the Glenbow Museum were awash with children. In the Max Bell Theatre, Mermaid Theatre performed a black light show. In the Martha Cohen Theatre the Youth Drama Society of Soweto presented a collective creation. In the rehearsal hall England’s Bac to Bac performed a play about West Africa. Hundreds of kids packed the Jack Singer Concert Hall to hear Heather Bishop. At the Glenbow, Quest Theatre acted out Robert Munsch stories.
Toronto Talent Over Tradition
Authors: Whittaker Herbert , Breon Robin
Published: June 2023

Opportunities for employment for non-white performers in Canada’s theatre were reported in vivid instances at Toronto’s Ryerson Theatre last spring. A young East Indian actress who had been trained at the National Theatre School recounted her application to Bill Glassco, co-artistic director of the Canadian Stage Company. He had explained that under normal circumstances he would probably not consider her for a role such as Juliet unless her audition was “exceptionally good. No, it would have to be brilliant,” he said. Another director, one aware of minority problems, was John Van Burek, director of the Théâtre Français de Toronto. He admitted that visible minorities needed to be aggressive to win attention. “You have to break down my door,” was the way he phrased it.
Strategies for Survival / 1: The Ground Zero Model
Authors: Bouzek Don , Lawrence Loree
Published: June 2023

Ground Zero is a popular theatre that initiates theatre and video projects with labour and activist groups in Toronto (see CTR 53). Companies like Ground Zero that operate without a physical plant and seek project funding from social sectors frequently overlooked by cultural groups may be best equipped to weather the changes in cultural funding that many fear lie ahead.
Serpent in the Night Sky
Authors: Warren Dianne
Published: June 2023

The playwright would like to thank the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre, the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the City of Regina Arts Commission.
The Third Ascent, Sky, The Chinese Man Said Goodbye
Authors: Moher Frank , Gault Connie , McManus Bruce , Nothof Anne
Published: June 2023

Since its founding in September 1987, Blizzard Publishing of Winnipeg has published a dozen new Canadian plays, among which are The Third Ascent by Frank Moher, Sky by Connie Gault, and The Chinese Man Said Goodbye by Bruce McManus. All three are by Western Canadian playwrights, and all were first produced in the Prairie provinces: The Third Ascent at Theatre Network, Edmonton, in January, 1988; Sky at 25th Street Theatre, Saskatoon, in February, 1989, and then at Theatre Network in March, 1989 as part of the Carlton Theatre Trail exchange of plays; The Chinese Man Said Goodbye at Prairie Theatre Exchange, Winnipeg, in February, 1989. The Third Ascent was also produced by the Prairie Theatre Exchange in November 1989, and its publication by Blizzard coincided with its production, thus fulfilling Blizzard’s commitment to make available to students and teachers of drama the text of current theatre productions. This theatre and publishing network in the West benefits playwrights and audiences.
A Revolution in Aboriginal Theatre, Our Own Stories, A Revolution in Aboriginal Theatre
Authors: Wheeler Jordan
Published: June 2023

Performing in front of a full house in Winnipeg’s Gas Station Theatre in the spring of 1990, Floyd Favel’s stage drama All My Relations brought both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people together for a performance that created awareness and pride, two important commodities in a time when Aboriginal people in this country are making their presence known as never before. About a Cree family living in Saskatchewan, All My Relations is a play written from the Aboriginal perspective. Performed by an all-Aboriginal cast, scored by an Aboriginal musician, and written by an Aboriginal playwright, it is an authentic Aboriginal story presented by members of an established and rapidly growing community of Aboriginal artists.