Canadian Theatre Research Articles

Art for Everyone? Mush, Multiculturalism, and the Prismatic Arts Festival

Founded in 2008 by Shahin Sayadi and Maggie Stewart, the Prismatic Arts Festival is a Halifax-based multidisciplinary arts festival that features the work of Indigenous and culturally diverse artists. This article examines the development of the Prismatic Arts Festival and the ways in which the festival has sought to negotiate, challenge, and transform Halifax’s artistic landscape by creating a model that is locally-grounded, nationally-networked, and fundamentally devoted to advancing the careers and profiles of Indigenous and culturally diverse artists in Nova Scotia and across Canada both within and outside of mainstream performance cultures. As the festival recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, this article traces the history of the Prismatic Arts Festival, its struggles and successes, and the complex negotiations the festival has made and continues to make in order to move toward a future of Canadian theatre in which cultural diversity and inclusivity are the norm, rather than the exception.

Sustainability and Indigenous Aesthetics: Musical Resilience in Sámi and Indigenous Canadian Theatre

Histories of colonial cultural erasure, unsuccessful decolonisation or postcolonialism and rapid modernisation are typically seen as the challenges to sustaining Indigenous traditional musics (Harrison, in press). The Indigenous peoples of Canada have experienced colonial assimilationist policies of government and church, including residential schools that took children away from their families and forbade song, dance and language. These policies resulted in musics and even entire cultures being erased. Although there have been recent improvements in Scandinavia, similar kinds of discrimination happened where the traditional Sámi vocal form,joik(in pan-Sámijuoiggas) was long (and in some cases, still is) regarded as sinful, and Sámi children were forbidden to use their mother tongues at school (for example, from about 1850 to 1980 during Norway’sFornorskningor Norwegianisation policy). In recent years, the Indigenous musics of Canada and the Nordic countries, among others, have reflected, articulated and interpellated sociocultural interrelations and politics (Diamond 2002; Diamond et al. 2018; Harrison 2009; Hilder 2012, 2015; Moisala 2007; Ramnarine 2009, 2017), and Indigenous artists have taken action on politicised issues through a range of contemporary and flourishing artistic expressions (Robinson and Martin 2016).

An Interview with Intimacy Coach Siobhan Richardson

Ryerson University School of Performance students Margot Greve, Ben Kopp, Claire MacMaster, Paige Madsen, Sienna Singh, and Olivia Tharme interview Siobhan Richardson about the emergent field of intimacy coaching in Canada. The students ask Siobhan their most pressing questions about agency, consent, and communication in the context of intimacy choreography and how the field of intimacy coaching evolved in Canadian theatre.

“Sorry Not Sorry”: Apologizing in the Wake of #MeToo

This article explores what it means to apologize for misconduct in the #MeToo era through three examples from the Canadian theatre industry: a private apology (Randolph College for the Performing Arts), a public apology (Citadel Theatre), and an absent apology (Soulpepper Theatre). Understanding a public apology as a performative utterance meant to restore a community’s trust, this article suggests the importance of examining the paratexts generated by and around it that help it achieve its function. From policy revisions, to media interviews, to public forums, these materials and events are crucial in the meaning-making process in which a #MeToo apology is engaged, especially when the theatre community’s access to the apology itself is limited. The article concludes by situating its case studies in relation to issues of misconduct in theatre education and training institutions.

The Theatre Feminist: A Manifesto

This manifesto passionately argues that theatre is not Feminist until it is transformative and unless it includes all of us. The Theatre Feminist is not a formula where you “just add women and stir.” It’s not just plays that are by, about, and for women. Feminist requires a fundamental shift in hierarchy and power that does not implicate people only individually and personally, but collectively and entirely. Its goal must be to overthrow cis-hetero-patriarchy, and there is no overthrowing patriarchy without overthrowing capitalism and racist colonial imperialism at the same time. As I explore the relationship between feminism and communism in this manifesto, and debunk some easy assumptions about the Theatre Feminist along the way, I ground my ideas in reflections on my play Behaviour, recently produced by the Great Canadian Theatre Company and SpiderWebShow. Behaviour demands a recognition of the audience’s gaze and complacency. It asks for action from the people in the audience who may not be victims or perpetrators of sexual assault and labour abuse. And it refuses to leave the audience feeling enriched and satisfied with themselves for having had their awareness raised.

Alan Filewod, ed. The CTR Anthology: Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review

Alan Filewod, ed. The CTR Anthology: Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review

Natalie Alvarez, ed. Fronteras Vivientes: Eight Latina/o Canadian Plays. Natalie Alvarez, ed. Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance.

Natalie Alvarez, ed. Fronteras Vivientes: Eight Latina/o Canadian Plays. Natalie Alvarez, ed. Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance.

Notes on My Forty Years with Canadian Theatre

Toyoshi Yoshihara contemplates his more than forty-year career of translating Canadian plays into Japanese. He traces trends in Canadian theatre and in Japanese theatre and venerates the possibilities of continuing theatrical exchange.

Staging Diaspora, Dramatizing Activism: Fashioning a Progressive Filipino Canadian Theatre in Toronto, 1974–2001

During the 1980s and 1990s, Toronto became home to a thriving Filipino Canadian theatre community, which had significant roots in earlier left-wing political groups organizing from afar against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. The most prominent company, the Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop (CBCW), used dramatic works to highlight a range of issues facing Filipinos in Canada, from the exploitation of domestic workers to employment discrimination, gender-based violence to neo-colonial and neo-liberal economic regimes. This article traces the history of that company, from its origins in Toronto’s 1970s anti-Marcos activist circles to its 1990s stage explorations of Philippine colonial and revolutionary histories. It contends that the CBCW’s activist and theatrical labour, by fostering a transnational critical political consciousness, should complicate assimilation-oriented analyses of immigration and incorporation in Canada. It asserts that the group’s efforts at forging diasporic connections across time and space, along with its attempt to politicize Toronto’s Filipino populace, provided an implicit rebuke to reigning Canadian constructions of multiculturalism and “ethnic” arts. Finally, it situates the company’s history as a demonstration of the important role of artistic and representational means in political struggles waged by Filipinos and other racialized communities in late twentieth-century Canada.

Canadian Theatre Made for Black Women

For close to two decades Trey Anthony has carved out a successful career as a published and produced playwright in Canada in a national theatre landscape where few playwrights enjoy sustained success. This is, in part, because Anthony is also an entrepreneur who identified Black women in Canada as a financially viable and lucrative target market and she has consistently self-produced content that is geared specifically to them. This article begins with the production history, critical response, and box office response to Anthony’s play How Black Mothers Say I Love You. It continues with an analysis of the play’s content and characters as representative of staging Black female life and it concludes with a contemplation of what Anthony’s successful cultivation of a Black female audience in Canada suggests about Canadian theatre.

“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