Canadian Theatre

Colleen Wagner’s The Monument won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Best Play in 1996. Writing in 2004, critic Colin Thomas described the two-character play as “a dark fantasy inspired by the war — or more specifically, the war crimes — in the former Yugoslavia.” Similarly, Joshua Tanzer’s review of a New York production in 2000 was captioned: “A soldier accused of war crimes is unexpectedly saved from execution only to be delivered into a life of torment at the hands of a mysterious woman in the powerfully written and superbly acted Bosnia-inspired play The Monument.” The two reviewers thus concurred that the war in Yugoslavia inspired Wagner to write the play. However accurate these two opinions are, as of yet there has been little consideration about the possibility that Wagner was inspired by events in her native country: the 1989 killing, by Marc Lépine, of fourteen female students at Montréal’s École polytechnique.

This volume rests upon two premises: 1) That collective creation is pivotal to the evolution of the modern theatre; and 2) That women have been central to the emergence and development of collective creation.
    Though written to be read as a self-contained work, Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance is in fact the third volume in an ongoing body of research into collective creation and devising practices from 1900 to the present. Our two previous studies, A History of Collective Creation and Collective 
Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), argued that modern collective theatre-making praxis may be best understood as an ongoing, resistant tradition emerging, in its European and North American contexts, circa 1900 and running throughout the twentieth century and on into present-day devising practices. Our goal at the inception of this body of work had been to contest the broadly accepted view of collective creation as a minor phenomenon peculiar to the New Left political theatre of the 1960s and ’70s, associated in the main with developments in the United States, Canada, Quebec, and England (and to a lesser extent, France).  Working in collaboration with an international team of scholars, we sought to elucidate the aesthetic, processual, and political links between theatrical devising in the contemporary period, collective creation practices of the ’60s and ’70s, and pre-war experiments in collaborative theatre-making—and to do so from an internationalist perspective.  In so doing, we worked to draw out both resemblances and divergences in collective practice, and in the aesthetic, social, and/or political impulses underpinning those practices, in their particular cultural and historical contexts.
    This new volume seeks to deepen that historicization, by investigating the centrality of women to the development of collective and devised theatre-making in the modern and contemporary period. Our project is two-fold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaborative process, authority, authorship, and attribution.
    Women must be credited with a central, foundational, and continued role in the development and transmission of practices of collective and devised theatre-making since the start of the twentieth century.  A cursory scan of a few prominent names in North America and Europe hints at the consideration women demand in the history of collective performance praxis: directors such as Joan Littlewood, Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Elizabeth LeComte, Tina Landau, Anne Bogart, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lin Hixson, and Julia Varley; pioneering teachers such as Viola Spolin, Suzanne Bing, Rena Mirecka, and Roberta Carreri; companies and networks such as Lilith, WOW Cafe, At the Foot of the Mountain, Spiderwoman Theater, Guerilla Girls, Omaha Magic Theatre, Split Britches, SITI Company, Nightwood Theatre, Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, The Magdalena Project, FEMEN, and Pussy Riot; choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Aileen Passloff, Trisha Brown, and Mary Overlie; playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous, Deb Margolin, Muriel Miguel, and Megan Terry.  And yet, the deep engagement of women in collectively generated performance has been grossly under-historicized.
    This volume traces a sprawling lineage, revealing a hitherto unacknowledged web of transmission—connecting, by way of example, the educational play movement spearheaded by such reformers as Dr. Maria Montessori in Italy, Margaret Naumberg in New York, and Neva Boyd of Chicago’s Hull-House, to the theatrical devising pedagogies of Suzanne Bing in 1920s’ France and Viola Spolin in 1930s’ Chicago, to the collective practices of (among others) Théâtre du Soleil and the Living Theatre in the 1960s, to the nomadic performances of the women of the Odin Teatret in 1980s’ Europe, to Pussy Riot’s recent protests in Russia.  In doing so, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in our previous volumes, in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation are revealed as central, and women practitioners further revealed as primary progenitors, renovators, stewards, and disseminators of these practices.  The history of the modern theatre is a history of collaborative methods and the history of collaborative methods is a women’s history.

The nature of surveillance is changing. It is becoming gamified. This article charts a shift in thinking about surveillance culture, from the panopticon models advanced by Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault to current analyses of the increasingly participatory and gamified models of surveillance in the age of big data. That shift is played out literally in Theatre Conspiracy’s immersive play Foreign Radical, in which participants are led through a game environment in which they reveal aspects of their online behaviour and judge each other in a way that replicates the kinds of social sorting that take place in both social media and in surveillance. The game leads them to deliberate on the case of an Iranian-Canadian man named Hesam, who stands accused of terrorism. As the case against Hesam comes to rest increasingly on his Middle Eastern and Islamic identity, the show reveals the role that racism and Islamophobia come to play in the interpretation of surveillance data. Although surveillance operates on a seemingly empirical basis, the stories it tells about people nevertheless remain fictions, assembled from statistical probability and speculation. In this way, surveillance adds to the sense that we live in a post-truth society.

This article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends Daniher put a comparative Asian North American method into practice in her classroom on Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University in Spring 2016. In particular, Daniher focuses on pairing Ins Choi’s play-text Kim’s Convenience (2011) alongside a viewing of the made-for-PBS broadcast of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in order to broach the topic of anti-Black racism in both Canada and the US in the Black Lives Matter moment. Although Daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a US-American institutional setting, she directs the following emergent queries to the field of Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies: How should we frame Asian Canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? For what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in Canada? Drawing on overlapping genealogies of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, Daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if Asian Canadian Theatre Studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “Asian Canadian studies projects” writ-large.

Canadian-born Robert Lepage is one of the most acclaimed directors and interpreters of contemporary
theatre. Together with the stage designer Carl Fillon and with the technical staff of his multimedia team Ex
Machina, based in Quebec City in a disused fire station, he has planned and given life to some of the most
emblematic examples of the dramaturgical use of scenography as well as the technique and integration of
video onstage. From Needles and Opium (Les aiguilles et l’opium) to The Seven Streams of the River Ota
(Les sept branches de la rivière Ota) to The Far Side of the Moon (La face cachée de la lune) he has more
recently staged The Andersen Project, a solo show commissioned by the Andersen Foundation to celebrate
the bicentenary of the Danish author’s birth.

From Granada to Jerusalem: Leo Africanus and the Legend of the Amphibian Bird in "Birds of a Kind" by Wajdi Mouawad.

The present article examines the drama Birds of a Kind by the Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad. It analyses the allegorical character of Wazzan which is based on the historical figure Leo Africanus, a Moroccan diplomat and polymath of Granadan origin who in the early 16th century was kidnapped by christian pirates and offered to the Pope Leon X. Following his conversion from Islam to Catholicism he became the first author to present Africa to the Europeans through his works, published under the patronage of two popes from the Medici family.
Leo Africanus was introduced to Mouawad by the American scholar Natalie Zemon Davis. In her study Trickster Travels (2006) she discusses the ambiguity and the evasiveness of this enigmatic historical figure whose character she highlights through the story of the amphibian bird. It is a parable placed as the author’s paratextual notice at the beginning of The Book of Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526 [1550]), Leo Africanus’s most important scholarly work, and in spite of many possible sources, is definitely his own invention.
This article aims to demonstrate how Mouawad distanced his dramatic character from the original figure, ie. the historiographic image of a trickster, by changing the point of the aforementioned parable. The story of the amphibian bird in Birds of a Kind, told by Wazzan to a Jew who right before his death is revealed his Arabic origin, is transformed form the parable of a trickster into a legend of someone who manages to overcome the prejudice in order to find his identity. For Mouawad, Wazzan personifies the reconciliation between Judaism and Islam, transmitting at the same time an idea of the world dreamed of by the humanism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

This article evaluates the effectiveness of three playwrights’ uses of social realism, verbatim theater, and poetic symbolism to foster a sense of empathy for those who have been branded as enemies in the War. I build on Judith Butler’s recent reading of Emmanuel Levinas, in which she notes that because Levinas’s notion of empathy depends on seeing the face of the Other it risks becoming parochial as we only develop empathy for those in close proximity to us. I ask how theatre might participate in fostering empathy for those who are geographically distant but to whom we are connected through political connections.

The diversification of both professional and community work over the last three decades has produced an Aboriginal theater that is vibrant, polyvocal, syncretic and frequently resistant to categorization. Like other Indigenous art forms in Canada, this work has necessarily served at least two different constituencies: its own distinct communities and the broader postcolonizing society from which many audience members are drawn. As this brief survey suggests, Aboriginal theater has wrestled with the legacies of colonialism in original and provocative ways; it has also looked forward to imagine different futures for Indigenous peoples and to forge new cultural and artistic allegiances, facilitating a pronounced if uneven shift in the nation’s performing arts culture.

... Here he discusses the “Given Circumstanc-es” of a scene from Chekov's Three Sisters ... Bruder, Melissa, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeline Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, and Scott Zigler. ... lr) play “The Stanisavski Game” in a scene from Act Three of Chekhov's Three Sisters ...

Ecological thinking, which has recently found expression in a wide range of critical and literary works, has been slow to take hold in the field of theatre and performance arts, both in scholarship and practice. Ecological theatre, placing ecological reciprocity at the centre of its dramatic and thematic content, rejects the humanist paradigm of Western theatre, situating humans and non-humans in a mutually reliant framework. Thus, ecological theatre problematizes the notion of ecophobia that postulates the superiority of humans over non-humans, shoring up culture/nature dualism. Drawing upon Felix Guattari's notion of 'ecosophy' in The Three Ecologies (2000), ecosophical theatre emerges as a new kind of ecological theatre, which includes not only human-non-human interactions but also social relations and human subjectivity. Therefore, by bringing into the spotlight the ecosophical theatre qualities, this paper aims at exploring how ecosophical theatre connects subjective, social, and ecological registers through new ethico-political and aesthetic paradigms and allows for fresh modes of existence, social reconfigurations, and original communitarian harmonies. In this context, by analyzing French-Canadian playwright Chantal Bilodeau's Sila (2015) from an ecosophical point of view, this paper indicates that Bilodeau participates in the processes of resingularization and social construction by making use of theatre's capacity to modify our subjectivities through the 'ethico-political and aesthetic paradigms' that Guattari suggests. Son zamanlarda çeşitli eleştirel ve edebi eserlerde ele alınan ekolojik düşünce, tiyatro ve performans sanatları alanında, hem teori hem gösteri bağlamında, yavaş yavaş yer bulmuştur. Ekolojik karşılıklılığı, dramatik ve tematik içeriğinin merkezine yerleştiren ekolojik tiyatro, insanları ve insan olmayanları birbirlerine karşılıklı olarak bağlı bir çerçevede konumlandırarak, Batı tiyatrosunun insan merkezci yaklaşımını reddeder. Böylece, ekolojik tiyatro, insanın insan olmayana üstünlüğünü varsayarak kültür/doğa ikiliğini destekleyen, ekofobi kavramını sorunsallaştırır. Felix Guattari'nin Üç Ekoloji (2000) adlı eserindeki 'ekozofi' kavramına dayanan, ekozofik tiyatro, yalnızca insan ve insan-dışı varlıklar arasındaki etkileşimleri değil, aynı zamanda sosyal ilişkileri ve insan öznelliğini de kapsayan yeni bir tür ekolojik tiyatro olarak ortaya çıkar. Böylelikle, bu makale, ekozofik tiyatronun özelliklerini ön plana çıkararak,bu tiyatro türünün öznel, toplumsal ve ekolojik boyutları 'yeni etik-politik ve estetik paradigmalar' aracılığıyla nasıl birbirine bağladığını ve yeni varoluş biçimlerine, toplumsal yeniden yapılandırmalara ve özgün komüniter modellere nasıl olanak sağladığını ortaya çıkarmayı hedeflemektedir. Bu bağlamda, bu makale, Fransız-Kanadalı oyun yazarı Chantal Bilodeau'nın Sila (2015) adlı oyununu, ekozofik bakış açısıyla analiz ederek, Bilodeau'nun Guattari'nin önerdiği yeni 'etik-politik-estetik paradigmalar' aracılığıyla, tiyatronun öznelliklerimizi dönüştürebilme kapasitesinden faydalanarak yeniden özneleştirme va toplumsal oluşum sürecine katıldığını göstermektedir.

Communication donnée le 21 avril 2015 à l’occasion de la journée d’étude "Regards croisés sur 'Incendies' de W. Mouawad et D. Villeneuve", organisée par le groupe Cinespi à l’Université catholique de Louvain (Belgique). Le texte a inspiré l'article publié dans l’ouvrage "Regards croisés sur 'Incendies'. Du théâtre de Mouawad au cinéma de Villeneuve", Paris, L’Harmattan, 2016 (édité par Serge Goriely en collaboration avec Arnaud Join-Lambert et Sébastien Fevry).

L' article se penche sur l’adaptation cinématographique d'"Incendies". En plus de revenir sur la genèse de l’œuvre théâtrale, il propose une analyse détaillée des choix de mise en scène et des contraintes techniques ayant conduit Denis Villeneuve à se réapproprier pleinement la pièce originale de Wajdi Mouawad.

The 4th Line Theatre Production Company was established in 1992 by Robert Winslow on his family farm just outside of Millbrook, Ontario. The company, popular for its presentation of outdoor theatre in the barns and the fields of this rural setting, has a stated mandate to "preserve and promote our Canadian cultural heritage through the development and presentation of regionally based, environmentally staged historical dramas" (4th Line Theatre Website). As of August 2008, the company has produced thirty-six shows predominantly written by Winslow and staged with casts and crews from Millbrook, Peterborough, and Toronto (4th Line Theatre Website).

This project investigates the 4th Line Theatre Company's contribution to the popular conception of local histories and how the reproduced narratives promote and perpetuate dominant ideologies of nationhood. To this end, this project analyzes the 4th Line Theatre as a cultural institution and as such does not specifically take up the theatricality of the productions. Although the scripts from the 2006 season are closely examined, a detailed performance analysis is not included herein. Utilizing materials from the company's 2006 season, this thesis provides analyses of the play texts, the theatre company's promotional material, and the physical space of the theatre. This analysis is used to make the case that the 4th Line "cultivates" a settler community as its audience. This project focuses on the specific practices of settler identity-making that take place at the 4th Line and how these practices align with a broader state-endorsed ideology of Canadian identity.

Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New English Literatures. Ed. Dunja M. Mohr, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.
(341 pages)

In the wake of addressing multiculturalism, transculturalism, racism, and ethnicity, the issue of xenophobia and xenophilia has been somewhat marginalized. From a variety of angles, the present collection seeks to investigate the relations between Self and Other in the New Literatures in English. How do we register differences and what does an embrace signify for both Self and Other? The contributors deal with a variety of topics, ranging from theoretical reflections on xenophobia, its exploration in terms of intertextuality and New Zealand/Maori historiography, to analyses of migrant and border narratives, and issues of transitionality, authenticity, and racism in Canada and South Africa. Others negotiate identity and alterity in Nigerian, Malaysian, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and Caribbean texts, or reflect on diaspora and orientalism in Australian--Asian and West Indian contexts.


Contributors
Vera Alexander, David La Breche, Haike Frank, Martin Genetsch, Jörg Heinke, Sissy Helff, Susan N. Kiguli, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, Natividad Martínez Marín, Danilo Victorino Manarpaac, Raihanah M. M., Mala Pandurang, Judith Dell Panny, Sandhya Patel, Jochen Petzold, Ginny Ratsoy, Dipli Saikia, Henning Schäfer, Edwin Thumboo, Virginia Richter, Laurenz Volkmann, Russell West--Pavlov

A recent article on multicultural theatre in the online Canadian Encyclopaedia notes that a longing to preserve cultural and linguistic roots and strengthen a sense of community can be seen as the driving motivation of immigrant theatre groups. The article provides an overview of the diversity of ethnic theatre in Canada stating that “some of the earliest ethnic theatres were formed in the 1930s, creating theatre exclusively for their own communities.” The article thus silently erases any ethnic theatre groups active before the 1930s, ignoring theatre as an important factor in the staging of national and ethnic identity among diverse groups of immigrants in Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The theatre of Icelandic immigrants in Canada is an example of such disappeared traditions. Only a few years after the establishment of the first Icelandic-Canadian settlement in Gimli, Manitoba in 1875, Icelandic immigrants started utilizing theatre to perform and debate questions of national, ethnic and immigrant identities creating a vivid and lively amateur theatre culture in the following decades, producing over 200 plays before the mid-20th century. By the 1920s, a network of community theatres was active throughout the Icelandic settlements in Manitoba, stretching to the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan and even across the border to US-state North Dakota. These activities are only mentioned in passing in Icelandic theatre history and are completely absent in the history of theatre in Canada.
Research on theatre history throughout the last century has in general been geographically organized, highlighting developments of theatre according to modern (predominantly Western) nation-state borders. As Marvin Carlson points out in his recent reflections on a global theatre history, gradual acknowledgment of other theatrical traditions as well as other geographical areas has challenged this emphasis on national theatre histories. Carlson notes that many important, past and present dimensions of theatre cannot be investigated within the paradigm of the national theatre history. This includes “theatre and performance created by constantly evolving and shifting communities created by populations voluntarily or involuntarily moved from their origin locations to establish new communities, such as immigrant enclaves, and refugee camps.”
Focussing on a case of a fluid network of community theatres, my article looks at the historiographical challenges implicit in the case of early Icelandic-Canadian amateur community theatres. The article asks what Carlson’s call for a paradigm shift implies for the theatre historian, in replacing the narrative model of teleological national theatre history with a more open-ended rhizomatic approach. The image of the rhizome, a notion Carlson adopts from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “allows for fluid multiple connections without privileging any controlling models of either representation or interpretation,” and thus challenges the fixed structures and teleological, linear narratives of national theatre histories. With regard to the theatrical networks, routes and intersection points in the negotiation of ethnic identity, the article asks to what extent such a rhizomatic approach might serve to shed light on the history of theatre of an immigrant community, raising questions regarding narrative, historiographical processes of erasure and the exclusion of amateur community theatre in a teleological narrative of national theatre histories.

The "Introduction" to Dr. MacArthur's 2015 report establishes context, starting with the question, "Where are all the women [in the professional theatre industry]? It then provides background on the Equity in Theatre (EIT) initiative that produced the 2015 report, followed by an overview of past research initiatives in the field, the methodological approach of the study, and a call to utilize the research to enact social change.

This essay canvasses theatrical renditions of time, mobility and belonging in
Marie Clements’ Burning Vision (2002) and Trevor Jamieson and Scott Rankin’s
Ngapartji Ngapartji (2005), each dealing with the social and environmental
legacies of the Atomic Age in remote indigenous homelands in Canada and
Australia, respectively. The plays situate local memories within the currents of
global history by delivering intimate yet epic accounts of the effects of nuclear
industrialization on land, water, species and human communities. Drawing from
Tim Ingold’s theorizations of dwelling and Nigel Clark’s recent work on the
geological scales of cosmpolitanism, I explore ways in which performances of
mobility and intercultural connectedness in these theatrical works articulate with
conventional notions of indigeneity as a marker of rootedness or belonging to
particular geographical spaces.

... I organized Le Boudoir, an annual magical retro cabaret, from 1994 to 2009 and have been organizing Meow Mix since 1995. Meow Mix puts out an almost monthly cabaret series. I am still doing Edgy Women. I am very close to dropping ''Women'' ...

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Writing a piece on improvisation in the theatre of Wajdi Mouawad presents a certain challenge since, as the artist himself claims, improvisation does not really constitute a production-forming part in his creative process. It is rather collective collaboration that informs his experience as a playwright and as a director.

Starting with his first play, "Wolfboy" in 1981, Brad Fraser has brought a distinctly Gothic approach to his vision of the horrors of modern life. Justin D. Edward has pointed out the presence of Gothic doubling and the presentation of the city as a dark place reflecting the unknowable recesses of character in "Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love," but Edwards' analysis in "Gothic Canada" just scratches the surface of Fraser's work. This paper examines two key works, the 1990 "The Ugly Man" and 2001's "Snake in Fridge" to create a broader view of Fraser's work, focusing on not just doubling and the unknowable landscape, but also on the specter of the past as it continues to haunt his characters and shatter their senses of identity.

This article outlines selected findings from a personal research project I conducted in 2012 in Toronto with support from Nightswimming Theatre’s Pure Research Program—a program for professional artists to investigate questions within their practice free from any outside academic or performance agenda. I conducted a two-day performance lab with eighteen actors to investigate the experience of acting in different performance mediums and the usefulness of the Visual Analogue Scale to quantify this experience.

Although now acknowledged as a major work in the development of queer and Canadian theatre, John Herbert's "Fortune and Men's Eyes" went through some surprising transformations in the years immediately following its 1968 premiere.  This paper examines the treatment of the play's ending, in which Herbert breaks the fourth wall for the first time in the play,  in the 1969 revival staged by Sal Mineo, the 1970 film version and the 1971 Parisian production to determine how the very different endings change the play's meaning and to ascertain, if possible, Herbert's role in making those changes.

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script, Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.

Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-engineered form of rice that could save an overpopulated world on the brink of catastrophic famine. The play examines how good, smart, well-intentioned individuals are drawn into, and corrupted by, complex institutional systems, be they corporate, military, or governmental.

Co-Authors: Anoushka Ratnarajah, lee williams boudakian, Laine Zisman Newman

Co-sponsored by Simon Fraser University and the frank theatre company, Q2Q: A Symposium on Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada was held in Vancouver, BC, July 20-24, 2016. The symposium aimed to bring together performers, practitioners, scholars, and community members to discuss the current state of queer theatre in the country, its histories, and its future(s). The symposium included performances, panels, roundtables, and networking events. Performers and practitioners presented together on the same panels, and the lack of strict presentation guidelines resulted in dynamic and varied formats. In this piece, three participants reflect on the presentations, group dynamics, and discussions that took place at the symposium.