Contested Directions: Performance Studies in/from/of Canada and Québec

Abstract

Contested Directions:Performance Studies in/from/of Canada and Québec Kirsty Johnston (bio) PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN CANADA. Edited by Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017; pp. 464. NATIONAL PERFORMANCE: REPRESENTING QUEBEC FROM EXPO 67 TO CÉLINE DION. By Erin Hurley. Cultural Spaces series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011; pp. 264. ROBERT LEPAGE ON THE TORONTO STAGE: LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, NATION. By Jane Koustas. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016; pp. 224. Last year, people living in Canada responded to the country's 150th year with celebration, critique, and challenge. Arguments about the country's current directions infused ideas about its past. Many people were and are still coming to grips with the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada, which over six years of public hearings had revealed the harrowing intergenerational effects and legacies of the Indian Residential School System. Shortly before a major series of public events in Ottawa to mark the sesquicentenary, Indigenous protesters erected a teepee on Parliament Hill, declaring it part of a "reoccupation," and hosted guests, among them Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In Québec, public spending, but not much public enthusiasm, accompanied the sesqui-centenary. Québécois interviewed in the press noted that this celebration, which largely ignored the French Canadian past before confederation, was one for English Canadians [End Page 411] and immigrants. Within this heady context of anger, lament, celebration, and controversy, three books arrived on my desk for review, each of which deals in different ways with the currents of history, identity, and performance running through the events of Canada 150, or "#colonialism150" as some critics dubbed it on Twitter. Read together, they suggest the ways in which performance theories and histories in Canada point to a multiplicity of national identities as well as potential futures and directions, even as the federal government promotes a centralizing vision of unity. On the face of it, these books can all be read under the sign of performance studies in Canada. Like the Canada 150 celebrations, however, the realities beneath the surface are more complex. Even if they all concern Canadian subjects broadly defined, each book tackles different places, performances, and scales and considers the category of nation in inverted commas. In Performance Studies in Canada, editors Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer have gathered a strikingly diverse and robust complement of performance studies scholarship from Canada-based scholars, but are careful to avoid drawing some essential national connection among them. Indeed, leading Canadian performance studies scholar Ric Knowles praises the editors' decision to be "rightly circumspect about what constitutes 'performance,' 'performance studies,' or 'Canadian context'" (383). As he explains in the book's afterword, [m]any Indigenous scholars, artists, and others do not recognize the borders that came late to divide the land that is Turtle Island or the colonial authority of the state apparatuses that police them. Many do not recognize the disciplinary silos that have long characterized Western systems of research and knowledge production, preferring a holistic, relational, and reciprocal approach to understanding that is lived and situated. (387–88) Thus, while the contingent performance of national identity is an explicit subject in several of the entries in Performance Studies in Canada, the collection as a whole troubles national framing. In comparatively more focused ways, the two other books raise similar themes. Erin Hurley's multi-award-winning monograph National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion also troubles the national idea—specifically, the Québécois national idea, but here it is the volume's central focus and problem. Pushing the boundaries of national theatre and performance studies scholarship, Hurley provides new modes of interpretation and paths that "alter not only what can be recognized as national (in this case, as Québécois) but also the conditions of perception for national performance" (11). She draws her compelling arguments around such diverse examples of cultural performance as Expo 67, the drama and theatre of Michel Tremblay and Marco Micone, the devised image theatre of Carbone 14, the musical stylings of Céline Dion, and feminist theatre practice of the 1970s and '80s. In another direction...