bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Performing Femininity” On Stage and Off
Authors: Bateman David
Published: June 2023

Coming of age in Toronto in the late seventies has had a particular effect upon the re-presentation of my body, on stage and off, as a drag performance artist, an educator, and a creative writer. The “performing” bodies of internationally acclaimed Canadian female impersonator Craig Russell and Toronto-based writer Margaret Gibson emerged during a formative period in my development and provided me with bold physical and textual images that informed my representational strategies over the next two decades. As an effeminate young man I was simultaneously frightened and titillated by the very self-reflective sight of a gay male, in drag, displaying his femininity for a paying audience. Writing about it in a very open, bittersweet way, as Gibson did in her short story “Making It,” was equally engaging for a young, aspiring drag queen with literary ambitions. Through these experiences, among others, I have come to view gender behaviour as largely constructed and citational (citing masculinity and femininity through a variety of culturally conceived bodies and texts). Subsequently, the intersecting sites of gay male effeminacy, and the kind of femininity culturally enforced upon the biological female strike me as prime locations for an interrogation of gay men as women, women as women, and women as men – on stage, on the page, and off.
MindLands
Authors: Hamilton W.A.
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright W.A. Hamilton. 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’ Union of Canada.
Theatrical Bodies and Everyday Life
Authors: Graham Catherine
Published: June 2023

The question of the body is not a new one in theatre studies. Every serious discussion of theatricality since the beginning of the modern period has had to deal with the body, simply because the central medium of communication in the theatre is the human body. Phillip Stubbes’s proposal to abolish the theatre of Elizabethan England was based on the argument that the actors’ use of the body to impersonate both nobility and the feminine was morally unacceptable. Diderot, in his Paradoxe sur le comédien, wrestled with the problem of the actor who must appear to feel real emotion while maintaining complete control of his or her body. Lessing asserted that “a crucial factor in supporting the efficacy of dialogue is the silent but persuasive eloquence of body language” (Burwick 43, 103). At the beginning of this century, Edward Gordon Craig proposed the replacement of the human body on the stage by the more controllable Ubermarionnette. Even Stanislavski, who is most renowned for creating an acting technique based on “affective memory,” gave significant instruction to actors about training the body (Wiles 34).
I Chink
Authors: Luu Yung
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Yung Luu. 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 copyright information contact: Yung Luu, 306-120 25th Ave. SW, Calgary, AB T2R 0Y8.
Dave veut jouer Richard III: Interrogating the Shakespearean Body in Québec
Authors: Lieblein Leanore
Published: June 2023

Shakespeare has always served francophone Québec as a site of difference. He has been both a rival to Molière and an agent of the British and anglo-Canadian other. His work has been emulated and denigrated, parodied and defaced. Even when admired, the performance of Shakespeare in Québec has never been uncontaminated by its multiple colonial associations; thus, Québec adaptations of Shakespeare have also been a site of resistance: Michel Garneau’s 1978 “translation” of Macbeth into Québécois, for example, demonstrated in the context of his nationalist project that Québécois was not merely a dialect but a language, one that had the maturity and the flexibility to render the words of even Le grand Will. At the same time, given Garneau’s sense of Québec’s otherness of language, culture and politics, the ostensible act of translation could not be other than an act of adaptation – or tradaptation, the word he coined – in which Shakespeare’s Scotland became “notre pauvre pays,” the victim of a tyrannical oppressor (Brisset 199-297 and passim).
Virtually Canadian
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: June 2023

Almost certainly, in every Canadian city, some theatre at some point in each and every year will produce a Shakespeare play, motivated in no small part by the fact that their production will likely have little difficulty finding an audience. This is because, as Michael Bristol has told us, “there is no doubt that Shakespeare is one of the great show business success stories” (viii). It is not Shakespeare’s blue-chip cultural capital that surely motivated the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation web site to choose him as its Artist of the Millennium? (see CBC, Act II).
A Midsummer Night’s Mash-up
Authors: Mccutcheon Mark
Published: June 2023

On 1 July 2000, Toronto’s Opera House became the unlikely set for a passing strange adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Serenity Industries, a Toronto dance party promotion company, hired the Queen Street East Theatre turned concert hall to host A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a Canada Day rave.
Dancing With Shakespeare
Authors: Fortier Mark
Published: June 2023

In 2001, Tom Stroud celebrated his tenth anniversary as artistic director of Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers. In that period he has created a number of performances in which dance and theatre intertwine in the use of verbal text as inspiration for dance movement. As a choreographer, Stroud is often dissatisfied with “pure dance,” in which movement has no context or connection to ideas. For him, text makes movement specific and adds a psychological dimension to dance, while dance embodies ideas and allows access to the emotional heart of the textual material. His approach to text and theatre is not so much narrative as “poetic”: his dance presents a series of images around a set of themes that arise in the chosen text. In this way, dance “makes a statement,” but this statement is in the oracular form of images that allow for audience members to make their own contemplative connections. Stroud invokes Pina Bausch as one of his precursors who have united theatre and dance. In a Canadian context it is easy to be reminded of Montreal’s Carbone 14.
Adapting Shakespeare to an Outdoor Canadian Prairie Reality
Authors: Heatley Stephen
Published: June 2023

“Adaptation” is the act of fitting one thing to another, modifying and altering something and in so doing, making it more suitable for a particular purpose. The question I am addressing here is “can we consider interpretation to be adaptation?” Is the simple act of placing a play in a setting or using the performance space in a unique way an act of adaptation? Can we consider the production of a Shakespearean play specifically in a Canadian spatial and cultural context to be an “adaptation”? I would say “yes,” and to examine this question, I’ll introduce you to the work of Edmonton’s summer Shakespeare company, the Free Will Players.
Reading Elsinore: The Ghost and the Machine
Authors: Knowles Ric
Published: June 2023

Publishing or reading Elsinore, “written and directed by Robert Lepage,” according to the show’s program, seems misguided. The play’s claim to fame is its inventive computer-controlled hydraulic staging rather than its text, after all, and not a word of the script is in fact “written” by Robert Lepage – at least not as writing is conventionally understood. In one sense, to read the play is to be reminded of the old joke about a student’s dismissal of Shakespeare’s Hamlet itself as nothing but a pastiche of familiar quotations. And Lepage’s adaptation of Hamlet for a solo performer (doubled) only exacerbates the problem: as in his other somewhat obsessive forays into Hamlet (in the various extant versions Le Polygraph, for example, or even in his acting role in Denys Arcand’s 1989 film, Jesus of Montreal), he focuses in Elsinore on what may come to have been understood as the play’s clichés. These include most notably the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, which, against the original Hamlet’s narrative logic, introduces and frames the version of Elsinore published here as an eschatological (or perhaps ontological) meditation. And like many whose contact with Hamlet is indirect or distant, Lepage seems to get the scenes all mixed up and in the wrong order.
Jazz and Blues Dramatic Literature and Performance Bibliography
Authors: Vautour Bart , Mirrlees Tanner , Watts Allan
Published: June 2023

Albee, Edward. Zoo Story: The Death of Bessie Smith and the Sandbox. New York: Coward–McCann, 1986.
Views & Reviews
Authors: Graham Catherine
Published: June 2023

The relationship of jazz and theatre, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, is a complex one. The three reviews featured here speak to some of the diverse influences jazz, and the community it comes out of, has on contemporary theatre. Kate Bligh’s review discusses a collaborative work created for the Montreal International Jazz Festival by one of Canada’s best known men of the theatre, Robert Lepage, in collaboration with musician Peter Gabriel. Her description of the piece, which took place in a cabaret setting reminiscent of the early jazz scene, demonstrates the affinity of Lepage’s creation techniques with the jazz process of improvising to create multiple variations on well-known motifs. In the end though, Bligh wonders why Lepage’s use of these techniques yielded a series of images that, taken together, had only limited impact. Why, she asks, did the transitions between scenes sometimes seem more interesting than the scenes themselves? Was the technology overwhelming the liveness of the onstage performers? Or was there a more serious problem here, a problem that is perhaps evidenced in directorial choices that emphasized the formal qualities of the piece over its social meanings, as in a sequence where a monkey and a Zulu warrior seem to be presented as virtual stand-ins for each other?
Editorial
Authors: Watts Allan
Published: June 2023

Any look at the art forms of jazz, blues and theatre will almost inevitably touch on the improvisational qualities of each and the ways in which those arts may inform each other. This issue features articles and scripts in which jazz and blues are not only considered as musical accompaniment to the dramatic text but are powerful metaphors for the dramatic action.
Tarragon Flavoured Memories
Authors: Breon Robin
Published: June 2023

On a clear, sunny and crisp second day of January the arts community in Toronto paused to pay tribute to a fallen leader. Urjo Kareda (1944–2001) had died of cancer in late December and a memorial service at the Bloor Street United Church saw a standing-room-only gathering of actors, playwrights, designers, administrators, arts patrons, educators and theatre critics come together with Kareda’s family and friends to pay tribute to this remarkable talent.
Generating a Performance of the Constructed Self: Thirteen Minutes in The Paradise Institute
Authors: Shaver Andrew
Published: June 2023

The Paradise Institute, as exhibited in Toronto at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at the Harbourfront Centre, is an oddity indeed. Straddling critical discourses, and occupying an ambiguous space within the context of the “white-wall” gallery, it defies standard means of investigation because it insinuates so many forms of art practice, incorporating visual art, sculpture, site installation, film, live performance and sound design. The work is the product of a long-time collaboration between high profile Canadian artists, and partners, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. This piece, their most recent collaboration, was commissioned by Wayne Baerwaldt – at the time adjunct curator at Winnipeg’s Plug In-ICA, now the director of The Power Plant – along with contributing partner The Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), as Canada’s entry in the forty-ninth Venice Biennale (2001). The Paradise Institute won a special award at the Venice Biennale, and marked the first time that Canada garnered any kind of decoration at the prestigious art competition. It is significant that this piece won a special prize for “involving the audience in a new cinematic experience where fiction and reality, technology and the body converge into multiple and shifting journeys through space and time.”
Canadian Theatre, the State, and Industrial Development
Authors: Mckinnie Michael
Published: June 2023

For some time I have been investigating the historical relationship between theatre practice and urban space, mostly in the context of theatre in Toronto since 1967. It became apparent early in this research that the intersection between theatre and the city raised questions not only of geography but also of political economy. These questions, however, highlighted a problem: if the critical literature on theatre and space is expanding rapidly – though not always rigorously – it would be hard to locate a similar critical interest in theatre and political economy. There is undoubtedly exemplary research being undertaken in the field of theatre and economics (the best instance of which is perhaps Tracy Davis’ outstanding work on the economic history of the British stage), but analyses of the ways in which theatre negotiates state actions and broader economic policy are few and far between.2
Ironic Images: Sharon Pollock’s Stratford Productions
Authors: Nothof Anne
Published: June 2023

Sharon Pollock has long distrusted “institutionalized theatre,” feeling that “the industrial corporate assembly line doesn’t work for creating art” (qtd. in Taylor R5). As she explained to Sherri Telenko in response to the question, “Why is Sharon Pollock so dissatisfied with the state of Canadian theatre?”:

Theatre grows out of chaos and it moves to institutionalization. The more successful you are, the more you move towards that end and there lies death. I believe you have to find the line that enabl es you to create and grow and at the same time, does not breed the kind of pigeon-holing and specialization that institutionalization brings. (Telenko 14)
How Passionate Are You?: An Interview with Sharon Pollock
Authors: Grace Sherrill
Published: June 2023

Sterrill Grace interviewed Sharon Pollock publicly al a rehearsal hall in the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario on 18 October 2002, as part of the Celebrating Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference and Festival. The interview was transcribed by Jesse Stewart and edited for publication by Ric Knowles.
The De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Method: Making Stories
Authors: Hengen Shannon
Published: June 2023

At his father’s side, he learned that it is the story-bearing nation, not the arms-bearing nation, that will triumph over racism and tyranny.
The Politics and Business of Playwriting
Authors: Lill Wendy , Nolan Yvette , Sherman Jason , Verdecchia Guillermo , Rebeiro Angela
Published: June 2023

This panel discussion took place on 18 October 2002 as part of the Celebrating Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference at the Studio rehearsal hall in the Avon Theatre complex of the Stratford Festival. It was chaired by Angela Rebeiro and featured Wendy Lill, Yvette Nolan, Jason Sherman and Guillermo Verdecchia. The discussion was transcribed by Jesse Stewart and edited by Ric Knowles.
Politics and Plays
Authors: Gilbert Sky , Macleod Joan , Varma Rahul , Yoon Jean , Knowles Ric
Published: June 2023

The following panel discussion was held at the Celebrating Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference and Festival on 19 October 2002 at the Studio Rehearsal Hall in the Avon Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. The panel was chaired by Ric Knowles, and featured panellists Sky Gilbert, Joan MacLeod, Rahul Varma and Jean Yoon. It was transcribed by Jesse Stewart and edited by Ric Knowles.
The Audience-driven Aesthetic of Recent Canadian Political Plays
Authors: Graham Catherine
Published: June 2023

The 1996 National Film Board film, Fermano, His Life on Stage, features an important discussion between playwright David Fennario and the former artistic director of Montréal’s Centaur Theatre, Maurice Podbrey. In it Podbrey notes Fennario’s success at the Centaur theatre with such political plays as On the Job and Balconville. There can be little doubt about the political impact of Balconville in 1970s Québec: it was and remains one the most important works in the history of English-Canadian theatre history in that province. Produced at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre two years after the election to power of the Parti Québécois and two year’s before Quebec’s first referendum on sovereignty, it used formal means as much as thematic content to confront anglo Quebecers with the new reality that history was forcing them to confront. As the name suggests, Balconville takes place on the balconies of a rental property in the southwest of Montréal, where working-class Anglophones and Francophones live beside each other without every really trying to understand each other. Yet the play demonstrates, often through humour, working-class families who have the same problems with gender relations and landlords, whichever of Montreal’s two dominant languages they are speaking. In formal terms, the play presented a distinct challenge for the audience, as it was played in both French and English. The choice to have Marc Gélinas, a Francophone actor, play his role in a very vernacular Québécois French, which was more than a little difficult for anglo Quebecers of the time (schooled in the regularly conjugated version of the language) to understand, challenged Centaur’s audience (see MacLeod). In effect, for Montréal Anglophone audiences of the time, to try to understand the action of this play was to face the new realities of a Québec where one could either retreat into a unilingual English ghetto or make an attempt to communicate despite the fear that one was never completely understanding what was said. Yet in his discussion of this important work in the film, Fennario announces that he considers Balconville a failure, largely because of the middle-class audiences to whom it was presented. Centaur’s audience, Fennario tells Podbrey, could and would never really rise to the challenge Balconville posed and this in itself made the production less politically effective than it might otherwise have been (qtd. in MacLeod).
CounterPoses: Re-imagining Tableaux Vivants
Authors: Bristol Joanne
Published: June 2023

CounterPoses: Re-imagining Tableaux Vivants, the catalogue for the event organized by Display Cult and Oboro, delivers an array of information, including abundant full-bleed colour photos, texts by the artists and an essay by Display Cult (curators Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick). CounterPoses was a three-day event involving twelve hybrid performance/installation works presented simultaneously throughout Montreal’s 4001 Berri building in May 1998. Aesthetically diverse, and produced from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the works shared an investment in examining and embodying artist and audience relationships, implicating pressing issues in performance cultures, museum cultures and everyday life.
To risk is dangerous too, but the rewards are very seductive
Authors: Cooper Michael
Published: June 2023

My passion for photography has driven me for most of my life. I am forever grateful to my brother, for it is he who introduced me to the world of theatre photography. It was at the end of the seventies when I first shot the performing arts. As a young and eager student of photography, the beauty of light, sound, staging, costumes and movement quickly seduced me. To this day I feel lucky to be part of this special community.
Home of My Soul, by Maki Yi
Authors: Fisher Dionne
Published: June 2023

The F.L.O.A.T. (or, For Lack of a Title) Festival, in Regina, Saskatchewan, has just completed its first year and talk of a second is already in the works. Founded by Ben Redant and organized by Kendra Triffo and Erin Graas, these three emerging artists wanted to create a venue that is completely dedicated to new play development by grant ing playwrights the opportunity to see their work on its feet; and in the hopes of generating audience and peer input that will help further their writing.
The Théâtre Parminou: Thirty Years of History
Authors: Martineau Maureen , Graham Catherine
Published: June 2023

Born in the effervescence of the social and protest movements of the 1970s, the Théâtre Parminou quickly defined its identity around a desire to move beyond the closed world of mainstream institutional theatre. From its foundation in May 1973 by the graduates of the Conservatories of Dramatic Art of Quebec and Montreal, the troupe’s mandate has been to create and tour works, in a popular theatre format, that take up the social problems of its era.
Still “Activist” after All These Years?
Authors: Grant Cynthia
Published: June 2023

“Feminist activist theatre worker” was an identity that I was more comfortable with as a moniker in the eighties and nineties. Yet, I still attempt to live as a person who seeks justice, who is engaged in transformative learning as an educator, who still will challenge the power structures. During my many years running theatre companies, first Nightwood Theatre (1979-1985) and then Company of Sirens (1985 until recently), and as a working Board member of the Theatre Centre (1979-1994), my interest was in “creating spaces” – both in the literal sense and in the sense of context – where meaningful theatre would flourish, where social change was possible.
The Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop
Authors: Grant Cynthia
Published: June 2023

Fely Villasin arrived in Canada in 1974, along with many others from the Philippines who were leaving a country under military dictatorship. She became very active in the anti-Marcos movement, using theatre as a part of political organizing. Over time, the Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop was formed, producing a fascinating series of plays over the years. I have long admired the plays of the CBCW, a hidden gem in the cultural landscape of Canadian theatre, and the work of Fely Villasin, an activist of incredible skill.
CAN AN IMMIGRANT SOUTH KOREAN THEATRE ARTIST BE HEARD IN CANADA?
Authors: Grant Cynthia
Published: June 2023

Huynhee Seo came to Canada in 1997, after spending fifteen years working in activist theatre with a group called Tobagi Theatre, based in the southwest of South Korea in Kwangju. In Kiang, a very unique project of community development had taken place, through an initiative called the Wildfire Night School. Several popular educators, brilliant intellectuals influenced by Paolo Freire, transformed communities of the poor. So in 1980, when the military government was installed, it was in Kwangju that there was community resistance. Initially a street theatre group as part of the community actions, the group formalized itself over time and became Tobagi Theatre. Tobagi Theatre toured in North America in 1994 and 1996. I spoke with Huynhee one late night in a Toronto kitchen about a crucial period of politics and culture both in her life and the life of South Korea.
Political Theatre: Because We Must
Authors: Gilbert Sky
Published: June 2023

I have been writing political plays for many (almost twenty-five) years. In fact, I find that when I’m interviewed on television or radio (if I’m not careful), I’m much more likely to be introduced as a gay activist than as a playwright. I’ve learned to accept this – it very much goes with the territory. I’m firmly convinced that a significant proportion of Torontonians avoid my plays like the plague. They don’t want to be preached at (who does?) and they’re especially not interested in hearing over and over again that “gay is good.”
Attracting The Eyes and Capitalizing on The Wallets: The Problem with Toronto’s New Public Performance Space
Authors: Harrower Natalie
Published: June 2023

With the official opening of Yonge-Dundas Square last spring, the Toronto theatre and music communities gained a new outdoor performance venue, and the discount ticket seller TO TIX, a permanent home. The space itself is a curious addition to Toronto’s inner-city landscape. It’s a great, big, blank canvas of granite slabs, with a few concrete benches, a skinny canopy structure that is reminiscent of the Gardiner Expressway, and a double row of fountains that light up as the sky darkens. Surrounded as it is by concrete buildings and the honks and exhaust from a steady stream of cars, one might have hoped for a little green space. But one cannot argue that the square seems out of place; the design is urban grey and it blends visually into the urban grey that surrounds it. The granite slabs that line its surface are graphically reminiscent of the outdoor plazas of nearby skyscrapers, and the vertical lines of the pillars rhyme with the varying heights of the surrounding buildings. The square is formally compatible with its surroundings; the question is how well it will function under the hybrid identity assigned to it by the city. The city is marketing Yonge-Dundas Square as a public space, while at the same time encouraging it as a venue for private rental. Introducing twenty-four-hour surveillance, rental fees, and a plethora of advertising billboards charges the space with a political dimension and puts in doubt the idea that this is simply a new gathering space for public entertainments. Yonge-Dundas Square may at first appear as a genuine addition to Toronto’s public space, an exciting new performance venue to be shaped by citizen use, but it is also a commercial venture that aims to free itself from the city’s purse strings in three years’ time. Our role as active spectators obliges us to be conscious of the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, performative elements at play in this new venue.
Black Theatre Canada: A Short History
Authors: Breon Robin
Published: June 2023

It seems like there is something of a renaissance of late in the Black theatre movement in North America. And for many who found the penumbral period from the mid-1980s into the 1990s to be a mean-spirited time, this is good news indeed. As I write, two phenomenally successful examples of Black theatre in Toronto, Djanet Sears’s play The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (which has been remounted this year as part of Mirvish Productions subscription season) and the CanStage production of Cookin’ at the Cookery, starring Jackie Richardson as blues singer Alberta Hunter, are both playing to full houses.
Black Theatre in Montreal and Toronto in the Sixties and Seventies: The Struggle for Recognition
Authors: Henry Jeff
Published: June 2023

In the sixties, Blacks in Montreal made up a tiny percentage of the population. Apart from the English-speaking West Indians, there was also a group of French (Creole)-speaking Haitians. Interestingly enough, at that period, geography did not matter, but language and culture did, so English- and French-speaking Caribbean migrants had little to do with one another. The migrants performed in community-based theatre. Productions were staged in church and community halls and school auditoriums. The actors, stage managers and costume designers were housewives, civil servants, nurses, teachers, doctors and other professionals. Rehearsals were held on evenings and on weekends and productions were on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. After the final show, more often than not, a party for cast, crew and volunteers was held.
an africanadian theatre aesthetic trek . . .
Authors: Mandiela Ahdri Zhina
Published: June 2023

It’s 1992, summer in toronto, and i am on rebound from some very wounding successes: unflinching, eye-opening realizations wrought from unmatched expectations and a bit of acclaim/near fame, i am on the edge, no verge – make that the precipice – of quitting the scene. the theatre scene, that is. yes i am ready to pack up my tongue and feet and paper, wrap up my stagecraft and trade them in for a camera and celluloid and hopefully some better budgets. and i very nearly did.
3: from The Language of the Heart
Authors: Moodie Andrew
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Andrew Moodie © 2003. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are expressly forbidden without written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For permissions, copyright and performance rights, contact the author through the Playwrights Guild of Canada, 54 Wolseley St., 2nd Floor, Toronto, ON M5T 1A5; telephone (416) 703-0201; fax (416) 703-0059; e-mail: info@playwrightsguild.ca
Views & Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

Social differences are not simply given to experience through an already authenticated cultural tradition; they are signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project – at once a vision and a construction – mat takes you “beyond” yourself, in order that you may return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture)
Destination Unknown: A Director/Designer Dialogue
Authors: Christenson Jonathan , Gerecke Bretta
Published: June 2023

Jonathan: Let’s start with how our design process for Fusion differed from other Catalyst Theatre1 projects.

Bretta: As a designer, I am predominantly in response mode - responding to a text or the seeds of an idea from a director or a playwright - and riffing on that. With Fusion, we chose to reverse the order. We dreamed up a set and lighting design and then hired eight writer/ director teams to create a performance in response. They were given a physical environment - a set (scaffolding towers, stairs, bridges), divided into ten distinct areas, with an interactive lighting effect for each area . We wanted to see what would happen if we reversed the offer/response mode that we traditionally find in theatre.
Feeling around the Repressed: Performing Uncanny Space in Sally Clark’s Jehanne of the Witches
Authors: Whittaker Robin
Published: June 2023

Startling to those who have encountered Sally Clark’s plays over the past two decades is that her terrible villains are sympathetic characters. At the same performed moment that we despise the antagonist’s violent psychological abuse of the heroine, we are drawn in by his boisterous displays of loud and creepy machismo as he attempts to both “get the girl” and thwart her objectives. Conversely, as Clark’s heroines are thrust into oppressive milieus, they themselves become monstrous. I would like to consider the tension between the male monstrous and the female-becoming-monstrous in Clark’s dark comedy, Jehanne of the Witches. Along the way, I posit a text-based framework for exploring the performed “uncanny” as experienced by both characters and spectators. I start by suggesting the following: Performance is “uncanny”; the “uncanny” is performance.
Theatre for Living and Practicing Democracy: Negotiating the Monologic Beast
Authors: Halvorson Becky
Published: June 2023

To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalencies and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity. Homi K. Bhabha,“Introduction: Locations of Cultu re” (18)
Staging the Postcolonial Monster in Judith Thompson’s Capture Me
Authors: Singh Dalbir
Published: June 2023

America’s purpose is more than to follow a process – it is to achieve a result the end of terrible threats to the civilized world. All free nations have a stake in preventing sudden and catastrophic attack We are asking them to join us, and many are doing so. Yet the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others. Whatever action Is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people. Different threats require different strategies. George W. Bush
Monstrous History: Judith Thompson’s Sled
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: June 2023

In Lion in the Streets (prod. 1990; pub. 1992), Judith Thompson used the device of a relay plot structure to suggest that the brutal killer of a young girl is not simply a criminal aberration but an extreme incarnation of the underlying spirit that pervades the community, manifesting itself in a range of violent acts perpetrated by a spectrum of seemingly less murderous citizens over the course of the play. As Thompson has explained, “The lion is the cruelty that is in all of us, the seed that is in everyone” (qtd. in Zimmerman, Playwrighting Women 203). In her 1997 play Sled, Thompson extends this earlier exploration of the monstrous wilderness within the urban heart to an epic vision of contemporary Canada and the history that has shaped it.
Views & Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession: the first tear says “How nice to see children running on the grass!”; the second tear says “How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!” Milan Kundera (qtd. in Zizek)
Witnessing the Workshop Process of Judith Thompson’s Capture Me: Mothers, Masks and Monsters
Authors: Read Robyn
Published: June 2023

I first met Judith Thompson when she was my professor for an Acting Studio course at the University of Guelph. We were performing Hamlet and she directed me to reach the core of Ophelia’s madness by “standing in the blood” of my character. At her request, I went outside on a muddy spring evening and rolled in the slush until I felt physically agitated and a little uncivilized as students passed by me on their way to the library. I had taken a risk, leaving my safe, known body to inhabit another. When I returned to the stage, proud of my transformation, she informed me that I was still not quite monster enough. “Robyn, you do not have enough shit in your hair,” she said, offering me the kindest of smiles, and I went back outside to rummage through the leaves.
Working with the Ghosts
Authors: Crowder Eleanor
Published: June 2023

Twice this summer, Rick Strong, the current president of the Friends of the Billings Estate, has stopped to watch me work as he crosses the path from the parking lot to the big house. “Outside all summer? You are so lucky!” he said. And he stands to watch the apprentices bunch through their eurythmy sequence a little longer.
Editorial
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

I came to the theatre through the army. But it took me more than four decades to understand the connection. As a teenager my performative rebellion against the strict naval culture of my family was to bolt to what seemed to me the furthest remove from the navy. To my father’s disappointment, I joined the army cadets.
Cast Iron
Authors: Codrington Lisa
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Lisa Codrington. 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 Playwrights Guild of Canada, 54 Wolseley Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto ON M5T 1A5; phone 416-703-0201.
Say Nothing by Ridiculusmus: The Northern Irish Conflict in a Suitcase
Authors: Defraeye Piet
Published: June 2023

David Woods and Jon Hough, two British actors who form the theatre company Ridiculusmus, are both pursuing PhDs in Comedy at the University of Kent. They know a thing or two about comedy and have strutted their stuff touring on various stages. Their Edinburgh Festival Three Men in a Boat (1992), inspired by Jerome K. Jerome’s satirical novel, was one of their early successes. As much as Jerome’s novel hinges on place and space, so does their latest show, Say Nothing, part of the High Performance Rodeo and also on tour in Vancouver and Edmonton.
The State of the Nation
Authors: McKinnie Michael
Published: June 2023

Well, maybe. As I write this from Birmingham, the British city where I live and work, Judith Thompson’s My Pyramids! Or: How I Got Fired from the Dairy Queen and Ended Up in Abu Ghraib, by Pvt. Lynndie England is playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The production, by Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, has received strong reviews in the British press. This even-handed treatment in the national newspapers makes a welcome change from the way that Canadian theatre is often covered here, when it is covered at all — more commonly, the British media treat Canadian theatre with a mixture of condescension, derision and, very rarely, rapturous embrace (usually when Ronnie Burkett comes to town).
Theatrical Nationhood in Radical Mobility: The Farm Show Futures and the Banner / Ground Zero Collaborations
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

The ghosts of The Farm Show haunt Canadian theatre still, more than three decades after it established a template for collectively created intervention theatre by moving into a rural township, recording its meetings with local farmers and their families on audiotape and then turning those exchanges into a reflexive theatrical report that “bounces along one way or another and then it stops” (Theatre Passe Muraille 19). Most recently and famously, the making of The Farm Show has provided the narrative platform for Michael Healey’s wildly successful play The Drawer Boy, which since its premiere in 1999 has won the Governor General’s Award for Drama and has been produced in theatres across Canada, the United States, Great Britain and New Zealand. The Drawer Boy testifies to the formative impact of The Farm Show as a critical point at which our present idea of “Canadian theatre” emerged as a cultural practice. The line between the two plays tells a story of cultural growth, of radical youth constructing a theatre method that has since developed into a professional system capable of exporting its history in plays like The Drawer Boy. But there is another line that leads from The Farm Show into the present and that offers a more radical narrative. Following that line, we can see how one signal historical moment can produce two radically different theatrical futures, which speak to opposing understandings of the relationship of theatre culture to national presence.
Of Borders, Identity and Cultural Icons: A Rant
Authors: Mojica Monique
Published: June 2023

I tire very easily of this topic of “Canadian identity.” I hear myself heaving great sighs of frustration and getting one of those irritated headaches. So, here I am wondering how I can explain to a Canadian theatre readership a world view that is so inside my body, so intrinsic an element to my being that I find it difficult to fragment it into a position for argument. Then there’s the perpetual explaining …
Seasons of Immigration to … a non-place near you
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

Think about leaving a place you call home, a place constituted by your history, your family, your language and all those memories that feed the story of yourself. Then, imagine for reasons that may be personal, to do with ambition or family, to do with an obligation, or reasons too horrendous to tell, you must leave this place. You choose to travel to Canada because you believe it will be the best place. In leaving, you are suddenly transported from a “place” of identity, as anthropologist Marc Augé describes it, to a “space” of displacement, a “non-place.” The non-place is the manifestation of a world increasingly concerned about commensurate, unproblematic exchange— of money, of commodities, of information and of people. It is the location where history, language and all facets of identity are abstracted for the ease of mediation, movement and evaluation through the mechanisms of trade and travel. For Augé, a non-place is
Admitting Where I’m At
Authors: Zimmer Jacob
Published: June 2023

A crowd gathers at an art gallery for Public Recordings’ Manual for Incidence. Seven people leave the space. This exit is a beginning. They go down the stairs to the basement, into the bathrooms, into an electrical room. As they leave, it becomes clear that something has started. The music gets louder; the lights brighter. We are in a very long, very white room. It has a bar and a door in the centre that leads to the stairs to the basement; it has bathrooms and an electrical room. We (the audience) are newly aware of this architecture as we wait for the re-entrance.
Beneath Bridges, Loading Docks and Fire Escapes: Theatre SKAM Tours Billy Nothin’ and Aerwacol
Authors: Gladstone Amiel
Published: June 2023

“Hi. My name is Amiel. I just wanted to come by and let you know we will be performing a show, a play actually … Over there.” And I point. A company of four or five actors can be seen, working the ground with rakes, unloading chairs from a van, and running a power cord from a nearby building.
Thoughts for the New Alternative: Histories, Boundaries and the Space Apart
Authors: Shaver Andrew
Published: June 2023

In Canada, underground and alte rnat ive th eatres, driven by the strong cur re nts of a newl y vocal and increasingly nationalistic generation, blossomed in the 1960s, matured in the 1970s, and subsequently found a reasonably assured place in the mainstream over the course of the 1980s. At the foreground of this movement were the theatres and companies of Toronto, such household names as Theatre Passe Muraille (emerging from the contro versial and now-defun ct Rochd ale College), Factory Theatre Lab, Toronto Free Theatre and Tarragon Theatre, in addition to some lesser-known companies such as Global Village Theatre, New Theatre and the Phoenix Theatre. The 1990s thinned their ranks Significantly (one notable loss being the Toronto Free Theatre), but the surviving companies were soon to be counted among the same Canadian theatre establishment to which they had once so effectively provided an alternative. It is now a commonplace for these mid-sized companies and their counterparts across the country to coproduce new works with major regional theatres such as the National Arts Cent re (the old status quo). Yesterday’s alternative is today’s mainstream.
A Tragedy, Defined Simply, Staged Dangerously
Authors: Ackerman Marianne
Published: June 2023

There were moments in Peter Hinton’s production of A Doll House when I wondered if I’d ever really seen the play before. As the cast came onstage at curtain call, their final performance before a packed three-hundred-seat Saidye Bronfman Centre theatre, I got up, assuming others would too. But no, they stayed put, clapping politely, leaving me, three rows from the front, a one-woman standing ovation until the actors disappeared. Mortifying at the time, it was in retrospect a cathartic experience.
Duncan Mcintosh’s Island Paradise
Authors: Stetson Kent
Published: June 2023

Outside his home on the spectacular north shore of Prince Edward Island — with its sunset view to the northwest, gulf horizon due north and marram grass dunes above — Duncan Mcintosh contemplates reinvention. In a burst of light on water, flocks of migratory waterfowl circle Stanhope Bay, lower knee-locked landing gear, spread webbed feet, stretch long necks, then settle perfunctorily on the surface. Amid much flap, squawk and chatter, Canada geese, mallards and blue-winged teal soon settle into spring routines, courting on the surface, up-ending to feed below, their airy, fluid patterns driven by tide, current and wind. Bald eagles, osprey and hawks circle overhead. A red fox bitch parades her four tumbling pups. Four years on, the grace and beauty of PEI’s spring awakening continues to intrigue Duncan. “Who,” he wonders, “choreographs this miraculous ballet?” Interesting question from Mcintosh, a director/producer as comfortable directing the Shaw Festival’s classically trained veterans as choreographing and directing the shiny new singer/dancer/actor cast of the remount of his production of Island impresario Campbell Webster’s new L.M. Montgomery—based hit musical, Anne and Gilbert.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

In the spring of 2006, when Sir Paul McCartney came to New foundland to protest the seal hunt , the whole event seemed all too familiar. Hadn’t these battle-lines been drawn many times before? This division between an international class of celebrity do-gooders and a class of workers doing some god-awful job in the service of survival; this divide between a lobby of influential elites and a community of people in a remote part of the world - haven’t we seen all of this before? Here was a conflict replete with differences in politics, economics, culture and power over the media circus engendered by the battle. While the media focused on the obvious passions being inflamed by the event - the impoverishment in a rural Newfoundland community, the way the doomed seals tend to look just like the family pet or the way the celebrity (rock star, film actor, etc .) tends to look heroic as he or she apparently puts his or her own life at risk in the service of saving the world - I wondered more about what the staging of this conflict said about deeply perceived notions of enlightenment as they relate to one’s location in the world or simply to one’s place in Canada.
Tiger of Malaya
Authors: Kanagawa Hiro
Published: June 2023

Caution: Copyright Hiro Kanagawa. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the copyright union. Changes to the script are for bidden 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 Hiro Kanagawa, 645 Uni on St. Vancouver, BC V6A 2C1; 604-872-7687.
Views and Reviews
Authors: Houston Andrew
Published: June 2023

There is something abo ut sound th at is somehow beyond our control. This is partly to do with how we sense sound as compared with how we sense the world in other ways. We can close our eyes and not see the world, but our ears are not equipped with the same ability to control reception. This is also to do with the relationship of our hearing to our other senses. Even if we plug our ears, sound still reaches us through vibration, or if we somehow manage to ignore vibration, there is still this sense of listening to some thing within, unintended - perhaps the sound of being. Sound is entirely an imrn crsivc experience; it surrounds us and demands that we be present to its sensation; or, as sound researcher Douglas Kahn has said, “Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences” (27). All communication can be more or less be summed up this way, as an “exchange among presences,” and yet, when we consider the multiple, layered and unpredictable ways in which this exchange is manifested through sound, we must consider the noise of such relationships; we must consider what noise can tell us about being in the world.
All the Voices
Authors: Anderson Fortner
Published: June 2023

A name is called and the next reader stands and steps out of the crowd into the light of the stage. Clutching a sheaf of paper, approaching the mike slowly, warily — there are adjustments and hesitations; then an apology for what we are about to hear. The reader is preparing to bare his or her soul to a group of strangers in a bar, cafe or church basement somewhere in North America, and the soul always needs a little context.