Canadian Theatre Research Articles

“Pedant Needs More Paunch”: Reviving Robertson Davies’s Annotations from his Performance Copy of The Taming of the Shrew

Director Robertson Davies’s 1949 production of The Taming of the Shrew with the Peterborough Little Theatre won the Louis Jouvet Trophy for best direction at the Dominion Drama Festival in Toronto, garnering critical praise as the DDF’s first full-length Shakespearean play. Davies’s performance copy for this production has recently been discovered in his personal book collection, donated to Queen’s University’s W. D. Jordan Special Collections and Music Library. Never previously examined or transcribed, this text incorporates director’s notes and critiques, music cues, blocking, omissions, and alterations, offering invaluable insights into Davies’s 1949 Elizabethan interpretation of this play. Reviving Davies’s annotations reveals new information about this specific production, one that challenged mid-twentieth century Canadian staging conventions. PLT’s Shrew emerges as a lighthearted and detail-oriented comic romp invested in historicity, its Commedia dell’Arte flavour likely imported from Tyrone Guthrie’s 1939 Old Vic production in which Davies acted. The mentorship model that Davies implemented with PLT he replicates in his first novel, Tempest-Tost (1951), where he draws directly upon his Shrew notes and directorial experience as well. Revising the “maturation myth” narrative of Canadian theatre, McKague’s study of Davies’s play situates nonprofessional theatre as intrinsic to the fabric and history of Canadian culture.

Editorial: Indigenous Methodologies/Settler Responsibilities

"Editorial: Indigenous Methodologies/Settler Responsibilities." Canadian Theatre Review, 178(), pp. 66–67

A Ryga-Rita Rethink

This article is an edited transcript of a panel convened at the Ryga Arts Festival, held in Summerland, British Columbia, in 2017, about Ryga’s groundbreaking 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. Issues discussed include the play’s legacy fifty years after its premiere and how twenty-first-century issues such as appropriation of voice have impacted the play’s continued production on Canadian stages. The panel, chaired by Canadian Theatre Review founding editor Don Rubin, includes contributions from the play’s original composer-singer-actress Ann Mortifee, opera composer Victor Davies, film-maker Gina Payzant, and writer-critic Patricia Keeney.

The Scripting of Unscripted: The Game of Making Theatre and the Theatre of Making a Game

This article asks questions of the key contributors to a theatrical digital story app about the process of creation. It examines the phases of development from the beginning of the process through to the end. The artists involved reflect on the challenges and freedoms of writing in an entirely new medium. This is the first instance of a Canadian theatre company crossing into digital game creation.

On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies

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.

RICHIE WILCOX, ed. Daniel MacIvor: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 5. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015. 257 pp.

RICHIE WILCOX, ed. Daniel MacIvor: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 5. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015. 257 pp.

YVETTE NOLAN AND RIC KNOWLES, eds. Performing Indigeneity: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 6. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016. 400 pp.

YVETTE NOLAN AND RIC KNOWLES, eds. Performing Indigeneity: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 6. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016. 400 pp.

HEATHER DAVIS-FISCH, ed. Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 7. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2017. 433 pp.

HEATHER DAVIS-FISCH, ed. Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 7. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2017. 433 pp.

More Dangerous Than Many a Pamphlet or Propaganda Book

For Ukrainian Canadian leftists, the 1920s represented a golden age of domestic cultural production. The strict hierarchy that constituted the communist movement in the 1930s was not yet extant, and the realm of possibilities was limited only by the imagination of the organization itself. The material produced in this period was neither crass agitprop nor cheap melodrama. Rather, it was bottom-up expressions of proletarian high culture and organic reflections of the social, economic, and political realities that constituted the experiences of Ukrainian progressives in Canada. As such, in the 1920s, the theatre served as the movement’s most effective vehicle for political propaganda and ethnocultural instruction.
 
 Pour les gauchistes ukrainiens canadiens, les années 1920 représentaient l’âge d’or de la production culturelle nationale. La stricte hiérarchie qui constituait le mouvement communiste dans les années 1930 n’était pas encore existante et le domaine des possibilités n’était limité que par l’imagination de l’organisation elle-même. Le matériel produit à cette époque n’était ni grossier agitprop ni bon mélodrame. Il s’agissait plutôt d’expressions ascendantes de la haute culture prolétarienne et de réflexions organiques sur les réalités sociales, économiques et politiques qui constituaient les expériences des progressistes ukrainiens au Canada. En tant que tel, dans les années 1920, le théâtre constituait le moyen le plus efficace du mouvement pour la propagande politique et l’instruction ethnoculturelle.

Asian Canadian Theatre

Asian Canadian Theatre

Rubies in the crown: A conversation on racial representation in Canadian theatre with Karen Robinson

Karen Robinson is one of Canada’s leading black actresses. Over the past twenty years, she has figured in more than 40 theatre productions, as well as in national and international TV series and films. A race-conscious artist actively engaged in portraying diverse representations of blackness on and beyond the Canadian stage, Robinson has acted in black-authored plays that have risen to canonical status, embodying memorable black female characters such as Billie in Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet and Esther in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. In this interview conducted in July 2016, Robinson shares some memories of the 2006 production of Harlem Duet at the Stratford Festival (Ontario, Canada), as well as her views on acting, colourblind casting, the revolutionary power of black women’s theatre, and the social relevance of individual and collective acts of resistance in a predominantly male, white-dominated cultural arena.

Natalie Alvarez, ed. Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013, v + 272 pp., $25.

Natalie Alvarez, ed. Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013, v + 272 pp., $25.

The Strangers Within and Outside the Canadian Stage

This article reviews Barry Freeman’s 2017 book, Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics. With precision and intellect, Freeman layers multiple theoretical frameworks to examine Canadian theatre, predominantly focusing on performance in Toronto. Freeman fruitfully explores how the definition and production of who is a stranger on Canadian stages is contextually contingent and changes over time, as well as the ways in which it is a construct of complex power relations in society regarding nationalism, multiculturalism, and globalization. This book is a significant contribution to the study of theatre in Canada that combines complicated theories with practice and provides illustrative examples to explore the ways in which theatre can ethically encounter difference in an age of ‘liquid modernity.’

Richie Wilcox, ed. Daniel MacIvor: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 5.

Richie Wilcox, ed. <i>Daniel MacIvor: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 5.</i>

On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies

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.

Yvette Nolan and Rick Knowles, eds. Performing Indigeneity: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 6.

Yvette Nolan and Rick Knowles, eds. <i>Performing Indigeneity: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 6.</i>

Heather Davis-Fisch, ed. Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 7.

Heather Davis-Fisch, ed. <i>Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 7.</i>

Toronto, English-Canada, and the ‘ROC’: Robert Lepage Onstage

This is a review of Jane Koustas’s 2016 book Robert Lepage on the Toronto Stage: Language, Identity, Nation. The reviewer comments on Koustas’s inquiry into Lepage’s success on the Toronto stage, his contribution to global perceptions of Canadian theatre, and his identity as a critically acclaimed artist in English Canada. The review queries the author’s identification of Toronto as the de facto representative of the ROC (Rest of Canada) and the ways that the book’s formatting of lengthy French passages replicates how audiences experience bilingual performance. The review suggests that, like many of Lepage’s works, Koustas’s book raises questions it leaves unanswered and points out productive areas for further inquiry.

An Informal Assessment of Twenty-First-Century Skills Developed Through Hidden Curriculum in Theatre Studies

Arguably more than any previous generation, students graduating from university programs in the twenty-first century need a comprehensive repertoire of essential skills for their rapidly evolving world. Undergraduate theatre training offers a wide range of those skills. In response to Glen Nichols’s prompt for the CATR panel discussions, I conducted an informal assessment of skills that are generated in Canadian theatre programs (2017) based on an available 1994 rubric for “Arts Education Standards and Twenty-First Century Skills.” 1 Analytical reasoning, information literacy, invention, self-direction, collaboration, and technological integration are examples of the competencies developed through effective undergraduate theatre studies programs; however, they are often the “hidden curriculum” (Jackson) little recognized by theatre educators and university administrators. There are limiting factors in the successful mining of the hidden curriculum for the benefit of our students including a lack of adequate teacher training for existing and incoming faculty (Pagen 223). Notwithstanding these factors, undergraduate theatre programs can provide a forum for the development of necessary skills for the twenty-first-century student.

Mobilizing a Slow Theatre Movement through an Atypique. Artist Perspective

With our performance industry working from turbo-capitalistic frameworks, artists from neurodiverse and other disability communities are all-too-often passed over. This article calls attention to how an emerging slow theatre movement in Canada is changing these conditions. Slowness, as McAskill argues, is an important mode of perception that values human diversity, resensitizing us to the world we move through. McAskill extends this approach with the Quebec-based atypique artistic movement. Dedicated to recognizing the aesthetic value and professional rights of physically unconventional and neurodivergent artists, McAskill describes in what ways atypique artists are leading new legacies of a slow theatre movement, particularly Les Productions des pieds des mains, a Montreal-based dance-theatre company. Discussing her experiences on-set as a production assistant for a recent contemporary film called Eurêka!, created by Menka Nagrani, the Artistic Director of the company, McAskill theorizes on how the company’s artistic approaches serve as a model of slow theatre, particularly through how they work with and value their diverse artists, who include members of the disability community. Ultimately, McAskill emphasizes the need for slowness in current Canadian theatre and, as she argues, its potentiality to set new conditions of art-making and living in North America.