One of the last performances Vertical City (Bruce Barton and Pil Hansen) created before moving fr... more One of the last performances Vertical City (Bruce Barton and Pil Hansen) created before moving from Toronto to Calgary was Trace, which premiered at the 2014 SummerWorks festival. Crafted in a compact and intense development process with close collaborators Michelle Polak and Martin Julien, Trace marked a subtle but defining moment in our artistic trajectory. Engaging participants in ways unconceivable in our present pandemic world, it was one of our most illuminating explorations of the potential for/in deeply intimate personal exchange between performers and audience members. Trace was built on, with, and through a process of spontaneous collective reminiscence-one perhaps only conceivable within SummerWorks’ combination of careful curatorial oversight and empowering artist autonomy. Adopting similar structural and aesthetic principles, this impressionistic three-way meandering reflects back on that experience. In the process, it renders a fittingly fragmented but deeply felt ode ...
The origins of Making Treaty 7 the theatrical production in some ways mirror the treaty signing p... more The origins of Making Treaty 7 the theatrical production in some ways mirror the treaty signing process itself 140 years ago: Negotiation, protocol, and the quest of two cultures trying to understand each other. Where this process significantly diverges from the murky dealings in 1877 is that the spirit in which this society and this play were created comes out of a need to repair and reconcile the fractured relationship between the First Nations and “newcomers,” a desire to recognize the facts of the past and have it inform us as to how to move forward together on this land. This article is a unique look inside the genesis and creation of Making Treaty 7. Troy Emery Twigg, a Blackfoot artist, dancer, and educator, and Kris Demeanor, a Calgary-based poet and musician, were part of the initial wave of consultation with Treaty 7 elders, research, and discussion with Michael Green, Narcisse Blood, and Blake Brooker that helped define the trajectory of Making Treaty 7. These interviews ...
One of the most compelling aspects of site-specific theatre is the potential for heightened immer... more One of the most compelling aspects of site-specific theatre is the potential for heightened immersion within a specific environment. Increased mobility (on the part of the performance and its audience), combined with the inevitably performative architecture of a hosting site, makes possible a pervasiveness of sensory stimulus unattainable in conventional the atrical contexts. While these condition sappeal to the full range of the senses, some modalities contribute to this experience with significantly more intensity than others.Yet beyond this cross-modal competition, site-specific sound design-particularly that which incorporates the binaural properties of headphone listening — regularly also explores the often contentious interplay between what Paige McGinley, among others, distinguishes as ‘soundscapes’ and ‘soundtracks’.The soundscape- ‘the “acoustic ecology” of a given place or environment’1 — she suggests ‘is concerned with the local spatial environment, the sounded knowledge of a particular place’ (2007, p.58). By contrast, the soundtrack, as a performative intervention, ‘offer[s] emotional and thematic cues,creating — and documenting — a journey’ (McGinley, 2007, p.58). The soundtrack is understood as a ‘mobile soundscape’, one that’accompany[ies]everyday life, but also perform[s] an aesthetic intervention that shapes one’s daily experiences’ (McGinley, 2007, p.58).
From the Executive Editor: I am constantly at least a bit surprised by the path my life takes. Li... more From the Executive Editor: I am constantly at least a bit surprised by the path my life takes. Little did I know that slightly over twenty-six years after Ann Saddlemyer and I headed up the founding of this publication, and somewhat less time after I retired from its editing, I would be writing this short introduction in the capacity of Executive Editor of Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada. When we originally conceived of the journal, we thought of "theatre research" in terms of a very broad understanding of those two words. As scholars interested in theatre in its more than three dimensions, Ann and I were conscious of the theatre's visuality as well as its textuality, and its almost endless modes of performative expression. I remember our first issue tried to signal that with an article on circus, a tribute to Dora Mavor Moore, an essay on a historic theatre, another on nineteenthcentury theatre management, one on a "Canadian" compa...
STAGE-BOUND: FEATURE FILM ADAPTATIONS OF CANADIAN AND QUEBECOIS DRAMA Andre Loiselle Montreal &am... more STAGE-BOUND: FEATURE FILM ADAPTATIONS OF CANADIAN AND QUEBECOIS DRAMA Andre Loiselle Montreal & Kingston, ON: McCill-Queen's University Press, 2003, 260 pp. Andre Loiselle's Stage-Bound: Feature Film Maptations of Canadian and Quebecois Drama is an ambitious, near-comprehensive, and meticulously analyzed study. Beginning with Melburn E. Turner's treatment of Hilda Mary Hooke's Here Will I Nest (play, 1938; film, 1942) and concluding with JeanPhilippe Duval's version of Alexis Martin's Matroni et moi (play, 1995; film, 1999), Loiselle offers an extensive survey of English- and French-language film adaptations of original stage plays in Canada. Through the application of a wide and eclectic array of theoretical approaches, he constructs an elaborate and persuasive (if, at times, overly restrictive) analytical frame, discovering a high degree of commonality amongst the works discussed, in terms of both preoccupation and strategy. If Loiselle's analysis occasionally strains beneath the strong determination of the book's global thesis, the results are nonetheless consistently insightful, evocative, and illuminating. Loiselle's study is divided into chronological sections, beginning with "Stage-Bound since 1942," which lays out the structure for the rest of book. This section also provides the theoretical basis upon which Loiselle builds the comparative analysis that follows, and, despite my considerable admiration for the accomplishments of Stage-Bound, I feel compelled to note two reservations about the author's approach to his material. Relying on a century of solid, but distinctly essentialist media theory, Loiselle proposes a "fundamental distinction between drama, which centres on a confined locus dramaticus closed off from the reality that it reproduces, and film, which can capture the wide vistas of actual landscapes...." Loiselle draws on Neil Sinyard's contention that "in some ways, the two forms are antithetical: theatre is artificial lighting and illusion, and cinema is open-air and realism; theatre is verbal, cinema visual; theatre is stasis, cinema is movement." By extension, Loiselle argues, "[T]he plays best corresponding to the demands of the hybrid medium that cinematized drama constitutes are those presenting a dialectical composition that pits coercive, centripetal pressures against explosive, centrifugal forces." The essentialist constraints of such an argument-manifested in the concept of "cinematized drama"-are clear here, and they occasionally lead Loiselle into apparent assumptions of "fundamental" properties, media characteristics, and related issues of aesthetic convention. For example, Loiselle contends, [A]lthough Being At Home with Claude and Possible Worlds are not as conspicuous in their references to theatricality, both films are intensely dramatic in their reliance on dialogue rather than on more ostentatiously cinematic effects. Beyond the prologue in the former and a few external scenes in the last section of the latter, both films remain anchored to the stage in their focus on character and dialogue rather than on the natural environment. Arguably, however, a "focus on character and dialogue" does not exclude (or even discourage) equal attention to "the natural environment," and neither of these conventional preferences are necessarily inherent to one or another medium. Loiselle's study is extremely valuable as an index to the specific conventions of recent Canadian dramatic works that have proven particularly conducive and/or susceptible to cinematic translation. But the grounds for the assertion of fixed and unquestionable ontological media distinctions are not to be discovered here. A related point of complication is also to be found in the quotation cited above. Within a single sentence the terms "theatricality" and "dramatic" are presented as being virtually synonymous. And, indeed, perhaps in pursuit of the relative degree of signifying stability afforded by cinematic texts (the analysis of which Loiselle navigates with agility), a large proportion of the author's references to original stage works are textual rather than being based on performances. …
... 30 Nov. 1998. Culjak, John, et al. "The Dramatists Co-ops' [sic] brief to be submit... more ... 30 Nov. 1998. Culjak, John, et al. "The Dramatists Co-ops' [sic] brief to be submitted to the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia." Project proposal. 25 May 1976. Cowan, Cindy. "Towards an Atlantic Playwrights' Colony." Canadian Theatre Review 49 (Winter 1986): 120-22. ...
... He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, the ATHE Career Achievem... more ... He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the Calloway Prize for writing in theatre. ... By Deirdre Heddon. ...
Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales …, 2003
... Edited by Louise Ladouceur of the University of Alberta and Glen Nichols of the Université de... more ... Edited by Louise Ladouceur of the University of Alberta and Glen Nichols of the Université de Moncton, this collection of articles represents a ... My own association with Ron was first-hand and deeply significant; he supervised my dissertation, and in the process he guided me ...
We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a fo... more We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a focus on the topic of intermediality back in June of 2006. While we knew that TRiC’s then lengthy list of guest-edited theme issues-in-waiting pushed the prospect several years into the future, we were both keen to explore the potential for such a project. As our turn in the limelight approached, a (to us) surprisingly small number of responses to our first two calls for proposals further delayed our move to print. However, the unusual time span between inception and completion has offered us a similarly uncommon opportunity to consider and revise our aspirations for the issue. Now, in the autumn of 2011 and on the verge of publication, evidence of this extended and somewhat circuitous evolution can be seen in this issue’s contents. One of the essays in this collection was first proposed to us in the middle of 2008; another only completed its peer-review process a couple of months ago. Cha...
We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a fo... more We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a focus on the topic of intermediality back in June of 2006. While we knew that TRiC’s then lengthy list of guest-edited theme issues-in-waiting pushed the prospect several years into the future, we were both keen to explore the potential for such a project. As our turn in the limelight approached, a (to us) surprisingly small number of responses to our first two calls for proposals further delayed our move to print. However, the unusual time span between inception and completion has offered us a similarly uncommon opportunity to consider and revise our aspirations for the issue. Now, in the autumn of 2011 and on the verge of publication, evidence of this extended and somewhat circuitous evolution can be seen in this issue’s contents. One of the essays in this collection was first proposed to us in the middle of 2008; another only completed its peer-review process a couple of months ago. Cha...
One of the last performances Vertical City (Bruce Barton and Pil Hansen) created before moving fr... more One of the last performances Vertical City (Bruce Barton and Pil Hansen) created before moving from Toronto to Calgary was Trace, which premiered at the 2014 SummerWorks festival. Crafted in a compact and intense development process with close collaborators Michelle Polak and Martin Julien, Trace marked a subtle but defining moment in our artistic trajectory. Engaging participants in ways unconceivable in our present pandemic world, it was one of our most illuminating explorations of the potential for/in deeply intimate personal exchange between performers and audience members. Trace was built on, with, and through a process of spontaneous collective reminiscence-one perhaps only conceivable within SummerWorks’ combination of careful curatorial oversight and empowering artist autonomy. Adopting similar structural and aesthetic principles, this impressionistic three-way meandering reflects back on that experience. In the process, it renders a fittingly fragmented but deeply felt ode ...
The origins of Making Treaty 7 the theatrical production in some ways mirror the treaty signing p... more The origins of Making Treaty 7 the theatrical production in some ways mirror the treaty signing process itself 140 years ago: Negotiation, protocol, and the quest of two cultures trying to understand each other. Where this process significantly diverges from the murky dealings in 1877 is that the spirit in which this society and this play were created comes out of a need to repair and reconcile the fractured relationship between the First Nations and “newcomers,” a desire to recognize the facts of the past and have it inform us as to how to move forward together on this land. This article is a unique look inside the genesis and creation of Making Treaty 7. Troy Emery Twigg, a Blackfoot artist, dancer, and educator, and Kris Demeanor, a Calgary-based poet and musician, were part of the initial wave of consultation with Treaty 7 elders, research, and discussion with Michael Green, Narcisse Blood, and Blake Brooker that helped define the trajectory of Making Treaty 7. These interviews ...
One of the most compelling aspects of site-specific theatre is the potential for heightened immer... more One of the most compelling aspects of site-specific theatre is the potential for heightened immersion within a specific environment. Increased mobility (on the part of the performance and its audience), combined with the inevitably performative architecture of a hosting site, makes possible a pervasiveness of sensory stimulus unattainable in conventional the atrical contexts. While these condition sappeal to the full range of the senses, some modalities contribute to this experience with significantly more intensity than others.Yet beyond this cross-modal competition, site-specific sound design-particularly that which incorporates the binaural properties of headphone listening — regularly also explores the often contentious interplay between what Paige McGinley, among others, distinguishes as ‘soundscapes’ and ‘soundtracks’.The soundscape- ‘the “acoustic ecology” of a given place or environment’1 — she suggests ‘is concerned with the local spatial environment, the sounded knowledge of a particular place’ (2007, p.58). By contrast, the soundtrack, as a performative intervention, ‘offer[s] emotional and thematic cues,creating — and documenting — a journey’ (McGinley, 2007, p.58). The soundtrack is understood as a ‘mobile soundscape’, one that’accompany[ies]everyday life, but also perform[s] an aesthetic intervention that shapes one’s daily experiences’ (McGinley, 2007, p.58).
From the Executive Editor: I am constantly at least a bit surprised by the path my life takes. Li... more From the Executive Editor: I am constantly at least a bit surprised by the path my life takes. Little did I know that slightly over twenty-six years after Ann Saddlemyer and I headed up the founding of this publication, and somewhat less time after I retired from its editing, I would be writing this short introduction in the capacity of Executive Editor of Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada. When we originally conceived of the journal, we thought of "theatre research" in terms of a very broad understanding of those two words. As scholars interested in theatre in its more than three dimensions, Ann and I were conscious of the theatre's visuality as well as its textuality, and its almost endless modes of performative expression. I remember our first issue tried to signal that with an article on circus, a tribute to Dora Mavor Moore, an essay on a historic theatre, another on nineteenthcentury theatre management, one on a "Canadian" compa...
STAGE-BOUND: FEATURE FILM ADAPTATIONS OF CANADIAN AND QUEBECOIS DRAMA Andre Loiselle Montreal &am... more STAGE-BOUND: FEATURE FILM ADAPTATIONS OF CANADIAN AND QUEBECOIS DRAMA Andre Loiselle Montreal & Kingston, ON: McCill-Queen's University Press, 2003, 260 pp. Andre Loiselle's Stage-Bound: Feature Film Maptations of Canadian and Quebecois Drama is an ambitious, near-comprehensive, and meticulously analyzed study. Beginning with Melburn E. Turner's treatment of Hilda Mary Hooke's Here Will I Nest (play, 1938; film, 1942) and concluding with JeanPhilippe Duval's version of Alexis Martin's Matroni et moi (play, 1995; film, 1999), Loiselle offers an extensive survey of English- and French-language film adaptations of original stage plays in Canada. Through the application of a wide and eclectic array of theoretical approaches, he constructs an elaborate and persuasive (if, at times, overly restrictive) analytical frame, discovering a high degree of commonality amongst the works discussed, in terms of both preoccupation and strategy. If Loiselle's analysis occasionally strains beneath the strong determination of the book's global thesis, the results are nonetheless consistently insightful, evocative, and illuminating. Loiselle's study is divided into chronological sections, beginning with "Stage-Bound since 1942," which lays out the structure for the rest of book. This section also provides the theoretical basis upon which Loiselle builds the comparative analysis that follows, and, despite my considerable admiration for the accomplishments of Stage-Bound, I feel compelled to note two reservations about the author's approach to his material. Relying on a century of solid, but distinctly essentialist media theory, Loiselle proposes a "fundamental distinction between drama, which centres on a confined locus dramaticus closed off from the reality that it reproduces, and film, which can capture the wide vistas of actual landscapes...." Loiselle draws on Neil Sinyard's contention that "in some ways, the two forms are antithetical: theatre is artificial lighting and illusion, and cinema is open-air and realism; theatre is verbal, cinema visual; theatre is stasis, cinema is movement." By extension, Loiselle argues, "[T]he plays best corresponding to the demands of the hybrid medium that cinematized drama constitutes are those presenting a dialectical composition that pits coercive, centripetal pressures against explosive, centrifugal forces." The essentialist constraints of such an argument-manifested in the concept of "cinematized drama"-are clear here, and they occasionally lead Loiselle into apparent assumptions of "fundamental" properties, media characteristics, and related issues of aesthetic convention. For example, Loiselle contends, [A]lthough Being At Home with Claude and Possible Worlds are not as conspicuous in their references to theatricality, both films are intensely dramatic in their reliance on dialogue rather than on more ostentatiously cinematic effects. Beyond the prologue in the former and a few external scenes in the last section of the latter, both films remain anchored to the stage in their focus on character and dialogue rather than on the natural environment. Arguably, however, a "focus on character and dialogue" does not exclude (or even discourage) equal attention to "the natural environment," and neither of these conventional preferences are necessarily inherent to one or another medium. Loiselle's study is extremely valuable as an index to the specific conventions of recent Canadian dramatic works that have proven particularly conducive and/or susceptible to cinematic translation. But the grounds for the assertion of fixed and unquestionable ontological media distinctions are not to be discovered here. A related point of complication is also to be found in the quotation cited above. Within a single sentence the terms "theatricality" and "dramatic" are presented as being virtually synonymous. And, indeed, perhaps in pursuit of the relative degree of signifying stability afforded by cinematic texts (the analysis of which Loiselle navigates with agility), a large proportion of the author's references to original stage works are textual rather than being based on performances. …
... 30 Nov. 1998. Culjak, John, et al. "The Dramatists Co-ops' [sic] brief to be submit... more ... 30 Nov. 1998. Culjak, John, et al. "The Dramatists Co-ops' [sic] brief to be submitted to the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia." Project proposal. 25 May 1976. Cowan, Cindy. "Towards an Atlantic Playwrights' Colony." Canadian Theatre Review 49 (Winter 1986): 120-22. ...
... He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, the ATHE Career Achievem... more ... He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the Calloway Prize for writing in theatre. ... By Deirdre Heddon. ...
Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales …, 2003
... Edited by Louise Ladouceur of the University of Alberta and Glen Nichols of the Université de... more ... Edited by Louise Ladouceur of the University of Alberta and Glen Nichols of the Université de Moncton, this collection of articles represents a ... My own association with Ron was first-hand and deeply significant; he supervised my dissertation, and in the process he guided me ...
We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a fo... more We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a focus on the topic of intermediality back in June of 2006. While we knew that TRiC’s then lengthy list of guest-edited theme issues-in-waiting pushed the prospect several years into the future, we were both keen to explore the potential for such a project. As our turn in the limelight approached, a (to us) surprisingly small number of responses to our first two calls for proposals further delayed our move to print. However, the unusual time span between inception and completion has offered us a similarly uncommon opportunity to consider and revise our aspirations for the issue. Now, in the autumn of 2011 and on the verge of publication, evidence of this extended and somewhat circuitous evolution can be seen in this issue’s contents. One of the essays in this collection was first proposed to us in the middle of 2008; another only completed its peer-review process a couple of months ago. Cha...
We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a fo... more We first discussed the possibility of co-editing an issue of Theatre Research in Canada with a focus on the topic of intermediality back in June of 2006. While we knew that TRiC’s then lengthy list of guest-edited theme issues-in-waiting pushed the prospect several years into the future, we were both keen to explore the potential for such a project. As our turn in the limelight approached, a (to us) surprisingly small number of responses to our first two calls for proposals further delayed our move to print. However, the unusual time span between inception and completion has offered us a similarly uncommon opportunity to consider and revise our aspirations for the issue. Now, in the autumn of 2011 and on the verge of publication, evidence of this extended and somewhat circuitous evolution can be seen in this issue’s contents. One of the essays in this collection was first proposed to us in the middle of 2008; another only completed its peer-review process a couple of months ago. Cha...
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