Bruce Barton, ed. Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising

Abstract

BRUCE BARTON, ed. Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre English. Vol. 12. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2008. xliii + 269pp. RIC KNOWLES and INGRID MUNDEL, eds. Ethnic, Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre English. Vol. 14. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. xxvi + 206pp. The range and diversity of artists, works, practices, and critical analyses these two volumes hold common oft-recurring themes and specific examples of purposefulness, agency and control, hybridity, limits of representation, and material circumstances of production. Both also exhibit attentiveness to creation processes and audience as integral to efficacy. Through these valuable collections readers will encounter multiplicities of forms, approaches, and scholarship that inherently, and often explicitly, challenge dominant, institutionalized modes of theatre production. Interestingly, number of contributions each collection could easily also have been considered for inclusion other. It is heartening to note relative prominence of cultural diversity theatre and practices, but also, increasingly, among voices and perspectives of those analyzing and theorizing. Bruce Barton's introduction to Volume 12, Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising, proposes compelling framework for analysis, clarifying much-conflated terminologies without reducing practices to fixed 'categories.' An overarching Dramaturgy of Agency--aiming for not merely affect but effect (vii)--will thus be constructed differently different circumstances, perpetual negotiation between and navigation of [...] distinct yet related terms (ix). Barton emphasizes intersubjectivity and multiple perspectives over common assumptions of consensus collective and collaborative work. He segues into essays an appropriately openended assertion that the proximate positioning of concepts can be as illuminating as that of living bodies performance (xxii). A significant number of authors Volume 12 provide meticulous details of creative processes, demonstrating various techniques that allow meaning(s) and aesthetic choices to emerge through making of work. Yet what distinguishes this volume from much existent writing field is that majority of contributors go beyond mechanics of process and aesthetics of public presentation, to engage questions, preoccupations, and intentions that spur creative acts. As result, voices and concerns of primary creators are more readily placed in conversation with voices of academics (though of course there are several instances of authors who inhabit both those worlds.) The importance of 1970s collective creation to development of theatre Canada has been well documented and theorized; it is nonetheless fascinating to consider earlier analyses of these canonical works relationship to more recent practices and critical frames of reference. In both earlier and later essays, important considerations of context, of relationship to audience, and of reception are often central. Conversely, and as noted by Wasserman (244; 250), cultural nationalism of 1970s and 1980s gave way to multivalence politics and ideology among more current practices examined. In Ethnic, Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre, various contributors throughout expose normative and exclusionary aspects of Canadian and Quebecois nationalisms. Later essays point to movement among a younger generation of culturally diverse and alternative theatre artists [. …