Congress 2007
ACTR/RTAC
Building
Bridges
May 25th-29th,
2007
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Congress Abstracts
Click here for the conference program.
Alvarez, Natalie. (Toronto) Clown, Krump, and the
Re-Appropriation of Minstrelsy in South Central Los Angeles.
Appleford, Rob. (Alberta) Bound and Predetermined:
Aboriginal Women's Performance Art as Captivity Narrative
Belliveau, George. (UBC) and David Beare , Monica Prendergast, Vincent White,
and Sarah Wolfman-Robichaud. Performing the complexity and art of teaching (in
theatre
Bennett, Melanie. (Calgary)
Legion of Memory: A peculiar site of memorial
Bird, Kym. (York) 'Miss Canada to wed Jack Canuck at the tender age of fifty:'
nation building and a new educational curriculum in the First World War Dramas
of Edith Lelean Groves
Blum, Justin A. (Toronto) Pedigree of a Topdog: Suzan-Lori Parks, Abraham Lincoln, and the Theatre of the
Absurd
Borody, Claire. (Winnipeg) Slow Dancing on Black Ice: The Cost of
Marginalization to the Theatrical Landscape in Canada
Butler, Alexis. (Toronto) Re-Vamping History: Neo-burlesque and
historical tradition
ChainŽ, Francine. (Laval) Ce que nous apprend la premiŹre
experience d'enseignement en art dramatique : crŽer des ponts entre la
thŽorie et la pratique.
What the first teaching
experience teaches us in drama: to create bridges between theory and practice.
(Abstract in French and English)
Cleveland, Janne.
(Carleton) Bridging Desire: Ronnie
Burkett Theatre of Marionettes
Cooke, Virginia. (UCFV) Taking Stock of the Stock
Companies: The British Guild
Players in Vancouver
Cowan, T.L. (Alberta)
"'The Rappers Don't Know What the Feminist Performance Artists Are
Doing': Action Poetry '94 and the Birth of Contemporary Spoken Word Performance
in Canada"
Culham, Cam. (Victoria) "Performing Language" at the
University of Victoria
Eaket, Chris. (Carleton) Pervasive Gaming: Experiments in Urban
Storytelling
Filewod, Alan. (Guelph) "A Paul Bunyan Ideal":
Workers Theatre in the 1950s.
Finn, Patrick & Marilyn Potts. (St. Mary's UC, Calgary)
"A Bridge too Far?": Shakespeare and Goodnight Desdemona,
Good Morning Juliet
Foster, Katherine.
(Toronto) The He(art) of the City:
Prairie Theatre Exchange at Home in Portage Place
Freeman, Barry. (Toronto) Theatrefront's Return: The Sarajevo
Project and its bridges of cultures,
traditions and stone.
Gallagher, Kathleen.
(OISE/UT) Dramatic Writing
and Subcultural Knowledge (Full paper included)
Green, Reina. (Mount Saint Vincent)
Park Shakespeare: Bridging the Divide
Hawkins, John A. (Alex)
(Alberta) Alberta's Theatre
100:
Celebrating a "Human Meeting Point of Vision and Dream"
Irwin, Kathleen (Regina)
Double-crossing/ Vying Representations in Crossfiring
Johnson, Stephen. (Toronto) The Re-Domestication of the Exhibition: A Visit to
the Niagara Falls Museum, lately closed
Joseph, Maia and Jerry Wasserman.
(UBC) Searching for Captain
McDonald's Trained Indians, "The Best Drilled People in the World"
Kivisto, Mikko. (Illinois) The Creative Spirit of Art: The Theosophical Writings of Roy Mitchell
Knowles, Ric. (Guelph)
"Bridging Cultures: Multicultural Text, Intercultural Performance
in Contemporary Toronto
Knutson,
Susan. (UniversitŽ Sainte-Anne) Daphne Marlatt's Canadian Noh Play, The
Gull
Lacroix
Melissa Morelli. (Lancaster) Preludes for the Piano: Bridges Between Gender and Genre
Levene, Gillian. (Toronto)
Major Gina: Interrupting the Genealogy of Male Theatre Criticism in
Toronto's Print Media (Wants to be
scheduled Monday or Tuesday)
Lohnes, Cortney. (Alberta) Rethinking Boal's Rehearsal for Change
Luger, Moberley. (UBC) Memory and Monumentality in Canadian
Theatre
Lundgren, Jodi. (Thompson
Rivers) The Woman Beside
Herself: Transnational Gestures in
Contemporary Canadian Dance
Macdonald, Megan. (Queen Mary)
Finding a Fault Line: Digging up an Anthropological Foundation of
Performance Studies
McKinnon, James. (Toronto)
Aiming the Canon at Canadian Audiences: Cowgirl Opera's Three Sisters:
A Black Comic Opera
Morelli, Henriette M. (UBC – Okanagan) "Lady, give us the history we haven't had": Bridging the Gap between Historically Specific
Sexualities in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine
Moschopedis, Eric. (Calgary,
AB) Trashing Cowtown: Locating
Personal Idenitity Through Dumpster Diving
Moser, Marlene. (Brock) Performing Pink: Breast Cancer and
Femininity
Nothof, Anne. (Athabasca) Making History Meaningful: The German
Plays of Mieko Ouchi and Vern Thiessen
Owen, David. (Calgary)
Bridging Canada's Modernist Past and Postmodern Present: Herman Voaden's
Symphonic Expressionism Then and Now
Paris, Jamie. (Regina) On
the Adversarial Treatment of Women by Men in Aboriginal Drama
Pearce, Wes. (Regina)
Bridging Pedagogies: The Laramie Project, Lord Byng Secondary
School and Community.
Perry,
Mia. (UBC)
Pedagogical processes at the theatre: Clements' Women in Fish: Hours
of Water
Prendergast, Monica. (Victoria)
From Guest to Witness: Teaching Audience Studies in Theatre
Quint, Cordula. (Mount Allison)
"The 'Foreigner's Invasion': Interculturalism, Tradition and
Contemporaneity in Odin Teatret's Ur-Hamlet.
Radmacher, Kimberley.
(Toronto) Hypertext meets
Performance: Bridging a disciplinary gap
Rudakoff,
Judith. (York)
Common Plants:Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality: Bridging Cultures,
Disciplines and Geographies (Wants to be paired with Zatzman)
Saint-Jacques, Diane.
(UniversitŽ de MontrŽal) ApprŽcier
une production thŽ‰trale l'Žcole (Abstract in French only)
Salter, Denis. (McGill) Part
One:Speaking, Embodying, Sounding, and Extirpating the Very Depths of Evil: The
Theatrical Language of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry's 1888 Macbeth
Senyshyn, Dimitry.
(Toronto) Anatomizing Discourse:
The Specular Body in Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus
Smith, Annie. (UBC) Culture squeeze: how may the academy understand and
teach a theory and aesthetics of Native performance?
Sperdakos, Paula. (Toronto) Ida van Cortland and the 1877-78 Season
of Mrs. Morrison's Grand Opera House, Toronto
Stedman, Sam. (Toronto) Social Change, Ethical Representation,
and the Inhumanity of the Avant-Garde
Stephenson, Jenn. (Queen's) The Performative Past Perfect?:
Theatricality, Violence and Identity in Perfect Pie and The Drawer Boy
Stovel, Nora Foster. (Alberta)
The Birth of the Ballerina: Self or Sylph?
ThŽberge, Mariette.
(Ottawa) Bridging francophone
linguistic minority communities through professional training in theatre
Thibault, Laurence.
(Ottawa) Representations in the
creative processes of French theatre productions for adolescents in Ontario
Tracey, Dawn. (Alberta)
Ronnie Burkett's Street of Blood
Turner, Mark. (Toronto) The City's Limits: Reflections on the
Impact of 'Metropolitanism' Upon Theatre and Performance Research in Canada
(Two. Choose one)
Wilkinson, Lydia. (Toronto) "'Just Watch Me': Watching Canada
Watch Itself Through Linda Griffiths' Maggie & Pierre."
Zatzman, Belarie. (York)
Bridging Communities: "Common Plants" an international
theatre research project
Panels
Ambivalence(s) of Invention: Dramaturgical Approaches to
Creation"
Pil
Hansen, University of Copenhagen
Bruce
Barton, University of Toronto
D.D.
Kugler, Simon Fraser University
A Tyranny of
Documents II: The Return of the
Theatre Historian as Film Noir Detective
Alan Filewod, University of Guelph
Paula Sperdakos, University of Toronto
Alexis Butler, University of Toronto
Moderator:
Stephen Johnson, University of Toronto
Women's
Caucus Mentoring Roundtable
Moderators: Louise
Forsyth (Saskatchewan), Sherrill Grace (UBC), Rosalind Kerr
(Alberta), Alexis Butler (Toronto).
Martina, Natasha (Saskatchewan)
The exploration of breath within contemplative practices and how that manifests
itself within an actor's training
Walsh, Lionel. (Windsor)
Introduction to Michael Chekhov Acting Technique
Heimbecker, Donna. (SNTC) Saskatchewan Native
Theatre Company Workshop/Lecture on
Aboriginal Youth Theatre.
Guest Speakers
West-words
into the 21st Century:
Assessing Western Canadian Playwriting at the Millennium: past developments,
present challenges, future directions
Link
to the West-words conference site here.
Keynote
Speakers:
Don
Kerr (Saskatchewan)
Mieko
Ouchi (Alberta)
Bruce
McManus (Manitoba)
Remembering Mavor
Moore
Allan Boss
(CBC Alberta, U of C)
Roundtable on Aboriginal
Playwriting in Saskatchewan
Keynote Speakers:
Mark Dieter
Ken Williams
Maria Campbell
Moderator: Alan
Long (Saskatchewan)
Abstracts
of Papers
Alvarez, Natalie. (Toronto) Clown, Krump, and
the Re-Appropriation of Minstrelsy in South Central Los Angeles.
In 1992, in
the streets of South Central Los Angeles, California, a form of dance began to
emerge variously referred to as clown or krump. Its origins are
contested, however, its progenitor is said to be "Tommy the Clown," a
dancer who, in a traditional clown costume with red nose and rainbow wig,
dominated the birthday party circuit, performing in residential street parties
a form of dance that, while reminiscent of hip hop, had taken on a much more
violent, expressive manner. Clown or krump dancing has become notorious
for its sharp jabs, aggressive popping and its clown-faced dancers, a
face-paint that marks them as "clown" and therefore non-threatening,
absolving them from the gang warfare that governs life in South Los Angeles
(formerly known as "South Central").
The collision
between the painted clown faces of krump dancers and the violent flailing of
limbs becomes particularly suggestive when juxtaposed with the video footage of
the Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police officers in 1991; krump and clown
simulates a body being beaten only to transcend this violence on the body in an
ecstatic state of "trance," when dancers meet in street gatherings
and "Battle Zones" as a means, ironically, of escaping the street
violence that pervades their neighbourhood.
This paper will
attempt to situate the phenomenon of clown and krump dancers, painting their
faces to demarcate themselves as "other" in the already
"othered" area of South (Central) L.A., within the context of the
minstrel tradition in America, more specifically, a grassroots re-appropriation
of minstrelsy in African American popular performance.
Natalie Alvarez is a PhD candidate at
the University of Toronto's Graduate Centre for Study of Drama and a
cross-appointed lecturer in the Department of Dramatic Arts and Great
Books/Liberal Studies at Brock University. Most recently, her work has
been published in Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors, and the
American Dramatic Text (Peter Lang, 2006). She
was the 2002 recipient of ACTR's Robert G. Lawrence Emerging Scholar
Prize.
Appleford, Rob. (Alberta) Bound and Predetermined:
Aboriginal Women's Performance Art as Captivity Narrative
In this paper, I consider Canadian
Aboriginal women's performance art as 'captivity narratives,' as attempts to
forestall the encoding of female bodies and their materiality by
nation-formational discourses—both non-Aboriginal and
Aboriginal. Whether bodies are abjected as tools for conquest by
colonial agents, or valorized as "sacred hoops" (critic Paula Gunn
Allen's term) of Aboriginal nationhood and kinship, they are introduced into a
circulation of acculturated or resistant cultural capital. Thus, just as the
classic female captivity narrative tells of settler women taken against their
will to live amongst 'savages,' the 'Aboriginal woman' becomes removed from a
chaotic present and is forced to function as a metonymic, immanent ordering
principle in individual lives and Aboriginal nations. Freedom, in both the
classic and contemporary senses, depends upon how one understands one's
captivity. I argue that Aboriginal women's performance art often attempts to
intervene in and problematize the enforced metonymy of the Aboriginal
woman/body/nation, whether by exploring the feelings of anxiety and fraudulence
this metonymy elicits, performing captivity to expose its constitutive effects,
or deconstructing the coherent, pliable female subject to expose the
vulnerability of bodies without their 'captivating' texts. As a starting point,
I will discuss the poetic recitation practice of the 19th c. "Mohawk
poetess" E. Pauline Johnson (who can be usefully read as the first female
Aboriginal performance artist), and will trace the problematic of captivity in
the work of contemporary performance artists such as Rebecca Belmore
(Anishnaabe), Aiyyana Maracle (Mohawk), and Lori Blondeau
(Cree/Saulteaux/MŽtis).
Rob Appleford is an Associate Professor
in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. In
addition to publishing many articles on Aboriginal performance and literature,
he has edited the critical collection Critical Perspectives On Canadian
Theatre in English, Volume One: Aboriginal Drama And Theatre
(Playwrights Press, 2005) and is presently completing the book length study
entitled The Ghost/Dance of North American Aboriginal Literature.
Belliveau, George. (UBC). David Beare, Monica Prendergast, Vincent White, and
Sarah Wolfman-Robichaud. Performing the
complexity and art of teaching (in theatre)
Teaching is a complex act that involves
many interwoven layers of performance. This performed presentation
explores the complexity of facilitating/teaching/directing theatre.
Anchored in complexity theory and performance theory, the authors (performers)
examine two critical moments in the lives of theatre educators where they
performed at multiple levels to engage a community. One story explores how a
secondary theatre teacher combines his skills in theatre and counseling to
generate positive youth development. Through the engagement of a collaborative
play-creating process this teacher explores the multi-layered roles he plays to
facilitate a theatre environment that fosters inclusion, control, intimacy,
empowerment, and vision for his students. The second story investigates how a
university theatre educator worked with a community, ranging from children to
seniors, to present an outdoor Shakespearean production. The multiple and
overlapping roles played by this educator in the creation and presentation of
this production enable us to dwell in the complexity of what it means to
facilitate a group of learners through theatre. These stories are
supported by a theoretical chorus voice that situates and contextualizes the
field experiences. Theory and practice are thus woven into a performed
script in an attempt to bring to life the layered stories within complex
learning sites. Collectively, the dramatized inquiry about theatre
processes explores the complexity and multiple layers of what it means to
teach/facilitate/direct in theatre.
George Belliveau is Assistant Professor
in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia where he
teaches theatre education. His research interests include theatre
education, drama across the curriculum, drama and social justice, and Canadian
Theatre. His work has been published in journals such as the
International Journal of Arts Education, Arts and Learning Research Journal,
Canadian Journal of Education, Canadian Theatre Review, English Quarterly, among
others.
David Beare is a PhD student in the
Language and Literacy Education program at the University of British Columbia.
His main research area is collective theatre for positive youth development.
He has been teaching theatre for the past fifteen years, and he has
co-created over a dozen original plays with youth. He currently teaches high
school theatre in North Vancouver, Canada.
Monica Prendergast, PhD, completed her
interdisciplinary graduate studies at the University of Victoria this year in
theatre and curriculum. Her research on audience education has led to many
chapter and essay publications, including in the books Ethnodrama (2005)
and Drama as Social Intervention (2006)
and journals such as Research in Drama Education, Journal of Aesthetic
Education and Qualitative Inquiry.
Poems that appear in her dissertation are forthcoming in a special issue of Theatre
Research in Canada. Monica is currently a SSHRC
postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Education, University of British
Columbia and a sessional instructor in Applied Theatre at the University of
Victoria.
Vincent White is a doctoral student at the University of
British Columbia in the Department of Language and Literacy Education. His
research interests include using ethnotheatre and narrative inquiry to examine
systems of change in schools. Vincent has extensive experience working in
public education as a counsellor, classroom teacher and vice principal. He is
currently involved in a pilot project that is looking at innovative ways to
promote pro-social behaviour in schools through student empowerment.
Sarah Wolfman-Robichaud is currently
working on her M.A. in Language and Literacy in Education with a focus on Drama
Education at the University of British Columbia. With a strong performance background, she is focusing her
research and practice on work with high-risk and underprivileged youth, while
addressing social issues through the theatre medium.
Bennett,
Melanie. (Calgary) Legion of Memory: A peculiar site of
memorial
The Legion of Memory was
developed in the disused Royal Canadian Legion in Kitchener, Ontario as part of
the City's Tapestry Multicultural Festival. A site-specific event, this performance
attempted to animate the displacement of the refugee, while exploring the
problem of war memorial in Canada today. My role in Legion of Memory was
that of playwright and performer.
Site-specific
theatre articulates and defines itself through properties, qualities or
meanings produced in specific relationships between an 'event' and a position
it occupies.[1] For many years, the disused Royal Canadian
Legion in Kitchener was both a site of leisure and a shrine that occupied
objects of war memorial. The Legion Hall with its artifacts for both
entertainment and memorial has become displaced by the passage of time and
disuse. During the dramaturgical process of Legion of Memory, it became necessary to build links
between the found objects of memory – photos, ribbons of honour, plaques,
etc. – and the fabricated plot being developed.
In
his archaeological analysis of Western theatre practice, Mike Pearson suggests
that theatre auditoria discourage social interaction, limit spectators'
eye-contact, and have implications on the practice, function, and meaning of
theatre.[2] Site-specific theatre, by contrast,
enables an arrangement of performance and spectators that results in concrete
social practices. Building a relationship between the performer and spectators
becomes one of the most crucial performance elements.
The
2007 ACTR conference, Building Bridges is the ideal platform to discuss the link between objects
of memorial meant to preserve the past to their present-day interpretation, as
well as the unique spectator/performer relationship in site-specific theatre.
[1] Kaye,
Nick. Site-specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. (London: Routledge, 2000) 1.
2 Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks. Theatre/Archaeology. (London: Routledge, 2001) 108.
Melanie Bennett is completing a Masters of Performance Studies
at the University of Calgary. She has collaborated on the writing and performing
of an original work called Bipolar/Bare that premiered at the Upstart Festival
in Waterloo. She has also written and performed for past site-specific theatre
productions including Mimetic Flesh, Mimetic Hotel, Legion of Memory, and Crossfiring / Mama Wetotan. While pursuing an academic career in
Performance Studies, she hopes to continue developing as a theatre
practitioner. Her current research and practice concerns site-specific
performance, postmodern dramaturgy, and the performance of cities.
(Would like to be grouped with Houston)
Bird,
Kym. (York) 'Miss Canada to wed Jack Canuck at the tender age of fifty:' nation
building and a new educational curriculum in the First World War Dramas of
Edith Lelean Groves
This paper builds a bridge between the past and the
present and between the disciplines of drama and education in its discussion of
the work of First World War author Edith Lelean Groves. Groves became one
of most celebrated Canadian pedagogues of the early twentieth century: she was
a teacher, a school trustee, the founder of Special Education in Toronto,
Canada and eventually the first woman "Chairman" of the Toronto Board
of Education. During the First World War Groves married and, like all
women at the time in Canada, was forced to relinquish her position. She
did not, however, abandon her interest in education. Having married the
principal of the public school at which she was teaching, Groves applied her
substantial talents to writing plays for primary school children. Between
1914 and 1918, she penned 19 of her 21 extant theatrical works, making her one
of the most prolific playwrights of the early twentieth century.
This paper focuses upon the relationship between Groves's work as a teacher,
the pedagogical purpose of the plays, and the formation of a new, Canadian
nationalism. It makes reference to several plays but focuses upon The
Wooing of Miss Canada
(1917) to examine the ways in which her primary school dramas inculcated in
very small children the values of progress, patriotism, and chauvinism that
dominate the project of nation-building as it is expressed in the new Ontario
curriculum during the First World War. It reads The Wooing of
Miss Canada as a
mythologization of Canadian identity at a moment of transition in its identity
from a daughter of the Empire with a unwavering fidelity to Great Britain to an
autonomous nation with a desire for independence on the world stage.
Kym
Bird teaches drama and theatre in the School of Arts and Letters, Atkinson Faculty
of liberal and Professional studies, York University, where she also earn her
PhD Her dissertation won the Dean's Dissertation Prize (1997) and was nominated
for the Canada-wide dissertation prize and the Governor General's Gold medal.
She is the recipient of the York University Parents' Association
University-Wide Teaching Award (1997) and the Division of Humanities, "Excellence in Teaching"
Award (1997). She was a member of the Professional Concerns Committee,
Association for Canadian Theatre Research, 1993-5 and a member-at-large,
1991-2. She has been the Secretary of the York University Faculty
Association since 2003. The Association of Canadian Theatre Research
presented Dr. Bird with the 2004 Ann Saddlemyer Award to Professor Bird for her
book, Redressing the Past: The Politics of Early, English-Canadian Women's
Drama, 1880-1920, published in 2004 by McGill-Queen's University Press.
That same year she held a Visiting Professorship at the University of
Rome, La Sapienza and is a member of the Editorial Board of La Sapienza's new
Journal Figura Nel Tappeto. She is the author of two, upcoming TRIC
articles entitled "The Beauty
of Holiness:" Politics and Allegory in Mary Kinley Ingraham's Acadia"
and "Habits of Independence: Cross-border politics and Feminism in
TwoWorld War I plays by Sister Mary Agnes." Professor Bird is
currently working on an anthology of early Canadian women's dramas.
Blum,
Justin A. (Toronto) Pedigree of a Topdog: Suzan-Lori Parks, Abraham Lincoln, and the Theatre
of the Absurd
"It's like Lincoln created an opening with that hole in his
head [...] We've all had to pass through it into now, you know, like the eye of
a needle. Everything that happens, from 1865 to today, has to pass
through that wound." Suzan-Lori Parks[1]
The theatre of Suzan-Lori Parks has characteristically sought to
re-present American history in ways that complicate conventional views,
undermining widely understood historical narratives even as they suggest an
indissoluble link between the past and present. In writing about her own
work, Parks consistently stresses how the idea of "Rep and Rev," the
repetition and variation of verbal elements or dramatic situations throughout a
play, draws on the aesthetics of American jazz music. She has had rather
less to say about the relationship between this term and an aesthetic which
might seem even more directly available to someone writing plays: that of
theatrical Absurdism as identified by Martin Esslin in his landmark The
Theatre of the Absurd.
This is perhaps understandable in a critical and theatrical climate in which
Esslin's term has escaped his initial use in discussing similarities among a
relatively small number of plays produced in a relatively short historical
period. The labels "Absurd" and "Absurdist" have
tended, in contemporary academic and critical discourse, to become either a
rigid prescription (how to write an Absurd play Step 1: place an obviously
constructed prop on a bare stage...) that fits hardly any of the plays Esslin
discusses, or a harmlessly ubiquitous term applied by critics to plays they
don't quite understand or simply find "weird."
This
presentation seeks to discuss how time (both on and off stage), space, and
dialogue function in Parks' Lincoln/Booth plays (The America Play and Topdog/Underdog). By underlining their
dramaturgical similarities to and difference from the plays of what we might
call "High Absurdism," argue that Parks simultaneously echoes and
appropriates the Theatre of the Absurd as part of her ongoing project of
re-presenting history in the theatre. While it's fairly clear how
historical figures and mythology get appropriated and re-purposed in her work,
I want to explore how we might make the same suggestion with regard to literary
history and dramatic structure.
Justin A. Blum is currently a PhD student at the University of
Toronto's Graduate Centre for Study of Drama. He holds an M.A. in Drama
from Washington University in St. Louis, and a B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from
New York University Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to scholarly
presentations on topics as diverse as Jacobean court entertainments, the
dramaturgical practices of Robert Lepage, and Shakespeare in the contemporary
classroom, he has worked as a playwright, screenwriter, and dramaturg in both
academic and professional capacities. His current research project is
entitled "The Theatrical Histories of Jack the Ripper: Melodrama,
Monstrosity, Modernity."
Borody,
Claire. (Winnipeg) Slow Dancing on Black Ice: The Cost of Marginalization to
the Theatrical Landscape in Canada
In
the fall of 1996 CTR devoted a special issue to the "Survivors of the Ice
Age" Symposium sponsored by Primus Theatre and held at College St.
Boniface in Winnipeg that spring. The symposium was devoted to the
discussion and demonstration of survival tactics by practitioners of,
what editor Ric Knowles described as,"politically or aesthetically
alternative or otherwise challenging art forms" during an extensive
funding recession. In his editorial, Knowles points out that changes in
arts funding practices were "less the result of local or provincial
election results, bad economic times, temporary "restraint"
recessions, or readjustments, than of major longer-term, and in many cases
deliberately orchestrated shifts in the social, cultural and political
climate". In acknowledging that "high-culture forms seem
secure, and commercial theatre...thriving like never before", Knowles
highlights the fact that the funding freeze was affecting only a certain sector
of Canada's theatre culture. Savannah Walling's keynote address to
participants of the symposium is among the collection of articles published in
the CTR special issue. In that address Walling presents a highly accurate
assessment of marginalized theatre using extensive experience with her own
company, Vancouver Moving Theatre, as a vantage point. This event
occurred more than a decade ago.
Unsurprisingly,
reflection upon the development of the theatrical landscape in Canada in the
past ten years, reveals that the 'facts' in this construction have emerged from
the domain of written documentation. What does one know about the state
of the culture and the 'facts' from which the Canadian theatre legacy is being
constructed? One can say with accuracy that there is a reasonable trail
of progress left by playwrights with a publishing and production history.
One can also locate the paper and concrete traces and leads of theatre
companies that have existed into the present. Furthermore, it is also
true that theatre occurring in larger Canadian cities is more likely to be
documented in various forms, and therefore noticed, than theatre in smaller
centres. This, in addition to the expansiveness of the country in
kilometers but not population, contributes the wide-spread regionalization of
Canadian theatre. While electronic documentation has improved the
spectrum of information accessibility, there remains the question of the
absence.
I believe that the work of the theatre
companies described by Walling a decade ago as "creators of indigenous
original art" and who focused more on spectacle, physical presence and
creative process are not necessarily documented in a manner that allows for
accuracy of representation in the Canadian theatre landscape. What
of the situations in which important work has been poorly or scantily
documented or when the documentation has been scattered or partially destroyed
or publically inaccessible? My own research has taken me on
quests for the archival material of small theatres that has led to boxes in
basements, attics, garages. This is certainly not a novel situation, but
rather the long standing experience of the archeologist and the
historian. However, the saddening reality for those of us who do this
kind of research is that the reach is not into distant past. We are often
writing about living people and relatively current work. One becomes
painfully aware of how quickly things fade without preservation.
This
paper seeks to determine the cost of this lost or buried material to students,
scholars and artists in the field of theatre and to ask questions directed a
the rallying of interest in the making of history, or perhaps more
specifically, to generate an interest in living history. Taking into
consideration the macro-theme of the humanities and social science congress
this year, the paper seeks to establish the importance of sustaining the
difficulties of searching for evidence of these absent presences and then
drawing them into the realm of public knowledge. In what way can we make
this knowledge public and what is the importance of doing so? Why should
we care?
Claire
Borody (University of Winnipeg, Department of Theatre and Film) is an Assistant
Professor of Theatre in Winnipeg where she teaches both practical and
theoretical courses in theatre.
Her research interests include 20-21st century acting and performance
theory, devised and collectively conceived performance work, cross-disciplinary
performance and contemporary Canadian theatre. She has been an active member of the Association for
Canadian Theatre Research (ACTR) since 1998 and has presented papers on a
variety of research topics. She
has served as Prairie representative to the ACTR executive since 2004 and was
the association's Secretary from 2004-2006. She is also one of the founding members of the Theatre
Practice Committee responsible for programming workshop/demonstrations for the
ACTR conferences. In 2004 she was
the co-ordinator of the ACTR conference at the University of Manitoba
(Winnipeg). She was a member of
the organizing committee for the 2005 International Children's Literature
Association Conference, served as administrative and creative consultant to the
independently produced New Forms Festival (2005) and as rapporteur at Femfest
(2003) sponsored by Sarasvati Productions. She is the Artistic Director of
Avera Theatre, a devised theatre company, she founded in 2003. Avera Theatre has received production
grants from the Manitoba Arts Council (MAC) funding Stories for Late Night
Drinkers (2005) and The Town Where They Count the Stars (2006). In 2005 she
received a Manitoba Arts Council (MAC) grant to travel to Poland to attend the
International School for Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). She also has extensive
experience as a freelance director, dramaturg and creative consultant on
various independent theatre and dance projects. She has published articles and reviews in Canadian
Theatre Review, Canadian
Literature and Prairie Fire.
Butler,
Alexis. (Toronto) Re-Vamping History: Neo-burlesque and historical tradition
To many, the word 'burlesque' conjures quaint images of
stripteasers in 'pasties' performing alongside hackneyed, not-so-funny
comedians on the 'wrong side of town'. Likewise, burlesque is usually perceived
as having been mercifully left for dead in the early forties. While burlesque
originated as a parodic form that incorporated feminine sexual display and
critical social commentary, it did not in fact actually feature striptease
until the 1920s. At the heart of burlesque however, there has always dwelt to
varying degrees the paradoxical tension between female sexual empowerment and
female sexual objectification. Whether or not burlesque ever, in fact,
"died" remains a point of some debate, and yet there is no doubt that
it is alive and kicking today.
The
neo-burlesque movement that emerged in the mid-nineties provides a compelling
site in which to consider the contemporary re-visionings of, and complicated
artistic and political relationships to, an historical theatrical genre. Using
several current Toronto neo-burlesque collectives as examples, this paper will
seek to explore the ways in which contemporary artists have drawn on their
perceptions of historical burlesque, both aesthetic and political, in order to
inform their practice. Some artists employ attempts at dramaturgical
re-creationism drawing on the outward gestural and sartorial markers of classic
burlesque. Others, like The Scandelles, opt for an interpretive strategy frequently dependant
upon camp and irony that seeks to re-engage the parody, social critique, and
sexual display of classic burlesque. While the former strategy generally sites
the reclamation of depictions of female sexuality from the male dominated porn industry
as its central goal, the complexity of the latter hinges upon the troubling of
essentialist hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality and desire and situates
itself in a primarily queer cultural context.
The
dramaturgical means by which these two strands (although there are undoubtedly
many others) of the neo-burlesque movement draw on and revise past tradition to
different contemporary political ends provides the focus for this paper.
Re-Vamping History: Neo-burlesque and historical tradition
Alexis Butler is in the third year of the PhD program at the
University of Toronto's Graduate Centre for Study of Drama. Also an actor and
theatre educator, her research presently focuses on the history and culture of
burlesque in Toronto.
ChainŽ,
Francine. (Laval) Ce que nous apprend la premiŹre experience d'enseignement en
art dramatique : crŽer des ponts entre la thŽorie et la pratique./
What
the first teaching experience teaches us in drama: to create bridges between
theory and practice.
What
the first teaching experience teaches us in drama: to create bridges between
theory and practice.
The
training in teaching drama at the university consists of a combination of
theoretical, didactic and practical courses. Arrive the time when the
university student must come into contact with high school students, and where
he or she is confronted with the reality of the school compared to what he or
she learned. This first meeting is memorable and it is it all the more in drama
where the organization of space, the dynamic of the group, the interaction
between the players is honored.
This
contact with high school students is the occasion to plunge in the reality of
the class and to enter the playful universe of drama. It is also a way of creating
bridges between theory and practice; a way of applying what was learned. We
studied this inaugural meeting in company of a group of university students in
art education during an animation in drama that was carried out near a group of
high school students. In the context of a collaborative approach, we will
account their observations, their training in drama but also, we will discuss
what the experiment of animating in a workshop has taught them about art and
life.
Ce
que nous apprend la premiŹre expŽrience d'enseignement en art dramatique :
crŽer des ponts entre la thŽorie et la pratique.
La
formation l'enseignement en art dramatique l'universitŽ est constituŽe d'un
ensemble de cours thŽoriques, didactiques et pratiques. Arrive le temps oť l'Žtudiant
doit entrer en contact avec des ŽlŹves et qu'il est confrontŽ la rŽalitŽ de
l'Žcole en regard de ce qu'il a appris. Cette premiŹre rencontre est marquante
et elle l'est d'autant plus en art dramatique oť l'organisation de l'espace, la
dynamique du groupe, l'interaction entre les joueurs sont l'honneur. Ce
contact avec des ŽlŹves du secondaire est l'occasion de plonger dans la rŽalitŽ
de la classe et d'entrer dans l'univers ludique de l'art dramatique. C'est
aussi une faŤon de crŽer des ponts entre la thŽorie et la pratique, une faŤon
de mettre en application ce qui a ŽtŽ appris.
Nous
avons ŽtudiŽ cette rencontre inaugurale en compagnie d'un groupe d'Žtudiants en
enseignement des arts dans le cadre d'une animation en art dramatique rŽalisŽe
auprŹs d'un groupe d'ŽlŹves du secondaire. Dans le contexte d'une approche
collaborative, nous rendrons compte de leurs observations, de leur
apprentissage en art dramatique, mais aussi de ce que l'expŽrience mme de
l'animation en atelier leur a appris sur l'art et la vie.
Francine Cha”nŽ is professor at the School of visual arts and
director of the Master's program in visual arts (UniversitŽ Laval) . She
teaches undergraduate students the pedagogy in the dramatic arts and offers a
research seminar at the graduate level. The research activity she is currently
pursuing is related to the playful approach works are presented in the museums,
po•Žtiques (the evolution of the creative process in the making), as well as
autobiographical and performatives practices. Francine Cha”nŽ has published
several articles in: Theatre Research in Canada, The Sciences of Education Magazine, IDEA, The Theatrical Directory, etc. She has also obtained the
2001 Jean-ClŽo Godin prize for the best French Canadian essay in theatre entitled
" Le musŽe l'Žcole : une expŽrience de jeu dramatique par les oeuvres
d'art ".
Cleveland,
Janne. (Carleton) Bridging Desire: Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes
The notion of building bridges assumes a disconnect between
ourselves and other people or things that – it is assumed – would
result in a deeper harmony or balance if the situation imposing the rupture was
somehow rectified. In the bid to erase the chasm that keeps us removed
from our deepest longings, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes provides a
creative plane through which to safely examine the dimensions of loss and
desire that are implicit in one another. Because "the audience sees
the puppet, through perception and through imagination, as an object and as life" (Toward an Aesthetics of the
Puppet 64, my emphasis), the puppet simultaneously functions as the receptacle
of our projected desires while commanding the freedom to act upon and perform
those desires in ways that human actors never could.
Since
founding his own company in 1986 Ronnie Burkett has been creating and producing
puppet theatre in which these animated inanimate objects have represented a
bridge to the understanding of our desires by acting out traumas of loss and
longing. Scenes of rape, incest, homophobic violence, political
repression, and the death of loved ones have all been foregrounded in Burkett's
work. Maintaining a Canadian – and particularly a Western Canadian
– flavour to his work (he is from Medicine Hat, after all), Burkett
employs the art of puppet theatre on National and International stages in order
to examine the conflicts that we humans encounter. This paper explores
how Burkett's puppets provide a bridge into the imaginative landscapes of the
unconscious in the attempt to heal wounds left in the wake of these traumas,
and enable us to reconnect to our desires.
Janne Cleveland is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Mediations at
Carleton University. This paper represents a small portion of the
dissertation she is currently working to complete at Carleton University in the
Cultural Mediations Program through the Institute for Comparative Studies in
Literature, Art, and Culture. As well as working on her thesis, I she has
been teaching in the English Department at Carleton and the Theatre Department
at University of Ottawa.
Cooke,
Virginia. (UCFV). Taking Stock of the Stock Companies: The British Guild
Players in Vancouver
On November 2, 1929, the newly refurbished Empress Theatre at Hastings
and Gore, Vancouver, opened for the inaugural production of what would turn out
to be Vancouver's last—and arguably the best—stock theatre company
prior to WWII: the British Guild Players. Built in 1908, when it
was hailed as the largest theatre west of Chicago, the Empress housed a
succession of stock theatre companies, with stage lives of anywhere from a few
months to four and a half years. Along with vaudeville, opera, and
touring companies, they formed a vibrant theatre scene in a city of just over
120,000.
The
primary producers for the British Guild Players were David Clyde and Norman
Cannon. Clyde and his wife Gaby Fay imigrated from London (and Glasgow),
where Clyde in particular had achieved stage success. Norman Cannon's
stage career had been primarily in cities outside London. From 1929 to
1931, Basil Radford, who had been touring in America and Australia, joined the
company. These were no bit players; they distinguished themselves both on
stage and later in film. Gaby Fay, for example, eventually became Fay
Holden, starring as the mother in the Andy Hardy films. Radford returned
to England's stage and screen; one of his memorable roles was in
Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
Yet
from 1929 to 1934, the British Guild Players defied the Depression, and
competed with touring companies, radio, and talking pictures to produce current
London and Broadway hits—often a new play every week—for Vancouver
audiences. It seems clear that they left Vancouver only when talking
pictures proved insurmountable.
For
the young Dorothy Somersets and others, these stock companies formed the bridge
to their own work. By focusing on the story of the British Guild Players,
I hope to illuminate a previously neglected and very rich area of Vancouver's
theatre history.
Virginia
Cooke. Dr. Virginia Cooke has taught in the English department at the
University College of the Fraser Valley for over twenty years; her teaching
includes courses in modern drama, history of drama, Shakespeare, and Canadian
drama. She has published work on
Samuel Beckett and Peter Shaffer, as well as Brian Friel. She has also written about Headlines
Theatre.
Outside
theatre, Virginia has written two handbooks on Writing Across the Curriculum
and one on working in Writing Centres, and was commissioned by B.C.'s Ministry
of Education to produce a study of Writing Proficiencies necessary for success
in university. She served for
several years as Deans of Arts, but has returned to teaching.
This
particular project on the British Guild Players began when an acquaintance in
Vancouver began house renovations and discovered that the bathroom walls were
insulated with old theatre posters!
Thus began the detective work which has turned out to be very exciting.
Cowan,
T.L. (Alberta) "'The Rappers Don't Know What the Feminist Performance
Artists Are Doing': Action Poetry '94 and the Birth of Contemporary Spoken Word
Performance in Canada"
In 1992, poet/musician/performance artist John Sobol spent
several months trying to convince directors at The Banff Centre that 1994 was
the year to gather a diverse range of artists from across Canada, the United
States, and abroad for a 3-week long workshop which would "reflect the
re-emergence of oral performance as a vital expressive medium and catalytic
social agent." Two years later, Action Poetry '94 welcomed twenty workshop
participants along with prominent guest artists including Lillian Allen,
Jeanette Armstrong Jayne Cortez, John Giorno, Judy Radul and Uma Rao. These
artists came from disciplines spanning the spectrum from music, to theatre, to
literary performance. However, Sobol recognized that the performance aspect (that is, "uniting two of
society's most significant symbol systems – the word and the body –
via the voice") of these seemingly miscellaneous practices was remarkable
and, indeed, cause for critical dialogue and collaboration, with the hope of
"forging [...] new alliances and praxes."
In this paper I will discuss the archive materials from Action Poetry '94
(housed at the Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives at The Banff Centre),
highlighting individual performances which were the central focus of the
workshop. What is perhaps most interesting about the Action Poetry '94
gathering is the fact that performing one's own words on stage was the common
denominator, which, at this point in history, struck so many people as being a
reason to recognize a newly re-emerging (though very old) cultural practice.
Thus my paper will conclude by considering the impact of having performance as the glue that sticks these artists
from different disciplines and practices together. The social aspect of
performance, and its potential for community political action, commentary, and
artistic experimentalism are ultimately the most prominent features of what has
come to be knows as Spoken Word performance, a now-vibrant and ubiquitous form.
Although the participating artists came to Action Poetry '94 from discrete
disciplines, their artistic praxes became understood to frame and be framed by
a shared sense of performativity. It is when the rapper and the feminist
performance artist saw reflections of themselves in each others' performances,
that contemporary spoken word was born.
Ą All
quotations taken from various letters & promotional materials from the
Action Poetry '94 fond.
T.L. Cowan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English
& Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation is entitled
"Vox Populi: The Culture, Politics, and Genealogies of Contemporary Spoken
Word performance in Canada." T.L. is the editor Canadian Theatre Review's special issue on Spoken Word Performance (Spring
2007).
Culham,
Cam. (Victoria) "Performing Language" at the University of Victoria
Taking its cue from the Saskatoon 2007 ACTR's invitation to
"build bridges", this paper will provide a first-hand account of a
specific "opening day" activity from a conference held last year at
the University of Victoria, called "Performing Language". The
presenter was one of the organizers of this international meeting of
practitioners who gathered from all corners of the world, to share how, in
their work, they are using drama in their second language and cultural studies
classes. Topics ranged from an Acadian deportation drama through role
play, to the study of a dramatic scene from a contemporary Japanese play.
As an illustration of drama's potency in such work, the paper will describe the
opening night "meet and greet activity", a "Sound Drama",
in which all participants played a key role. This was built upon a David
Booth model, and adapted to suit the diverse group. As well as being
theoretical, the paper has a practical component in that it provides a concrete
and "useable" structure (the Sound Drama) which is a successful means
to promote creative connections between a group of strangers, ones who, as in
this case, do not even speak the same mother tongue. The described
activity is based on a folktale which, in its telling, unfolds to incorporate
all the "languages" of theatre, from set building to music to text
delivery, and all players make up parts of this whole.
This paper will report on the presentations, dramatizations, dialogues
and roundtables which were all a part of an innovative conference, held at the
University of Victoria in February 2006, which explored the place for
performance in L2 (second language learning). This initiative was
envisioned and birthed by the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies. This
unique gathering, aptly named "Performing Language: International
Conference on Drama and Theatre in Second Language Education", brought
together members of a cross- section of different UVic departments: Pacific and
Asian Studies, Linguistics, Theatre and Continuing Studies. As well, it
attracted many national and international academics and
practitioners. Keynote guest, Oriza Hirata, is a world- renowned
Japanese playwright and advocate of drama in education. His presentations
throughout the event provided participants with insights into theatre's place
in language and cultural acquisition. Hirata's play Tokyo Notes is a required text in a core Japanese
course offered at UVic and excerpts from his work were shared through
performance as a model for the teaching of JSL (Japanese as a Second Language).
In collaboration, Professor Emeritus Juliana Saxton, and Cam Culham, the
presenter of this paper, hosted the opening evening drama activity, based on
the David Booth "Sound Drama" concept, as a means of connecting this
diverse group.
An overall report of this conference, sponsored by UVic's Pacific and Asian
Studies Department, will be given in the introduction of this paper as
well. This was the first of its kind for the University of Victoria, and
is hoped to be held as a bi-annual event.
Cam Culham is an actor/ESL teacher, who also works as a
children's entertainer, historical theatre interpreter and director of young
actors. He completed his M.A. at the University of Victoria in 2004, under the
direction of Professor Juliana Saxton, where he conducts workshops using drama
as a conduit for both language and culture acquisition, for teacher trainees,
both national and international. Papers at recent ACTR conferences have been on
such topics as: museum theatre, applied theatre, clowning, immigrants' theatre
and ESL and drama. In 2004, Cam conducted his DIESL (Drama in English as a
Second Language) workshop with international participants at the IDEA
Conference in Ottawa, and was co-organizer of "Performing Language",
a "first of its kind" conference at the University of Victoria in
2005 (subject of this proposal). He has recently published chapters in two
books: Arts and Social Change and Body and Language, as well as numerous journal publications, most recently
in "Cultural Reflections" with the Department of Anthropology,
University of Victoria. Cam is also honoured to be serving his second term as a
member of the selection committee for our association's Godin Prize which
awards one Canadian French essay per year.
Eaket,
Chris. (Carleton) Pervasive Gaming: Experiments in Urban Storytelling
"Communities," writes Robert Bellah, "have a
history-- in an important sense [they] are constituted by their past-- and for
this reason we can speak of a real community as a 'community of memory,' one
that does not forget its past" (Bellah et al. 153). Imagined
communities continually tell their stories in public forums in order to combat
the acceleration of forgetting that is so typical of our technological age (cf.
Anderson 1983). In Platial, a lo-fi urban game, our research group attempts to combine
Situationist techniques of navigating the city with a geospatial encyclopedia
of places in order to enable a unique experience of one's own community and a
digital repository of stories and artifacts linked to particular places.
As
a "GeoPervasive" game, Platial encourages mobility, crossover between
physical and virtual worlds, an awareness of place, and social interaction
between players (Jagers and Wiberg 78). It draws on Situationist concepts
such as the dŽrive and psychogeography to create an experience of city that is
non-functionalist, performative and engaging. Platial also follows in a long tradition of the
"art of the walkabout": from Benjamin's fl‰neur, to Surrealist walks,
to peripatetic street performers such as ThŽ‰tre DŽcale in Paris and the
Natural Theatre Company in the UK.
Multimedia
artifacts and stories collected during the game are uploaded to a web site that
is one-half Google Maps and one-half Wikipedia, in order to provide
site-specific narratives about places in particular communities. The game
encourages the recording of photos, video clips, audio and text-based stories
in order to capture the subjective impressions of a place—a type of data
typically ignored by traditional maps. These emotional impressions and
narratives—which conventional cartography purposefully avoids—are
ironically the self-same things that constitute communities to begin with, and
that which we most readily associate with a particular place. As a repository
of collective memory, Platial seeks to combat an acceleration of forgetting—by
foregrounding the lived experience of the city, and by sharing of the stories
of its inhabitants.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. NY: Verso, 1983.
Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler,
and Steven Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Commitment and Individualism
in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Jagers, K and M. Wiberg. "Pervasive Gaming in the
Everyday World" in Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 5(1), pp78-85, 2006.
Biography
Chris Eaket is a native Saskatchewanian who received his BA in
Drama from the U of S in 1998. He is currently completing his PhD in
Cultural Mediations at Carleton University, with an emphasis on Theatre and
Technology. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled Articulating Space: Site-Specific
Performance and Locative Media looks at the ways in which particular technologies have been
deployed to create theatre outside of traditional theatre spaces. He has
published in Cartographica, and has articles forthcoming in TRIC, The Canadian Review
of American Studies and
FutureVisions to Critical Singularities (edited by Lee Easton). He is a
former member of the Cybercartographic Research Project and is currently a
researcher with the Digital Games-Based Learning Group at
Carleton.
Filewod,
Alan. (Guelph) "A Paul Bunyan Ideal": Workers Theatre in the 1950s.
This paper seeks to shed light on one of the unexamined problems
in the history of Canadian political theatre: what happened to radical theatre
culture in the period between the militancy of the Workers Theatre movement and
the emergence of radical counter-cultural aesthetics in the 1960s? For
historians of Canadian theatre, the 1950s have always posed a problem, as a
decade of false starts, of cultural unrest and unfulfilled aspirations, of
postcolonial autonomy deferred by scarcity of resources. The historical
consensus has been that this was the decade of origins, foundings and transformations,
which began with cultural poverty and ended with an emergent professional
canon-building theatre culture. This has become the myth of the 1950s in
Canadian theatre, which became the precondition of a school of analysis that
saw theatrical development in terms of a professional theatre institution
organized around the production of a national canon.
Against this position, I want to advance another: that the theatre culture of
the 1950s was marked by diversity, plurality, activism and fierce cultural
nationalism. There was nothing sudden about the emergence of a sustaining
theatre culture: it had in effect always been there. The failure of theatre
historiography in Canada is that is has tended to chart the historical progress
of theatres as companies and structures rather than practices. Consequently
historical genealogies record aborted attempts and false starts, assuming that
the movement of structures is evidence of cultural materiality. But if
companies are understood as strategic ventures rather than structures, then
attention can be brought to bear on the practices that work through them. And
at that point we can see continuities and linkages that disturb historiography
convention.
This paper argues that the gaps and elisions of political theatre history are
failures of perception and historiography. By focusing on practices rather than
canonizing structures, it establishes a continuing tradition of radical theatre
in the McCarthy era. The paper examines the left-wing theatre culture in
Toronto in the '50s, looking at the Toronto Labor Theatre and the Play-Actors
(both direct continuations of the Theatre of Action). Their relationship to the
structures of political authority on the left is examined in the promotion of
the cult of Paul Bunyan as a heroic model worker, and the united front of
progressive theatres in the 1955 production of the musical Little Paul
Bunyan.
Finn,
Patrick & Marilyn Potts. (St. Mary's UC, Calgary) "A Bridge too
Far?": Shakespeare and Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet
This paper asks if Anne-Marie Macdonald's play Goodnight
Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet effectively bridges the early and late modern periods.
Goodnight
Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet presents images of exhaustion in current academic work and
posits an escape from text and time. The protagonist, Constance Ledbelly, is a
PhD candidate whose research is poached by a tenured faculty member. He uses
her to obtain full professorship and a spot at Oxford, while she delays
completion of her dissertation. Her doctoral work – a translation and
interpretation of an arcane manuscript tradition related to Othello and Romeo and Juliet – transcends the textual and
builds a temporal bridge through performance. The resolution of her character
and of the play comes through performance – a move that politicizes her
while pulling Desdemona and Juliet from their contexts and into hers.
During
the play, Macdonald captures an important aspect of the state of performance
studies. We are not just at the end of an historical age and the beginning of a
new mode of study, but at the end of the system of work founded on different
concepts of time. The current situation shifts labour to part-time workers
excluded from the benefits of time. Popular culture tells us that time itself
has changed speed. Do these conditions inform our perception of performance?
Does Macdonald's reworking of Shakespeare offer an example of a productive,
historicized, performance of texts and time that build a usable bridge between
the past, present and perhaps the future?
Patrick Finn is Chair of Humanities and Associate Professor of
English and Drama and at St. Mary's University College. His publications focus
on issues of performance and information technology. Recent theatre work
consists of productions of Shakespeare, contemporary Canadian plays and short
plays by Pushkin.
Marilyn Potts is an award winning teacher and producer of drama,
receiving the Madd Award for teaching, the Harry and Martha Cohen Award for contributions
to theatre in Calgary, the Women of Distinction Award, The Women of Vision
Award, and most recently, the Calgary Achievement Award. She is currently on
the Board of Alberta Theatre Projects and is Adjunct Assistant Professor of
Drama at St. Mary's University College. Recent productions include Stories
Lies and Heroes as
director and various roles acting roles in and around Alberta.
Foster,
Katherine. (Toronto) The He(art) of the City: Prairie Theatre Exchange at home
in Portage Place
In 1989 the Prairie Theatre Exchange, after realizing long and
steady growth, moved from its original home in the old Grain Exchange Building
in the Winnipeg Exchange District to a new $3.5 million facility in the Portage
Place Mall in Downtown Winnipeg. PTE's artistic director at the time, Kim
McCaw, expressed an initial hesitation to the re-housing, considering Portage
Place a "hostile environment" for the theatre. However, McCaw's
view changed with the persuasion of Professor David Arnason who justified the
move as "a matter of art seizing a position at the centre rather than
willingly relegating (itself) to a position at the periphery". In
this paper I examine the link between Winnipeg's downtown revitalization
project and the repositioning of the arts, particularly theatre, in relation to
urban development. This paper investigates the relationship between
theatre practice and urban space through examining John Logan and Harvey
Molotch's concept of place patriotism as it relates to Winnipeg's ongoing Downtown
revitalization. Focusing on the relationship between the Portage Place
Shopping Mall, which opened in 1987 as the salvation of downtown Winnipeg, and
has since become a declining retail space, and the Prairie Theatre Exchange,
who has made its home in this space for over fifteen years, I explore the
unique connection between the artistic space of the theatre within the consumer
place of a shopping centre.
Katherine Foster is a doctoral student at the Graduate Centre
for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. She holds an M.A in drama from
the University of Toronto and a B.A in English from the University of
Manitoba. Katherine's current research interests are in intercultural
theatre practice with an emphasis on the dissemination of practical and training
methodologies across cultural boundaries. Currently Katherine is working
as the Co-Artistic Director for the Festival of Original Theatre: Dissolving
Borders, a student run conference and performance festival that will take place
at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto this
February.
Freeman,
Barry. (Toronto) Theatrefront's Return: The Sarajevo Project and its bridges of cultures, traditions and
stone.
Of all the weights that we make bridges bear, the heaviest is
symbolic. Around the world as well as in the landscape of our
imagination, bridges stand for understanding, for hope, for freedom, for an end
to our isolation and a salvation to our loneliness; the same in our language,
which has us building bridges, crossing bridges over troubled water, calling it
water under the bridge. But we can also burn bridges, and in that act reveal
the fragility of utopian visions.
The
manipulation of such symbolism has been particularly important in the states of
the former Yugoslavia, where bridges in many communities serve as an obvious
divide between ethnic communities, and where, consequently, many historical
bridges were destroyed in the conflicts of the 1990s. Bridges were the
obsession of one of the region's most famous writers, Ivo Andrić, who saw
in them "the eternal and eternally unsatisfied human desire to link, to
reconcile and join all that springs up before our spirit and our eyes, so that
there should be no divisions, no confrontation, and no parting".
This
turns out to be a particularly fitting symbolic field in which to situate
Theatrefront's 2006 play Return. Return was the culmination of The Sarajevo Project, a collaborative intercultural theatre
project consisting of a series of workshops and performances held in Toronto
and Sarajevo between 2003 and 2006. The play follows the story of Tarik
Nakaš—a young Bosnian who left his family in 1993 at the nadir of
the Siege of Sarajevo—and who returns to Sarajevo in 1998 with
immigration papers intent on convincing them to move to Canada. My paper
will consider the resonance of bridge symbolism within cultural context, within
the narrative and themes of Return, as well as within The Sarajevo Project and Theatrefront's larger aim of
bringing together different cultures and theatrical traditions.
Barry Freeman is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Centre for
the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. Barry has recently
written papers examining models of interculturalism in the theatre, temporality
and control in intercultural practice, and on cultural trauma in the
Newfoundland context as seen through Kent Stetson's Harps of God. His dissertation
will examine collaborative intercultural theatre, drawing on close observation
of the Prague-Toronto-Manitoulin Theatre Project.
Gallagher,
Kathleen. (OISE/UT) Dramatic Writing and Subcultural Knowledge
Building bridges between the cultural and subcultural life of
youth and institutions like schools is an enterprise fraught with
challenge. Sometimes schools attempt to domesticate young people's
"alternative literacies", through mostly well-meaning multicultural
events, but at other times youth popular culture and alternative forms of
literacy so charge the space socio-politically that they are effectively shut
down by the cultural imperialism of classrooms. In response, historically
marginalized youth often develop sophisticated ways of cultural participation
that are, most often, not acknowledged or legitimated by schools. This
presentation will examine the dramatic writing of youth as one important form
of subcultural expression.
Kathleen Gallagher is Associate Professor and Canada Research
Chair in Urban School Research in Pedagogy and Policy in the Department of
Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). Dr. Gallagher's book Drama
Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities (University of Toronto Press, 2000)
received the American Education Research Association's book award for
significant contribution to Curriculum Studies in 2001. Her edited
collection (ed. K. Gallagher and D. Booth) is entitled How Theatre Educates:
Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates (University of Toronto Press, 2003). Her
forthcoming book is titled, The Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in
Dangerous Times (University
of Toronto Press), which is based on a study of four drama classrooms in
schools in New York City and Toronto. Dr. Gallagher's research in drama
continues to focus on questions of inclusion, engagement and artistic practice
as well as the pedagogical possibilities of learning through the arts. (Full
paper included)
Green,
Reina. (Mount Saint Vincent) Park Shakespeare: Bridging the Divide
Open-air productions of Shakespeare are a staple of summer
theatre in Canada. In 2006, at least nineteen theatre companies performed
twenty-seven open-air productions of Shakespeare in this country. While these
productions occur in a wide variety of performance spaces, many are held in
public parks, where the stage is marked with little more than a rope on the
ground. This paper explores the impact of this type of space on performance and
audience perception with specific reference to the 2005 production of A
Midsummer Night's Dream by Festival by the Marsh in Sackville, New Brunswick.
There
has been little critical examination of the impact of open-air performance
space on productions. Only recently has the interest in environmental theatre
and site-specific theatre prompted a consideration of not only how a
performance is altered by the space in which it occurs, but also how that space
is changed by the performance. Such would appear to be the case in Festival's
production of Dream.
Not only did the choice of location determine set and costume design, music and
lighting, but the performance space also became a bridge connecting two
communities: town residents and university members. Moreover, the undifferentiated
space of the park and the natural lighting enabled a connection between actors
and audience and a mutability of performance and audience space. This
connection not only redefined the roles of both performers and audience
members, but also revealed the disconnect between character and actor.
Reina Green is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
English at Mount Saint Vincent University. She has published on early modern
drama, including Shakespeare, and issues related to women in theatre. She is
currently researching open-air productions of Shakespeare in Canada.
Hawkins,
John A. (Alex) (Alberta) Alberta's Theatre 100: Celebrating a "Human Meeting Point of
Vision and Dream"
In her Call for Papers, Moira Day described the prairie landscape as "an
increasingly complex human meeting point of vision and dream." In
November, the Alberta Playwrights' Network and Theatre Alberta held separete
Calgary and Edmonton launches for "Theatre 100", a book of the 100 most influential
people in Alberta theatre history. At the Edmonton event, four actors and
APN's executive director Ken Cameron presented a cabaret of songs, scenes, and
reminiscences of many of these 100 people.
As I sat in the Edmonton audience, even before I read Cameron's introduction,
it seemed to me that the most important aspect of Alberta theatre is not our
institutions, nor our plays, nor even the emergence of our professional
theatre, but the interconnections — or bridges — among these 100
people and others, and how these bridges have created today's Alberta theatre.
At the subsequent reception in Catalyst Theatre's tiny lobby, everyone was
already talking excitedly about these interconnections. By the time I had
moved through the crowd from one end of the lobby to the other, I had
formulated the idea that it would be possible to illustrate all of the bridges
among these 100 people, focused not on a "degrees-of-separation"
parlour game, but on an approach that would show the most meaningful and
fruitful interconnections. So I propose to prepare a paper that will
illustrate the bridges among these 100 people, and will demonstrate the ways in
which these bridges constructed the Alberta theatre scene as it exists today.
John A. (Alex) Hawkins teaches theatre history and directing in
the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In
1995, he founded Abbedam Productions, the production arm of the BA Division
within the Department of Drama, and directed its first two major productions,
one of which was Michael Cook's On the Rim of the Curve. Since 1996, Abbedam Productions
has been an entirely student-run organization. Alex is faculty liaison
for Abbedam, which has presented eleven student-directed plays since
then. In March 2006, Alex directed Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our
Teeth at
Walterdale Playhouse in Edmonton. Since 1995, Alex has presented papers
on a number of topics, relating mostly to Alberta theatre, at several ACTR/ARTC
Conferences. This year, Alex's topic is: "Alberta's Theatre 100: Celebrating a "Human
Meeting Point of Vision and Dream".
Irwin, Kathleen (Regina)
Double-crossing/ Vying Representations in Crossfiring
This
paper discusses Knowhere Production Inc.Ős and S‰kwwak First Nations ArtistsŐ
CollectiveŐs struggle to represent the cultural communities that participated
in the production of Crossfiring, a
site-specific performance at the Claybank Brick Plant National Historic Site in
Southern Saskatchewan, in September, 2006.
The cross-cultural,
cross-disciplinary event considered the resources of the Dirt Hills to
aboriginal and non-aboriginal cultures, mapping the global economies that
determined the siteŐs local viability and the way the dominant culture
interrupted prior traditional land claims.
The
site now represents two cultures historically at cross-purposes in relation to
the elemental resource, clay; one culture developed a spiritual relationship
with it, the other recognized a commodifiable expedient in it. Over time, the
site has been constituted by a range of associations: a place of healing, of
expropriation, and of commodification. Once a vital community, it is now an
example of twentieth century industrialization preserved within a tourist
destination, a heritage museum where paradoxically the representation of its
complex past is threatened by an impulse to capture one historical moment while
occluding another and the economic need to create, as Barbara Kirshenblatt
Gimlett writes, Ňthe sense of ÔherenessŐ necessary to convert a location into a
destinationÓ (1998, 7).
The collaboration
between the two not-for-profit companies was an attempt to reconstitute the
narratives of the cultures that marked this land over centuries of use. This
paper discusses this collaboration as a vexed attempt to represent, present and
record pasts where, on one hand, oral history was brutally interrupted by
colonial intervention and, on the other, the written archives are merely
partial, referencing economies rather than lives. As well, the site, itself
facing a crisis of identity, helped to trouble the performance in productive
ways. The siteŐs physical persistence, the Claybank Historical SocietyŐs
determination to create a heritage destination and the performanceŐs desire to
represent multiple perspectives illustrate the complexity of presentation and
representation in the absence of shared goals, cultural values and aesthetic
language.
Finally,
the paper addresses the methods employed to capture and record the event and
how this illustrates a struggle to grasp the ŇineffableÓ in order to support
and sustain a constructive discourse.
Kathleen Irwin is Associate
Professor of Scenography at the University of Regina. Her scenographic practice
investigates places of memory and, through community-based collaboration, she
creates events designed to refocus attention on defunct urban and industrial
sites towards their cultural reuse and redevelopment. She will defend her dissertation with the University of Art
and Design Helsinki in August.
Johnson,
Stephen. (Toronto) The Re-Domestication of the Exhibition: A Visit to the
Niagara Falls Museum, lately closed
When the Niagara Falls Museum, located in a variety of venues in
Niagara Falls (Canada and US), closed in 1999, it was one of the
longest-lived examples of the commercial museum in North America. It
contained artifacts accumulated over 170 years, and carried with it a
historical patina that reached back to a time when it was entirely
acceptable to display a collection of sea-shells next to a
taxidermical display, and an Egyptian mummy near to one of the barrels
that went over the Falls carrying a human daredevil. It was a combination cabinet of curiosities,
dime museum, and local history museum, of a kind that, by the time it closed,
was among the last of its vintage and type. It was, in the late
twentieth century, insupportable both economically and curatorially. It
was decrepit and rather sad-looking, witnesses tell me, when it closed.
Except that it didn't close. After more than a century and a half of
exhibition in various buildings in Niagara Falls (both Canada and New
York), its architectural existence ceased, but the collection and the
rights to the name were purchased by William Jamieson, a commercial art and
artifact dealer in Toronto. Far from
dispensing with the
collection, he has carried on its name and traditions. He integrated its
artifacts into his own collection--he is a dealer in ancient and tribal art, as
well as a collector of 'curiosities' of many kinds. And in his
basement, he has re-created a portion of the Niagara Falls Museum.
This paper describes a tour of both of these museums Jamieson's
home and his tribute to its predecessor--as a means to consider the persistence
of, and perhaps the revival of, some of the traditions of 19th-century museum
culture.
Stephen Johnson is the Director of the Theatre Drama and Performance
Studies programs at the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus, and teaches
in the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama. He recently published in CTR
on Body Worlds, and manages the research project outlined in this abstract, on
view at http://link.library.utoronto.ca/minstrels/
Joseph,
Maia and Jerry Wasserman. (UBC) Searching for Captain McDonald's Trained
Indians, "The Best Drilled People in the World"
Captain Charles McDonald was a San Francisco drill master and
entrepreneur who became famous in the 1870s for his extravagant exhibitions of
west coast Native people trained in the military arts. His shows were witnessed
by packed audiences from San Francisco to Victoria, New York to London, and
reviewed exuberantly in the press: "At the tap of the drum the whole art
of manual arms, with a hundred variations, is performed with most astonishing
rapidity." "The drill could not have been better executed, even by
white men." McDonald argued vehemently that Native people had been
consistently misjudged and mistreated, and part of his agenda was to prove that
the "savage" could be trained, domesticated, made "useful."
In his 1983 book Frontier Theatre, Chad Evans briefly tells "the tragic tale of
Captain McDonald's Trained Indians," "for a time, [Canada's] most
famous, if warped, cultural exportation." Of McDonald's ten or so
Native performers, at least five were recruited from the Vancouver Island colony
in 1874 and remained with the troupe throughout its American and European tour.
The story peters out ominously in France in 1877 with word that some have
fallen ill with consumption.
In this research-in-progress, we try to pick up the trail so tantalizingly
marked by Evans. We examine this story in a variety of contexts: 19th
century Canadian-American theatrical relationships; historical, ethnographic,
and performative elements of Wild West shows and other exhibitions of Native
culture; and the challenges of unearthing archival materials that reveal the
details of a story so difficult to categorize.
Maia Joseph is a PhD student in the Department of English at the
University of British Columbia. Her research interests include Canadian urban
literature and the interdisciplinary theorization of space and community. Her
dissertation will examine literary responses to the recent (and ongoing)
redevelopment of Vancouver's downtown core.
Jerry Wasserman is Professor of English and Theatre at UBC
and editor of /Modern Canadian Plays/. His recent books are /Theatre and
AutoBiography/, co-edited with Sherrill Grace, and /Spectacle of Empire: Marc
Lescarbot's /Theatre of Neptune in New France.
Kivisto,
Mikko. (Illinois) The Creative Spirit of Art: The Theosophical Writings of Roy Mitchell
Roy Mitchell was an important figure in Canadian theatre (and American theatre
as well), recognized by his peers and contemporaries. But he has received
little attention amongst theatre historians in Canada over the years. To
some extent, this can be attributed to the Canadian obsession with the
"alternate" theatre movement of the 1960s and 70s, when Canada
supposedly achieved its own national identity in theatres. Too often, the
efforts of pioneers such as Roy Mitchell, Merrill Denison, and Gwen Pharis
Ringwood—all who flourished before the "swinging
sixties"—are dismissed as isolated moments in history, or as
amateurs that had little impact on the development of professional theatre in
Canada. Unlike Denison and Ringwood, Mitchell passed away before the
environment for theatre in Canada had improved. Thus, many of Mitchell's
writings had gathered dust while Denison and Ringwood received renewed
attention in the 1970s and 80s. But what had likely marginalised Mitchell
more was his involvement in the theosophical movement. This little
understood religious philosophy is studied by a small minority of people and is
rarely discussed today. Whenever Mitchell is mentioned in the context of
Canadian theatre history, very little attention is paid to his theosophical
works, thus they diminish some of his importance. He was a prolific
writer on theosophical topics, and this philosophy had shaped his theories on
theatre staging, education and development. This paper will explore Roy
Mitchell's theosophical writings and how they fit in the context of his
theories and practices of theatre.
Mikko Kivisto is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, whose area of specialization is in Canadian theatre
history and dramatic criticism. He is currently working on his
dissertation on Roy Mitchell and his theories on theatre and theosophy.
Mikko received his MFA in Theatre Studies at the University of Calgary in 2002
where he completed his thesis on the plays of Gwen Pharis Ringwood, and his BA
(Honours) in History at Laurentian University, Sudbury, in 1998.
Knowles,
Ric. (Guelph) "Bridging Cultures: Multicultural Text, Intercultural
Performance in Contemporary Toronto
This paper examines the relationship between official
multiculturalism in Canada as utopian text and the grass–roots practice of
intercultural theatre in Toronto as heterotopic performance. Within the context of post-1971
discourses of Canadian multiculturalism it considers the complex ecology of
contemporary grassroots interculturalism in the city as it plays itself out
among the many and various intercultural theatre companies within the city who
attempt to construct culturally alternative communities and solidarities across
difference. The purpose of the exercise is to come to some understanding of how
individual gendered, raced, and classed subjectivities and community identities
within the contemporary multicultural city are not just reflected or given
voice by, but constituted through performance as, for example, Filipino Canadian, Asian Canadian,
Caribbean Canadian, African Canadian, First Nations or Native Canadian. How
does this performative construction of subjectivities relate to what Himani
Bannerjee sees as the oppressive state-constructed ethnic communities of
official multiculturalism? Finally, the paper considers how these
performatively constituted subjectivities interact with one-another in shifting
coalitions and solidarities—bridges—in relationship to a societally
dominant understanding of the city's social relationships, understandings that
constitute dominant cultures as unified and monolithic, and minoritized or
immigrant non-European cultures as "ethnic" enclaves.
Ric Knowles is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He
is Editor of Canadian Theatre Review and former editor (1999-2005) of Modern Drama, author of The Theatre of Form and
the Production of Meaning (1999), Shakespeare and Canada (2004) and Reading the Material
Theatre
(2004), and co-author of Remembering Women Murdered by Men (2006, with The Cultural Memory Group);
co-editor of Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in
English (2003,
with Monique Mojica) and Modern Drama: Defining the Field (2003, with Joanne Tompkins and W.B.
Worthen), and editor of Theatre in Atlantic Canada (1986), Judith Thompson (2005), and The Masks of Judith
Thompson (2006).
He is the General Editor of the Playwrights Canada Press book series, Critical
Perspectives on Canadian Theatre, and is currently Vice President of the
American Society for Theatre Research, and Vice President (Research and
Publications) of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Knutson,
Susan. (UniversitŽ Sainte-Anne) Daphne Marlatt's Canadian Noh Play, The Gull
From May 10 to May 14, 2006, Vancouver-based Pangaea Arts
produced, in a tent at Richmond City Hall, the world premiere of The Gull, an English-language, Canadian
adaptation of the Classical Japanese Noh, one of the oldest continually
performed theatre forms in the world. The performances were created in the
context of the Steveston Noh project, a collaboration begun years earlier to
honour the historic connection between Steveston and Mio, the fishing village
on the Wakayama coast which was once home to many of Steveston's
Japanese-Canadian fishing families. The project was public, and expensive,
involving as it did active collaboration between Canadian artists, including
Daphne Marlatt, who wrote the play, and Japanese artists, including Noh Master
Akira Matsui, Noh Mask Designer, Hakuzan Kubo, and Tokyo-based American Noh
musician and composer, Richard Emmert. The collaboration aimed to remember
shared histories – the play has light-hearted moments of living, loving,
and fishing – and so, especially, to acknowledge the injustice and the
suffering caused by the internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII.
Beyond and through that suffering, the play explores issues of humanity,
poignant in our era of forced migrations and massive disruptions: peace,
spiritual release, 'home.' 'What was home to you / Mother, was not home
to us'[i]
The
Steveston Noh project provides us with a model of public, community-based,
respectful, intercultural collaboration which deserves close study. This paper
sketches that collaboration and explores some of the elements that contributed
to its success.
[1] Daphne Marlatt, "The Gull," Nochiba (Act II), 5,
unpublished ms. used with permission.
Susan Knutson works at UniversitŽ Sainte-Anne. Her research is
in contemporary Canadian literature, and she is currently working on a project
on Canadian literary transculturation. She is the author of one book, Narrative
in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard, which was published by WLU Press in
2000.
Lacroix
Melissa Morelli. (Lancaster) Preludes for the Piano: Bridges Between Gender and
Genre
Preludes for the Piano, an ekphrastic performance piece, explores the procreative
nature of art and bridges gaps between art forms, language, time and
gender. It is a combination of music written by a man, Claude Debussy, in
the early twentieth century, and spoken word, written and performed by me, a
woman, nearly one hundred years later. This pairing allows for not only
the continuation of art-inspired art – for Debussy drew from literature,
music, drawings, variety shows, myth and architecture for the creation of his PrŽludes
– but also
for the sounding of the female voice in the historically male-dominated sphere
of music publication. As a bridge between languages, Preludes for the
Piano is a
translation of both Debussy's suggestions for interpretation of his music from
French into English and the symbols, dots and lines of his music into
words. The script becomes, therefore, a collage of translations, literary
references and quotations, and original text. It tells the stories of
songs and myths, people and places, images real and imagined. Like the
music it is based on, Preludes for the Piano is to be performed so that the
synthesis of art forms may be complete and total. The performance
consists of recorded music of Debussy's PrŽludes, symbolic of the recorded male voice,
and live spoken female word, which gives voice to both the silenced women of
early twentieth century Impressionist music and the women of today.
Melissa Morelli Lacroix has a Double Honours degree in French
and Creative Writing and a Certificate in Translation Studies from the
University of Alberta. She is currently under the tutelage of Michelene
Wandor in the Master of Arts in Creative Writing programme at Lancaster
University. Her stories and plays have been produced on CBC radio and at
the University of Alberta.
Levene,
Gillian. (Toronto) Major Gina: Interrupting the Genealogy of Male Theatre
Criticism in Toronto's Print Media
"Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with
fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for
women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival"
—[3]Adrienne Rich, When
We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1971)
At the conclusion of Bernard Shaw's Major
Barbara, the title
character rejects her faith in the Salvation Army as a [4]"paradise of enthusiasm";
ostensibly, she exchanges her singular socio-political voice for one that
accords with the masses. The landscape of print media theatre criticism in
Toronto has experienced a similar silencing of distinctive female
voices—a subsuming of women's perspectives by celebrated male figures
whose views (and iconic grandeur, with regards to Nathan Cohen, Herbert
Whittaker and Urjo Kareda) have come to shape mass readership and theatre
audiences. With the notable exceptions of certain trailblazers, notably Gina
Mallet of The Toronto Star and Kate Taylor of The Globe and Mail, female critics have experienced a
lapsed representation in the criticism of national newspapers, local magazines
and fringe weeklies. My paper asks, 'How are female voices situated within the
critical landscape of contemporary theatre criticism in Toronto and what types
of bridges (political, literary, ideological) have enabled and suppressed this
mobility?' Likewise, what paths must we, as theatre critics and scholars,
architect to broaden the city's critical design? Toronto represents a unique
site for analysis since this metropolis houses a myriad of print media venues and,
thus, means of awakening the female critic's [5]"sleeping consciousness." Yet this
urban centre also poses complex critical challenges, particularly what Jean
Francois Lyotard terms the [6]"crisis of
legitimation": the pressure placed on theatre critics to function as the
singular mouthpiece for a fractured, multi-cultural audience. Theatre
criticism, as opposed to theatre itself, is not a transient activity, but
rather one that records our cultural legacy. Canadian research must pay
attention to these cultural barometers. To this end, my paper will consider the
necessity of re-vision, of re-reading women's voices embodied in past and
present critical activity. As women and as women writers, we must—as Rich
insists— know the writing of the past, and know it differently than ever
before, to transcend assumptions that impede women's visibility in the critical
field.
[1] Kaye, Nick. Site-specific
Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. (London: Routledge, 2000) 1.
[2] Pearson, Mike
and Michael Shanks. Theatre/Archaeology. (London: Routledge, 2001) 108.
[3] Rich, Adrienne.
"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision." Adrienne Rich's Poetry
and Prose. Barbara
Charlesworth and Albert Gelpi, Eds. W.W. Norton: New York, 1993. 167.
[4] Shaw, George
Bernard. Major Barbara. New York: WW Norton, 2002. 283.
[5] Rich, Adrienne.
"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision." Adrienne Rich's Poetry
and Prose. Barbara
Charlesworth and Albert Gelpi, Eds. W.W. Norton: New York, 1993. 168.
[6] Lyotard, Jean
Francois. Qtd in Paul Leonard's, "Critical Questioning." Canadian
Theatre Review 57
(Winter 1988). 4.
Gillian Levene is a PhD student at the Graduate Centre for the
Study of Drama where she is completing a dissertation on the question of
critical responsibility in contemporary theatre reviews published in Toronto's
print media. Her investigation into critical practice began under the
mentorship of Professor Charles McNulty, past theatre critic of New York's Village
Voice and current
critic of the LA Times, when pursuing her Graduate degree in Dramaturgy and Theatre
Criticism at the City University of New York, and where she was awarded the
Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges honor. Gillian has worked extensively
in professional theatre in the capacity of Literary Associate at the Atlantic
and Lark theatre companies in New York, as well as Programme Coordinator at Jim
Simpson's Flea Theatre; Dramaturge for the 78th Street Theatre Lab and Brooklyn New
Studio; and Writer and Director for various productions in Montreal, New York
and Toronto. Her last project was the 3-year, SSHRC funded study,
"Shakespeare and the Queens Men," organized by the Records of Early
English Drama (REED) at U of T, for which she dramaturged and archived
Elizabethan plays. She currently teaches dramatic criticism and theory at the
University of Toronto at Scarborough, where she is currently an Instructor of
Shakespeare and Elizabethan Literature, and is preparing to be a panelist at a
forthcoming conference at Yale University dedicated to a discussion of North
American theatre criticism.
Lohnes,
Cortney. (Alberta).Rethinking Boal's Rehearsal for Change Rethinking Boal's
Rehearsal for Change
In Canada, although the dialogue regarding popular theatre is on
the rise, there is little critical analysis within the field, due in large part
to the plurality of terms and concepts that exist. Edward Little posits that
"it is precisely this lack of ideological clarity" that freezes the
creation of a critical discourse which aims to examine the potential and the
ramifications of popular theatre. In order to improve, approaches to Popular
Theatre are in need of revision and modification in order to become truly
accessible for facilitators and participants of the form. When these approaches
are discussed in terms of theatre intervention, many connections can be made,
but an overall through-line that links the two is nonexistent, and as a result,
popular theatre is often unable to act as a form of change.
In
this paper I will examine Augusto Boal's arsenal of the oppressed and the
implications of engaging the work with at-risk youth. The hefty coinage "a
rehearsal for change" often frames work of this nature, and I will argue
that this phrase is often misleading in that a mandatory step is missed during
practice and facilitation. The overlooked, key step is the "rehearsal of
life", and explores the relationship between Boal's theoretical
underpinnings and those of social theorist Kurt Lewin. This alternative approach
to Boal will be discussed through careful consideration of Forum Theatre and
the arsenal of techniques presented in The Rainbow of Desire.
Cortney Lohnes is pursuing her Graduate degree in Dramatic
Theory and Criticism from the University of Alberta and is currently
researching the connections between crisis intervention and popular theatre.
While completing her BFA in Drama for Human Development (Concordia University)
in Montreal, Cortney worked on the first stages of her research, designing and
facilitating alternative theatre programs for Batshaw Youth and Family
Services, PowerCamp International and the YMCA. Other research interests
include the aesthetics of Canadian popular theatre, performance and the
internet, and collective creation.
Luger,
Moberley. (UBC) Memory and Monumentality in Canadian Theatre
Ten years after winning the Governor General's award for Drama, Colleen
Wagner's The Monument, is still one of the most frequently produced Canadian
plays. Just this spring, it was put up in Washington, DC, Lethbridge, and
Toronto. It has played on four continents, in three languages, and is one
of only three Canadian selections in The Broadview Anthology of Drama (2003). Critics have said that
the feminist two-hander about sexual war crimes and revenge has seen success
because of the "universality of its themes" (Introduction to The
Broadview).
My paper is inspired by this claim: it questions whether a monument can be universal. Wagner's play
is not set in a particular time or place and it does not recall any specific
event–what then is it a monument to? Like all forms of remembering,
memorializing is a present action that reflects a certain set of national,
political, or personal beliefs; but in The Monument, who is being asked to remember
whom? My paper relies on scholarship on memorialization (Young, Huyssen,
Winter) to investigate the relations of theatre (moving out from Wagner's play
to the genre itself) and monumentality. Wagner presents the monument of
her title as a solution to the problems her characters have experienced:
"We are going to build a monument . . . ," one of these characters
says, determined. But to what problem is a monument a solution? My
paper explores how a theatrical monument might start to resolve the conflicts
of history–how it might effectively bridge the past and present.
Moberley Luger is a PhD student in English at the University of
British Columbia, where she works on trauma studies and contemporary
literature. She received her MA in Creative Writing from Concordia
University and is the author of several published poems and a short
play–"So Loud"–produced at UBC's Brave New Playwrights Festival.
Lundgren,
Jodi. (Thompson Rivers) The Woman Beside Herself: Transnational Gestures
in Contemporary Canadian Dance
As an embodied art form and perhaps the only artistic discipline
dominated by women, contemporary dance provides an apt site for exploring
transnational feminist modes of coalition-building. In two Canadian
performance pieces—dances of madness and grief, respectively—the
"woman beside herself" bridges cultures and genres in the process of
confronting internal alterity. In my own "Tarantella," a
narrator deemed mentally ill in North America appeals to a southern Italian
tradition that would celebrate rather than stigmatize her disordered state;
chiasmatically, in Andrea Nann's "Meditation #5: On Loss and
Desire," the choreographer, mourning her daughter's death, has
extrapolated from her private loss in order to represent the grief of women in
Sri Lanka who have lost family members in politically-organized mass
killings. As text-infused dances, both works cross genres as well as
cultures: "Tarantella" was inspired by Ernesto de Martino's The
Land of Remorse, an
anthropological study of tarantism in southern Italy, and "Meditation
#5" by the prologue to Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, a novel that concerns a Human Rights
investigation in Sri Lanka. Skirting cultural appropriation, in the first
case, and sentimental universalism, in the second, the "woman beside
herself" experiences a suspension of usual ego boundaries as she becomes
altered (in madness) or attempts to incorporate alterity (in grief). This
internal hybridity shifts the oppositional relationship between Self and Other,
both offering an ethical model of transnational coalition and forming its
necessary prerequisite. In Canadian live performances, the dancers'
bodies assert the local while the spoken texts evoke distant contexts.
The final bridging takes place between performer and audience, and reviewers
testify that Nann's dance, at least, succeeds in making audience members aware
of similarities between their own private wounds and the collective, yet
individually felt, suffering of others in the global public. Individual,
personal, and emotional, such compassionate revelations must surely take place
if transnational coalition is to become possible and remain sustainable.
Dr. Jodi Lundgren is a faculty member in English at Thompson
Rivers University (Open Learning Division). The author of Touched: A
Novel, she has
performed extensively as a dance artist and has published literary criticism on
Canadian fiction and autobiography.
Macdonald,
Megan. (Queen Mary). Finding a Fault Line: Digging up an Anthropological
Foundation of Performance Studies
Established and new interdisciplinary bridges used by
performance studies enable extensive collaborations across fields, new research
ideas and methodological tools. From the first bridge with anthropology
in the 1960s the use of anthropological methodologies has rarely been
questioned. However, recent research by Anthropologist Fenella Cannell
(London School of Economics) suggests that the foundations of Anthropology may
not be what they seem. By adopting anthropological methodologies performance
studies may have inherited more than it realises. Her recent article 'The
Christianity of Anthropology' (2005) and forthcoming book The Anthropology
of Christianity
(2006) posit that,
Anthropology
came to believe without much qualification its own claims to be a secular
discipline, and failed to notice that it had in fact incorporated a version of
Augustinian or ascetic thinking within its own theoretical apparatus.[1]
In
this reading the ideologies underpinning Anthropology are linked with 4th
century thought concerning the ascetic where a duality exists between "the
inferiority and sinfulness of the body" and "the soul."[1]
In her article Cannell argues that these influences in anthropology are
applicable to more than just religious field work: "Ascetic ideologies are
by no means [...] particular to religion but have also powerfully shaped the
language and procedures of social science itself."[1] This shaping
has consequences for performances studies which reach back to its inception and
continue today.
This
paper interrogates the foundations of performance studies, questions how
methodologies have shaped past research (for example those deriving from
Geertz's research) and what the implications are for contemporary
investigations.
Bibliography
Canell, Fenella, The Anthropology of Christianity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2006)
- 'The Christianity of
Anthropology' in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2005) 11, 335-356.
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books 2000)
- Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and
Indonesia
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971)
Stucky, Nathan, and Cynthia Wimmer, eds., Teaching
Performance Studies,
Foreword by Richard Schechner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2002)
Megan Macdonald is currently in the final year of a PhD in Drama
at Queen Mary, University of London (UK).
Her dissertation examines The Performance of Belief, engaging primarily
with embodied practices such as ritual, spirituality and performance art. The history and influences of
performance theory itself have become a new area of research which bring
together interests in theology and ethnography in relation to the body.
McKinnon,
James. (Toronto) Aiming the Canon at Canadian Audiences: Cowgirl Opera's Three
Sisters: A Black Comic Opera
In the summer of 2005, Edmonton-based company Cowgirl Opera
toured across Canada, hitting all the major Fringe Festivals and One Yellow
Rabbit's High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, with their radical adaptation of
Chekhov's Three Sisters. In addition to its unlikely combination of
Chekhov, laugh-a-minute comedy, and grotesque violence – done to and
through Chekhov – punctuated with burlesque musical numbers, the show
offers a fascinating opportunity to ask how the "Canadian-ness" of
Canadian spectators is constituted in and through ostensibly identical
performances in different communities across Canada.
The
play seems to follow the familiar, even clichŽd, Canadian adaptive strategy of
transferring the canon to a contemporary Canadian setting. The location
is rural Saskatchewan, and metropolitan symbol of the sisters' unrequited hopes
and dreams is Edmonton. In contrast to the Canadianized Uncle Vanya that
represented Alberta at the 2005 Magnetic North Festival, however, this
adaptation of Chekhov takes an aggressive, even hostile stance toward its
canonical source, appropriating only what it finds ripe for carnivalesque
parody, and discarding the rest.
This
paper will explore how Cowgirl Opera aims the canon at contemporary Canadians,
using feminist and Brechtian tactics, figurative and literal dis-embowelment of
the canonical text, and both gender- and genre-reassignment therapy.
Special attention will be given to the paradoxical effect of using specific
Canadian geographical referents: while in one sense this tactic builds bridges
between different(ly) Canadian audiences, in another sense the distinctly
different responses of those audiences draws our attention to the deep valleys
and chasms beneath those bridges.
James McKinnon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto's
Graduate Drama centre. He has previously presented papers at ACTR on
Canadian Shakespeare adaptations (in 2000 and 2005), and on the theatre
audiences of early Toronto (2006). James has studied at the universities
of Calgary, Alberta, Toronto, and McGill, as well as the International School
of Theatre Anthropology. His Ph.D. research asks how contemporary
Canadian playwrights use material from the dramatic canon in their own plays as
a strategy to engage Canadian spectators.
Morelli,
Henriette M. (Okanagan)
"Lady, give us the history we haven't had": Bridging the Gap between Historically Specific
Sexualities in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine
My paper will explore the ways in which Carly Churchill, in her
socialist-feminist play, Cloud Nine, unmasks the hierarchical power relations inherent in
gender, race, class, age, and sexual orientation. By setting her Cloud Nine in the Victorian period in the first
act and in 1979 in the second, Churchill demonstrates that sexuality is
historically and socially specific and that its meaning is a site of constant
struggle. Although written almost a quarter century ago, Churchill's play
envisions the possibility of building bridges between the unique social power
relations inherent in historically specific sexualities. Although
sexuality, as a focal point in the construction of subjective identity, becomes
a primary locus of power, it is often not understood as such.
Consequently, what Churchill does in Cloud Nine is to unmask the hierarchical power
relations behind gender constructs, particularly those of race and class, in a
collateral way to make visible the multiplicity of power relations focused in
sexuality. The historic specificity of Cloud Nine enables her to interrogate the ways in
which, at different historical moments and in different social contexts, women
and men identify with different modes of subjectivity. In turn, audiences
of Cloud Nine begin
to question
whose interests are served by such identification and eventually learn to address
and contest the specific forms of power exercised within the racist, classist,
and homophobic patriarchal societies in which they live.
Dr. Henriette M. Morelli received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from
the University of Saskatchewan; the title of her Ph. D. dissertation is
"Somebody Sings: Brechtian Epic Devices in the Plays of Caryl
Churchill." Dr. Morelli currently teaches English Literature with
the Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan.
Moschopedis,
Eric. (Calgary, AB) Trashing Cowtown: Locating Personal Idenitity Through
Dumpster Diving
Calgary's cowboy mythology, maintained by economy and art, is deeply embedded
in the city's cultural identity. Cowtown folklore is nostalgic and perpetuates
a static identity that characterizes its citizens as cow-folk. As an indigenous
Calgarian and artist whose cultural upbringing does not correspond with
Calgary's Cowtown hegemony, how can I, through performance practice and
alternative civic engagement, bridge the gap between dominant and counter
mythology; and subsequently ground my identity in a city that doesn't recognize
me as a citizen?
Considering the practice of collecting Jean Baudrillard says,
"here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of collecting. For it is invariably
oneself that one collects" (12). Dumpster diving – the activity of
collecting refuse – resides uncomfortably between petty crime, economics
and artistic practice, and often occurs in marginalized city spaces such as
alleys. From the perspective of performance studies, dumpster diving can be
viewed as an anthropological, archaeological and performative act – one
where a diver actively engages contemporary culture though the excavation and
collection of its artefacts. Jennifer Dalton, in her article Dream
Trash/Trash Dream,
articulates that "the acts of collecting and curating [are] synonymous and
simultaneous with the act of creating" (67). Could this be
re-articulated to suggest that the act of collecting and organizing found
materials has the potential of creating new 'forms' of personal mythology and
subsequently, identity? As a dumpster diver, I will investigate one of my own
collections: found diaries. I will auto-explicate the diaries from two
perspectives: 1) how did the original writers identify themselves as a citizen
of the city, and 2) how do their autobiographical depictions produce a sense of
personal identity in the finder? In this way, I intend to provide evidence that
by locating personal identity, Calgary's Cowtown mythology can be demystified
and a bridge built between personal identity and the city.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, J. (1994). The System of Collecting. In Elsner, J. C., Roger, Ed. The
Culture of Collecting. Oxford, The Alden Press
Dalton, J. (1999). "Dream Trash/Trash Dream: The Artist
as Collector, Historian and
Archivist." A Journal of Performance Art 21(2): 63-70.
Eric Moschopedis graduated from the University of Calgary's
Department of Drama with Distinction in 2001. During his undergraduate degree he
spent a year at the University of Lancaster studying contemporary British
theatre practice. His present research interests in performance studies include
performance creation, fragmentation, the displacement of public and private
histories in performance, nostalgia, pop music, the living urban experience,
gender and sexual politics, the early avant-garde, ritual, and the body in
performance. Eric Moschopedis is an award winning and highly recognized
creator, performer, facilitator, and curator. As the Artistic Director of
Bubonic Tourist (2000-2006), an inter-disciplinary performance creation
company, Moschopedis played a vital role in the creation and dissemination of
emerging inter-disciplinary performance and visual art. Since September 2000,
Moschopedis has created and performed over thirty original works, curated five
International Mutton Busting Performance and Visual Art Festivals, co-founded
two performance and visual art venues - birds & stone and MOTEL - and has programmed over 550 national
and international artists. He has been recognized in numerous
publications and most recently was honored as one of one hundred Alberta
theatre artists who has made a vital contribution to theatre arts during the
one hundred years of this Province's history. His expertise in creating
community through performance has been in great demand and he has spoken on the
issue at conferences across Canada.
Moser,
Marlene. (Brock) Performing Pink: Breast Cancer and Femininity
From Kitchen Aid mixers to cell phone accessories to M &
M's, there's nothing you can't buy to support the fight against breast cancer.
The very public, consumer-driven, pink ribbon campaign makes the breast cancer
fight something everyone, presumably, in his/her consumerism, can join in. In Pink
Ribbons, Inc.
Samantha King questions such "consumer-oriented philanthropy."
This paper pursues this line of inquiry by exploring the relationship between
breast cancer and constructions of femininity as performed in the pink ribbon
campaign and beyond. While the pink ribbons and pink products give us the
illusion that we have some choice and can make a difference, the discourses
around the treatment and rehabilitation of those who have had breast cancer
continue to promote constructions of the "feminine" that serve to
conceal, blame and make invisible.
This paper will explore these discourses, in readings of the medical industry,
the alternative movement, and in the rehabilitation and testimonial literature
that permeate the breast cancer industry.
Marlene Moser is Associate Professor in the Department of
Dramatic Arts at Brock University. Her research involves the study of identity.
She has published in Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada and Modern Drama. Other research includes
"praxis" as pedagogy and other intersections of the theoretical and
the practical.
Nothof,
Anne. (Athabasca). Making History Meaningful: The German Plays of Mieko Ouchi
and Vern Thiessen
Alberta playwrights Mieko Ouchi and Vern Thiessen both explore
the tragic consequences of a political expropriation of the creative
imagination for nationalistic ends. Their "German" plays
interrogate history in terms of individual aesthetic and scientific choices and
compromises. In Ouchi's The Blue Light, Leni Riefenstahl defends her filmmaking
for Hitler's Third Reich as an apolitical artistic enterprise. In Einstein's
Gift, Thiessen compares the philosophies and
beliefs of physicist Albert Einstein and chemist Fritz Haber in respect to
their scientific research, and the ironic and disastrous repercussions of their
work. Both plays engage in ethical debates on a personal and political
level, revisiting history to consider the possibility of making moral choices
within a totalitarian political system.
Anne Nothof is a professor of English at Athabasca University in
Alberta, Canada, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and
post-graduate distance education courses in literature and drama. She has
published critical essays in journals such as Theatre Research in Canada,
Modern Drama, Mosaic, and the International Journal of
Canadian Studies,
and in two texts on postmodern theatre: Siting the Other, and Crucible of Cultures. She has edited a collection of essays
on Canadian playwright, Sharon Pollock for Guernica Press, and a collection of
Pollock's plays for NeWest Press. She is a board member and editor for
NeWest Press in Edmonton, and past president of the Association for Canadian
Theatre Research. For twelve years, she hosted a weekly radio programme
on drama, and developed a television series on world theatre. More
recently she has assumed the editorial responsibility for the Encyclopedia of
Canadian Theatre on the World Wide Web (www.canadiantheatre.com).
Owen,
David. (Calgary) Bridging Canada's Modernist Past and Postmodern Present:
Herman Voaden's Symphonic Expressionism Then and Now
Herman Voaden wanted to elevate the arts in Canada and believed
in creating a Canadian identity through art. The purpose of his theatre,
Symphonic Expressionism, was to transport the audience into a more abstract and
eternal place through the use of a concrete central story surrounded by a
multitude of abstract elements expressing the emotions arising from the
unfolding situation - a Gesamtkunstwerk. His aim was to do for theatre
what the Group of Seven painters did for visual arts.
I will compare Voaden's original production and dramaturgical techniques with
my production of his play Hill-Land at the University of Alberta in 1999. Whereas
Voaden's playwriting and direction incorporated allegorical characters, choral
response, modern dance, abstract movement, minimal sets, finely controlled
lighting, soundscape music, direct audience address, heightened poetic
language, time compression and cyclical narrative structure, I instead chose to
adapt some of the techniques of Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman to stage
Voaden's text. Specifically, I used slow-motion movement, large
projections, strings to both fragment and unify the stage, gestic acting and
live music structured like that of Philip Glass. Voaden was an early Canadian
bricoleur of
styles and techniques as I needed to be while staging his work. Just as
Voaden borrowed from several disciplines and styles to realize his theatre
then, I argue his plays are due for a rediscovery using the diverse
technological and dramaturgical tools at our disposal today.
David Owen is a PhD student at the University of Calgary's brand
new Performance Studies program as well as a Sterling award winning playwright,
director, actor and sound-designer with a Master of Arts degree in Drama from
the University of Alberta. He is an associate member of the Playwright's
Guild of Canada (PGC) and a member of Alberta Playwright's Network (APN).
He is best known for his plays Excess Unwanted Growth and Hang-Gliding Over The Abyss and his contributions to the NextFest
shorts. Some of the shows he has directed are Doctor Faustus at the University of Lethbridge, The
Importance of Being Ernest and Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) at Red Deer College, The Birthday
Party at the
Walterdale Theatre and the Canadian premiere of My Head Was A Sledgehammer for his own company, Manual
Transmission Theatre.
Paris,
Jamie. (Regina) On the Adversarial Treatment of Women by Men in Aboriginal
Drama
In Leroy Little Bear's essay "Jagged Worldviews
Colliding," he argues that a difference between Aboriginal values and
customs and Eurocentric values and customs is that Aboriginal worldviews
privilege wholeness (79); in contrast, "the value system of [the] Western
European[s] [is]...linear and singular, static, and objective" (82). For
Little Bear, this contrast is sharpest with issues of equality; where the
linear system of Eurocentric worldviews allows for hierarchies of people,
groups and the sexes, Aboriginal worldviews privilege equality among the
different groups. He argues that "Equality pervades Aboriginal societies
because of values such as sharing and generosity, the importance of groups as
opposed to the individual, and in general the concepts of wholeness and
totality" (83). Because Eurocentric worldviews have been, and continue to
be, imposed upon Aboriginal communities, the effect of colonization creates a
fragmented worldview among Aboriginal peoples (86). Without a unified
worldview, Aboriginal communities are unable to recover from colonization. In
the works of Aboriginal dramatist, this conflict is played out in the
adversarial relationships between men and women.
In Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Ian Ross' fareWell, and in Yvette Nolan's Annie Mae's
Movement, there is
a pattern where men engage in failed political movements without women. Instead
of women and men being two sides of the same circle that support one another,
men look at women as adversaries; women become a group that they must take
power from instead of being a group they must work with to gain power.
Works Cited
Bear, Leroy Little. "Jagged Worldviews Colliding." Reclaiming
Indigenous Voice and Vision. Ed. Marie Battiste. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000. 77-85.
Highway, Tomson. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Toronto: Fifth House Publishing, 1989.
Nolan, Yvette. Annie Mae's Movement. Unpublished. June 2006 Draft.
Ross, Ian. FareWel. Toronto: Scirocco Drama, 2002.
Jamie Paris is a graduate student at the University of Regina. He
is currently writing a thesis on Rudyard Kipling. His work tends to be
interdisciplinary; he is interested in issues of aboriginal justice, speech act
theory, just war theory, children's literature and culture and Victorian
literature.
Pearce,
Wes. (Regina) Bridging Pedagogies: The Laramie Project, Lord Byng Secondary School and Community.
"One British Columbia school board calls The Laramie
Project profane, another school board calls it profound."
In late September of 2005 the School District #36 (Surrey, BC) found itself the
centre of a firestorm around charges of homophobia, censorship and
intolerance. At the centre of this controversy was a decision by the
School District to "postpone" a production of Moises Kaufman's The
Laramie Project
that was to have been mounted at Elgin Park Secondary School. Charges and
counter-charges flew but this protest once again painted Surrey as one of the
most intolerant school systems in the country.
In
January 2006, independent of (but coloured by) the recent events in Surrey,
Vancouver's Lord Byng Secondary School presented The Laramie Project. The production at Lord Byng was, I
believe, unique in Canada both in terms of the curricula that was developed
around the play but also given the fact that many of the same diverse
communities and constituents which sought to ban the production in Surrey
embraced the production in Vancouver. This paper is an examination of the
development and implementation of the phenomenal educational program that the
staff, students and Lord Byng community developed around The Laramie Project. This educational project
garnered national attention, and throughout its development and implementation
demonstrated creativity, thoughtfulness, a commitment to social change and a
dynamic/proactive response to Kaufman's play. The immediate, not to
mention long term (and extremely positive) after effects, of this pedagogical
approach demonstrated that the concerns of the Surrey School District were
unfounded, hysterical and homophobic.
Wes D. Pearce teaches a variety of classes relating to theatre
design including 4 years of Costume Design courses, Costume Breakdown and
Costume History. He has pioneered a number of interdisciplinary courses
with a variety of faculty members in music, film studies and visual arts and
has supervised at the graduate level. His research focuses on two
distinct areas: contemporary Canadian scenography and issues of homophobia and
gay identity in theatre. He maintains an active professional career designing
dozens of productions for many theatres including: Globe Theatre, Persephone
Theatre, Alberta Theatre Projects, Western Canada Theatre, and Prairie Theatre
Exchange among others. He is a member of the Associated Designers of
Canada, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association and sits on the
Executive of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research.
Perry,
Mia. (UBC) . Pedagogical processes at the theatre: Clements' Women in Fish:
Hours of Water
You probably share with me the conviction that theatre educates.
You may even agree that the experience of a piece of theatre offers
opportunities for critical and embodied pedagogy that are unequalled in
traditional educational settings. What I propose to investigate in this
presentation is how.
What exactly occurs in the multimodal, embodied and aesthetic experience of
live theatre that renders it a 'place of learning' (Ellsworth, 2005)? I
explore this question using the production of a play written by Aboriginal
playwright, Marie Clements as my basis. The play, Women in Fish: Hours of
Water is an
interdisciplinary collective creation involving the portrayal of a community of
women's history: the fishing industry as they experienced it; the relationships
between Whites and Indians; the relationship with the sea and with the men at
sea. Based on direct excerpts from the production I will analyse three
particular elements—modes—of representation (dialogue, imagery and
sound) occurring in the production. As opposed to a structuralist approach that
may appear implicit in this endeavour, I aim to portray these modes as
evolving, living and transforming experiences that create meaning only in
collaboration with spectators and their various kinds of understandings,
changing with every changing spectator. In this light I propose to analyse
elements of Women in Fish, that each in themselves represent unique places for learning,
and combined in a piece of theatre create the possibility for a multi-layered,
multimodal and critical pedagogical experience.
Clements, M. (2004). Women in Fish: Hours of Water. Unpublished.
Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning, NY: Routledge
Mia Perry is a theatre theorist and practitioner currently
undertaking her doctorate degree in the field of theatre and education at the
Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. She has formerly
studied at the Samuel Beckett Centre, University Trinity College Dublin, The
Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow, and the Central School of Speech and
Drama in London, England. She is currently researching the relationship between
contemporary devised theatre and critical pedagogy.
Prendergast,
Monica. (Victoria) From Guest to Witness: Teaching Audience Studies in
Theatre
In 2005-2006 I was given permission to teach a directed studies
course in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria called
"Audience Process and the Victoria Theatre Season". This paper
offers a critical pedagogical and performative reflection on both the delivery
and reception of this class. Based on a recent dissertation study
– Audience in performance: A poetics and pedagogy of
spectatorship (Prendergast,
2006) – the
course offered students a radically different way to think about theatre that
placed their experience as spectators as the answer to Brecht's question
"What's theatre for?" Theatre is fundamentally for an
audience, yet this
somewhat obvious position tends to be forgotten in the context of a
contemporary mainstream theatre culture in which the audience is most often dealt
with as an afterthought rather than as an essential part of an ongoing creative
process. Spectators have become guests, patrons, clients and accidental
ticket-buyers rather than witnesses, memory-holders, questioners and integral
respondents to theatre-making. Based on the performance theories of
Herbert Blau, Jon McKenzie, Richard Schechner, Elinor Fuchs, Marvin Carlson,
Bert O. States, Baz Kershaw, Jill Dolan, Susan Bennett and others, this audience
in performance
curriculum is interested in foregrounding the study of performance reception
and in increasing the participation of audiences in the performance
process. In response to the 2007 conference theme of ACTR, this course
offered a way to build a bridge over, through and around the fourth wall that
so divides the actor and spectator in most current forms of Western theatre
practice.
Monica Prendergast, PhD, completed her interdisciplinary
graduate studies at the University of Victoria this year in theatre and
curriculum. Her research on audience education has led to many chapter and
essay publications, including in the books Ethnodrama (2005) and Drama as Social
Intervention (2006)
and journals such as Research in Drama Education, Journal of Aesthetic
Education and Qualitative
Inquiry.
Poems that appear in her dissertation are forthcoming in a special issue of Theatre
Research in Canada. Monica is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral researcher in the
Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia and a sessional instructor
in Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria.
Quint,
Cordula. (Mount Allison) "The 'Foreigner's Invasion': Interculturalism,
Tradition and Contemporaneity in Odin Teatret's Ur-Hamlet.
With its recent production of Ur-Hamlet (an adaptation of Saxo Grammaticus's
"Vita Amlethi" from his Gesta Danorum), the Odin Teatret continued its
exploration of intercultural theatre. The work was performed by a cast from a
wide range of performance traditions, among them Balinese Gambuh, Japanese Noh
theatre, the Brazilian Candomble-Orixa tradition, an international
"Foreigners' Chorus" from 21 different countries, and the permanent
members of Barba's own company. Of particular interest for my inquiry are the
ideological assumptions which underpinned the spatial aesthetics and semantics
of the production. While the cast's citation of the varied indigenous practices
foregrounded the director's "montage"-approach to staging, the
treatment of space made a more subtle, formative contribution to how the
borders between cultures were framed, legitimated or assimilated by the mise
en scŹne?
Envisioned from its very beginning as a site-specific performance for the
courtyard of Kronborg Castle (Helsingor), the Renaissance frame of the castle's
architectural features offered a provocative "container" for the
"folkloric display" of the interlaced Western and indigenous
traditions of Asian and African origin. At the same time, the
scenography, the stage-auditorium configuration and Barba's use of the space
engaged in citations of ancient Greek staging conventions as the
"ur"-code of Western theatre. More provocative, yet, was the
addition of a narrative thread about the invasion of the "fictional
castle" by a group of foreigners – a motley group of contemporary
"characters" -- which integrated a discourse on the theme of
invasion and alterity, as well as on the confrontation between the traditional
and contemporary, the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, into the very fabric of the
work. The purpose of my inquiry is, therefore, to investigate the relationship
between the varied, coexisting codes "at play", to reflect on the
specificity of their use and the attendant ideological implications.
Cordula Quint is Assistant Professor of Drama at Mount Allison
University,
where she teaches courses in dramatic theory and theatre
practice. Her
articles have appeared in the Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Journal,
WHERE THE BOYS ARE: Cinemas
of Masculinity and Youth, (Eds. Pomerance and
Gateward, 2005), Popping Culture
(Eds.
Pomerance and Sakeris, 2004), Global
Challenges and Regional
Responses (Eds.
Achilles, Bergmann, and DŠwes,
2003), Mźller in America
(Ed. Dan
Friedman, 2003), Closely Watched Brains
(Eds. Murray Pomerance and John
Sakeris, 2001 and 2003), Space and the
Postmodern Stage (Eds. Eynat-Confino and Sormova,
2000), and the New England
Theatre Journal (2000).
Radmacher,
Kimberley. (Toronto) Hypertext meets Performance: Bridging a disciplinary gap
This paper proposes to read hypertext and performance theories as
two sides of a similar epistemological coin. Performance and hypertext theories
may seem to be antithetical, but as I shall explore through this paper,
hypertext's early theorists' tendency to over invest hypertext with radical
potential can effectively be questioned through a performance theory lens. As
well, a hypertextual methodological approach could enrich how performance is
conceptualized.
Hypertext
theory plays a crucial role in how what we today consider new media is
theorized about and considered. Yet, because of its early post-structural bent,
hypertext theory has tended toward the radical, as it is seen to have inherent
emancipatory qualities. More recently, hypertext's predominantly literary
theorists have grappled with how to theorize what seemed to be by its nature
revolutionary, but has turned out to be a tool most readily used by advertising
and online shopping.
The
term "performance" connotes a connection to cultural and
anthropological theories, and so it works to refer to a hybridity that
reverberates through cultural and media studies. "Performance" also
has an etymological link to performance art as that hybrid of art and
(anti)theatre that foregrounds the body over the text. Hypertext theory
effectively explodes the body/text binary and can work not only as metaphor for
the performance theorist, but perhaps offer a methodological paradigm to
express performance's function in art and culture.
Kimberley Radmacher: Kimberley is presently a 2nd year PhD
Student at the University of Toronto's Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama,
where her primary research involves intermedial approaches to early English
drama in the 21st century. She also holds a bilingual honours degree in Drama Studies
from York University's Glendon College and a Master's degree in Communication
and Culture from Ryerson University.
Kim will be directing a "hyperspatial," multi-mediated
production of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling in March 2007 at the Glenn Morris
Studio Theatre, produced by U of T's Drama Centre.
Rudakoff,
Judith. (York) Common Plants:Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality: Bridging
Cultures, Disciplines and Geographies
Art-making is an internal process dependent on external
circumstances: time, place, weather, geography, economics, socio-political
context, cultural bias. Art presents a map of a place in its own peculiar time.
Audiences process art internally, but in a way that is dependent on both given
circumstances and external contexts. Common Plants, funded by a SSHRC grant in
Fine Arts Creation, is working with an international team of scholars, artists
and students to expand the universe of given circumstances, discovering how to
move past particular experiential filters and cultural specificity while
honouring their place in the creative process/product. Common Plants is working
to de-limit the boundaries of artistic possibility and audience understanding
of the creative work generated by the project.
Common Plants proposes that this is
possible through the conception and implementation of an innovative creative
process that is transcultural in scope (including Rudakoff' Four Elements
Methodology and Creative Lomograms process) and by providing the resource of a
virtual "site" in which given circumstances can bridge not only
geographical borders, but the borders of quotidian reality, in order to
envision a landscape that accepts distinct and different perspectives on the
familiar in order to re-examine and react to them through artistic responses.
Common
Plants involves students and professional and links geographically and
culturally distinct participants from Toronto, Waterloo, Regina, the Canadian
North (Iqaluit, Nunavut) and South Africa (Cape Town, Khayelitsha Township,
Nyanga East Township, Gugulethu Township), encouraging expression of individual
identity through exploration of shared vision, common principles and the
challenge of difference.
Primary
themes explored in the performance cycle by all participants are Identity, Home
and Voice. Spoken text (in languages including English, Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana,
French, Afrikaans and Inuktitut), physical movement, geographical location,
cultural history and spiritual and mythological traditions are achieving
artistic "cross-pollination" and leading to the next stage of the project,
the creation of a hybrid, transcultural work.
Current state
of project can be viewed at www.yorku.ca/gardens
Judith Rudakoff is a developmental dramaturg who works with
emerging and established playwrights and dancers throughout Canada and in Cuba,
Denmark, South Africa, England and USA. Books include Between the Lines: The
Process of Dramaturgy (Playwrights
Canada Press, 2002, coeditor Lynn M. Thomson); Fair Play: Conversations with
Canadian Women Playwrights (Simon & Pierre, 1989, co-editor Rita Much) and Questionable
Activities: Canadian Theatre Artists in Conversation with Canadian Theatre
Students
(Playwrights Canada Press, 2000). Her articles have appeared in The Drama
Review, TheatreForum, Canadian Theatre Review. She is the creator of Elemental
Lomograms, a transcultural methodology for initiating performance and visual
art. Teaching awards include the inaugural Dean's Prize for Teaching Excellence
(Faculty of Fine Arts) and the University Wide Teaching Prize at York
University where she is a Full Professor, and three NOW Magazine "Best of
Toronto" awards. She was the first Canadian honoured with the Elliott
Hayes Prize in Dramaturgy for her work on South Asian choreographer Lata Pada's
multidisciplinary work, Revealed by Fire. Rudakoff is a member of Playwrights
Guild of Canada and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. Recent
projects include dramaturgy for Qaggig Theatre (Iqaluit), Debajehmujig Theatre
(Manitoulin Island), and Common Plants: Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality (www.yorku.ca/gardens <http://www.yorku.ca/gardens>), a
transcultural, interdisciplinary and international project funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Saint-Jacques,
Diane. (UniversitŽ de MontrŽal) ApprŽcier une production thŽ‰trale l'Žcole (Abstract in French only)
Le nouveau Programme de formation pour l'enseignement primaire
ajoute aux compŽtences inventer et interprŽter des sŽquences dramatiques,
la compŽtence ÇApprŽcier des Ďuvres thŽ‰trales, ses rŽalisations et celles de
ses camaradesČ. Certes, l'enseignement de l'art dramatique a toujours compris
un moment de retour sur les rŽalisations des ŽlŹves, mais de l'ordre du RŽagir
avec, au mieux, une objectivation des moyens mis en Ďuvre pour montrer le
personnage ou la fable. Le nouveau Programme va nettement plus loin en
demandant l'ŽlŹve de Çporter un jugement d'ordre critique ou esthŽtiqueČ. Si
l'intention est louable, sa concrŽtisation se rŽvŹle, l'expŽrimentation,
imprŽcise et peu adaptŽe la rŽalitŽ scolaire. Une dŽmarche d'apprŽciation des
productions thŽ‰trales a donc ŽtŽ ŽlaborŽe dans le cadre de cours de didactique
et mise au point par et pour des enseignants en exercice dans diffŽrents
contextes Žducatifs. Cette dŽmarche respecte l'esprit de celle du Programme,
mais s'en distingue par des prŽcisions sur les ŽlŽments constitutifs
considŽrer, l'introduction d'Žtapes intermŽdiaires avant le jugement et, de
maniŹre plus gŽnŽrale, en faisant appel tant l'expŽrience personnelle qu' la
lecture formelle. Elle comprend cinq Žtapes : le Participer permet d'entrer
en contact avec l'Ďuvre, le DŽcrire d'inventorier ses ŽlŽments de contenu
(thŽmatique, langagier et matŽriel/technique), l'Analyser d'Žtablir des liens
entre les ŽlŽments pour cerner la dynamique de l'Ďuvre, l'InterprŽter d'Žmettre
des hypothŹses sur son sens en rapport avec le ressenti et les ŽlŽments
examinŽs et le Juger d'en Žvaluer la qualitŽ en fonction de critŹres.
Professeure titulaire la FacultŽ des sciences de l'Žducation
de l'UniversitŽ de MontrŽal, Diane Saint-Jacques y donne des enseignements en
didactique des arts, particuliŹrement de l'art dramatique. Ses intŽrts de
recherche portent principalement sur le processus crŽateur, la didactique de
l'art dramatique, notamment la dŽfinition du domaine dans une perspective
sŽmiologique et, depuis 1997, sur la dimension culturelle du curriculum.
Salter,
Denis. (McGill) Part One: Speaking, Embodying, Sounding, and Extirpating the
Very Depths of Evil: The Theatrical Language of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry's
1888 Macbeth
Henry Irving interpreted Macbeth as a morality play in which the
'Evil' that was allegorized as Macbeth had to be destroyed, as if forever, by
the end of the production. Meanwhile, Ellen Terry created a complementary
interpretation of Lady Macbeth as an (archetypal) woman who, in defiance of
received assumptions about the Siddonian interpretation of the role, was at
once beautiful, seductive, tender, and loving, determined to urge her husband
to commit murder. The 'Evil' allegorized by her performance brought about
depression and a broken heart, culminating in a Sleepwalking Scene informed by
both tragedy and pathos. To provide musical interpretation, rather than
traditional musical accompaniment, in expressing the stylistic significance and
moral import of Irving and Terry's performances, Arthur Sullivan created an
original score on which actor and composer worked together to provide a
continuous 'soundtrack' that served to enhance a complex interrelationship of
text, acting, image, and sound. Drawing from Irving and Terry's annotated study
copies in the Harvard Theatre Collection and elsewhere, and from Sullivan's
manuscript of the score at Oriel College, this paper analyses how, why, and to
what ends, Irving cut and restructured Shakespeare's play into 6 acts; the
singularity of both his and Terry's interpretations of their roles in relation
to stage tradition; and 5 exemplary scenes demonstrating some of the salient
attributes of the revolutionary theatrical language that the production so
brilliantly invented. (This paper is the first of two interrelated papers on
the complexities of this production.)
Denis Salter is an Associate Professor of Theatre at McGill
University; the associate editor of alt. theatre: culture diversity and the
stage; a member of the editorial boards of many other journals, including
Theatre Research in Canada; a member of the ACTR executive board; and a
specialist in modern drama, Victorian and Edwardian stage history, dramaturgy
and criticism, Canadian theatre, and Shakespeare in performance.
Senyshyn,
Dimitry. (Toronto) Anatomizing Discourse: The Specular Body in Suzan-Lori
Parks' Venus
Critics such as Jean Young have argued that Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus—in its free interpretation of
historical fact and its emphasis on the spectacular display of its title
character—effectively reinforces the colonial structures that exploited
the historical Saartjie Baartman in the early nineteenth century. Young draws
upon the extant record of Baartman's experience in order to argue that Parks'
treatment of these materials "tells us little about Baartman"[1]
implicitly suggesting that Parks is guilty of further marginalizing and
displacing Baartman's subject status. This interpretation suggests a desire on
Young's part for a particular onstage recuperation of an 'authentic' Saartjie
Baartman that might somehow redress the historical wrongs done unto her. Parks'
play, however, implicitly questions not only the viability, but the very
possibility of such a project, by representing Baartman as we receive her in
the historical record: the culturally encoded product of colonialist discourse.
While Parks encourages her audiences' apprehension of its own historical
specificity and distance from the cultural milieu of the play, she
collapses—or, bridges—this gap at those points where she implicates
them as voyeuristically complicit in the staging of Venus' body-as-spectacle.
The extent to which an audience feels uncomfortably complicit in the violence
of Venus' discursive construction and exploitation may be seen as an indicator of
the play's success in troubling the colonial gaze and the discursive regimes
that inform Venus' onstage construction. The specular quality of Venus'
body—determined by the extent to which it is experienced in the audience
as the colonizing construction of its own gaze—turns the gaze back on
itself and becomes the locus of Parks' critique.
Dimitry Senyshyn completed a Master's degree in English at the
University of Toronto in 2005 and is now in the second year of a direct-entry
PhD at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama. His current research focuses on
the relation between Early Modern common law and the operation of generic
convention in English revenge tragedy from 1587-1641.
Smith,
Annie. (UBC) Culture squeeze: how may the academy understand and teach a
theory and aesthetics of Native performance?
In winter session, 2006 at UBC, I co-taught the course, The
Theory and Aesthetics of Native Performance, with fellow PhD student and Native
scholar and publisher, Greg Young-Ing. This course idea had come out of
the collaborative visioning and teaching of The History of Contemporary
Aboriginal Theatre in Canada, with Michelle La Flamme (winter session, 2005). We
wanted to explore our felt need to articulate an indigenous theory and
aesthetics of performance.
This paper discusses the disjuncture between the attempt of western scholars to
apply western literary theory to Native theatre and Native understandings of
indigenous performance. This is a debate of world views as expressed in
the essays in two texts utilized in our courses: (Ad)dressing Our
Words: Aboriginal Perspectives on Aboriginal Literatures , edited by Armand Ruffo and Aboriginal
Drama and Theatre,
edited by Rob Appleford. I use the work of MŽtis playwright, Marie
Clements, to illustrate the points of disjuncture and to offer an understanding
of what may be considered a Native theory and aesthetics of performance.
The issues that arise from this discussion challenge the institutions of both
theatre and academy to relax the colonialist, cultural squeeze still
perpetrated on Native culture and scholarship. It can be argued that
contemporary post-modern expressions of performance already are moving towards
a new relational and participatory aesthetic (Bourriaud, 2003; Gablik 2002)
that conjoins considerably with indigenous aesthetics. And then there is
the issue of appropriation ...
Annie Smith recently earned her PhD in Curriculum and
Instruction at UBC. Her dissertation, "Elasticity, Community, and
Hope: understandings from participatory theatre performance", explored, in
relation to performance theory, what people meant when they said they
experienced "a feeling of community" when they participated in
theatre performance. Ongoing research will explore the use of community
ritual in theatrical performance. She is currently developing a
collaborative participatory workshop performance of Marie Clements' play, Age
of Iron.
Works cited:
Appleford, R., ed.. (2005). Aboriginal drama and theatre,
critical perspectives on Canadian
theatre in English, vol. 1. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press.
Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational aesthetics. S. Pleasance & F. Woods
with M. Copeland (Trans.). France:
Les presses du reel.
Clements, M. H. (2001). Age of iron, in DramŽtis: three MŽtis plays, Young Ing, G. and Kruger, L.F.,
eds.. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books Ltd.
Gablik, S.
(2002). The re-enchantment of art. London & New York: Thames
and Hudson.
Ruffo, A. G., ed.. (2001). (Ad)dressing our
words: Aboriginal perspectives on Aboriginal literatures
Sperdakos,
Paula. (Toronto) Ida van Cortland and the 1877-78 Season of Mrs. Morrison's
Grand Opera House, Toronto
In September of 1877, Canada's first actress-manager, Charlotte
Morrison, opened the fourth season of her tenure as manager of the resident
stock company of Toronto's Grand Opera House. Making her theatrical debut on an
"as cast" basis, in what was then termed the "ballet," was
a young woman with a two-year-old child who, possibly to escape an untenable
domestic situation, had just recently turned to the theatre and adopted a
glamorous stage name: Ida Van Cortland. During the following eight months, Ida
supported such celebrated touring stars as Fanny Davenport, McKee Rankin, and
Helena Modjeska, as well as "Toronto's favourite," Mrs. Morrison
herself, playing at least forty different roles in everything from broad farce
to Shakespearean tragedy. Meanwhile, Charlotte struggled with economic hard
times, declining audiences, mounting bills, an unsympathetic Gas Company, and
competition from other Toronto theatres, while continuing to lead tours herself
to neighboring towns like Hamilton and Whitby when the GOH was rented out to
other touring companies. At the end of the season, Charlotte Morrison was
replaced as manager of the GOH, and retired from the theatre for the second and
last time in her illustrious career; while Ida Van Cortland continued the
journey toward her own considerable celebrity as a touring star.
In its consideration of the brief intersection of the careers of two
significant actresses, this paper will serve as a snapshot of a transitional
point in the history of the theatre in Canada.
Paula Sperdakos is Associate Professor at the University of
Toronto, where she teaches courses in acting and directing theory and practice
and Canadian theatre history. Her articles and book reviews have been published
in Theatre Research in Canada, CTR, Essays in Theatre, Modern Drama, and Queen's Quarterly. She is the author of the Ann Saddlemyer
Award-winning Dora Mavor Moore: Pioneer of the Canadian Theatre. Most recently, she was a contributor
to Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and
Practice
(Talonbooks, 2006). She has directed shows of all kinds in theatres across
Canada.
Stedman,
Sam. (Toronto) Social Change, Ethical Representation, and the Inhumanity of the
Avant-Garde
Emmanuel Levinas wrote that "All human relations...proceed
from disinterestedness.... In it justice
is shown from the first, it is thus born from the signifyingness of
signification, the-one-for-the-other, signification" (Otherwise 159).
Though employed to a variety of different ends – some
exceptionally different from a Levinasian project – this notion of
disinterestedness is not foreign to the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century avant-garde and its manifestations in performance. The examples are numerous, and the
following list is anything but comprehensive: Craig's źber-marionette;
Meyerhold's similar desire for "tragedy with a smile" through
"plastic statuesqueness" (175, 78); the Futurists' aggressive pursuit
of dehumanization; dada's belief that "what is divine in us is the
awakening of anti-human action."
In an age of epic polemic battles between institutional inhumanity and
so many humanitarian organizations, a lack of conventionally defined human
interest often implies apathy. But
at what cost is such a belief sustained?
Were Jacques Derrida still with us, he could supply ample evidence of
less than humane treatment that he weathered at the hands of intellectuals who
preached socio-political betterment.
This paper is an interrogation of the
possible efficacies of the "inhuman" as it relates to the pursuit of
justice through theatrical means.
For Levinas, the transcendence of being and essence – that is, all
that we know of being "human" – is a point of hypothetical
entry into ethical responsibility.
In what ways might the transcendence of human interest find productive
theatrical representation – or, at the very least, quasi-representation
– toward socio-political betterment?
Sam Stedman is in the final stages of his doctoral studies (or
perhaps recently finished, if all has gone well) at the Graduate Centre for Study
of Drama at the University of Toronto.
This past year, he taught sessionally at Queen's, the University of
Toronto at Mississauga, and the University of Windsor. His research is centred on the
application of Derridean and Levinasian philosophy to performance studies.
Stephenson,
Jenn. (Queen's) The Performative Past Perfect?: Theatricality, Violence and
Identity in Perfect Pie
and The Drawer Boy
The recovery of lost memory is a central concern in both Judith
Thompson's Perfect Pie and The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey. For two sets of characters the initial
loss comes out of a traumatic event that steals memory through the disruption
of subjectivity. To access the past and restore damaged identity, characters
usurp the power of the playwright to produce plays-within and thus to wield
influence over reconstituted dramatic historiographies. However, since
fictional worlds of drama are themselves performative creations, the use of
performative strategies to create additional inset worlds destabilizes the
constitutive material of the original fiction. This instability and the
resulting ontological ambiguity about the truth of history permits access to
self-knowledge, but at the same time calls the authenticity of that knowledge
into question.
The
central focus of this paper is on intersections between the violence that, I
argue, is innate to the instigation of theatricality and the creation of
fictional subjectivity that is the result of that theatricality. The plots of
the two plays selected revisit this intersection between violence and
subjectivity. In The Drawer Boy, Angus' memory is damaged by a war-time explosion, leaving
Morgan as the custodian of their history. In Perfect Pie, the situation is more ambiguous;
Patsy and Marie/Francesca share memories of sexual assault and a horrific train
crash. The result of these traumas is to commingle and redistribute certain
aspects of their identities, while at the same time 'erasing' Marie altogether.
I am interested in how formal characteristics of theatricality are reiterated
in the action of the stories presented and to what extent the overarching
dramatic form aids or compromises the search for authenticity.
Jenn Stephenson is an assistant professor in Drama at Queen's
University. She has published in Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and
Criticism and Studies
in Text and Performance. Her area of interest is in theatricality, metatheatricality,
and the instability of fictional worlds in Shakespeare and in postmodern
Canadian drama.
Stovel,
Nora Foster. (Alberta) The Birth of the Ballerina: Self or Sylph?
The romantic ballets that continue to
fill theatres to the present day—La Sylphide, Giselle, La Bayadere, and Swan Lake—portray woman in an unusual light. Although the
ballerina is the star of each piece, she becomes a tragic figure who dies at
the end of the ballet and is survived by the man she loves. In one act of each
ballet the heroine is transfigured—dead and transformed into a sylph or
spirit, shown to her lover in a vision, or impersonated by another woman.
The heroine's divided self is reflected
in all artistic areas. First, the composition of the music reflects this
duality, including both allegro and adagio elements to represent the quick and the dead versions. The
choreography echoes the dichotomy by combining lively solos and duos with
ethereal variations and pas de deux. This dichotomy allows the ballerina to display her expertise in
both artistic arenas. Occasionally, the dual aspects of the heroine are danced
by two dancers, each excelling in that style, notably as Odette/Odile in Swan
Lake. When both
roles are danced by the same dancer, the ability to excel in both modes
represents a tour de force performance for the ballerina. In La Sylphide there are two women—a mortal and
a sylph who are rivals for the love of the man. When the man attempts to secure
the ethereal creature by making her mortal, he kills her. Thus, the sylph is
not allowed to be human, physical, or sexual. Such ballets are based on folk
tales, which have intriguing psychosocial implications for female identity.
Although the man survives her, the choreography often reduces him to the
supporting role of a human crane. I plan to examine the role of pointe work and supported adagio in creating these gender images.
I will explore the ramifications of the
cultural perceptions of women reflected in these ballets by examining their
literary and folk sources, the choreography and music, and the duality of the
ballerina. In the complete paper, I will explore five major ballets—La
Sylphide, Giselle, Swan Lake, La Bayadere and Sleeping Beauty—and their implications for gender and culture. In
the interests of time, of time, I will focus on La Sylphide. I will use it to pose the question:
why do these nineteenth-century ballets, which appear to contradict current
views of gender construction and performance, continue to be so popular?
Nora Foster
Stovel is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, where she teaches
twentieth-century literature. She has a BA, MA and Ph.D. from McGill, Cambridge
and Dalhousie Universities. She has published books and articles on
twentieth-century writers-- specifically D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, and
Margaret Laurence--as well as essays on Jane Austen. She has edited four books
by Margaret Laurence. She has completed Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of
Her Writing, with the assistance of a SSHRCC grant and a
University of Alberta McCalla Research Professorship. She has been awarded a
SSHRC grant to pursue her study, "Sparkling Subversion": Carol
Shields's "Double Vision."
ThŽberge,
Mariette. (Ottawa) Bridging francophone linguistic minority communities through
professional training in theatre
This study is based on the premise that francophone linguistic minority
culture in Canada would not be the same without the contribution of
professional artists to communities. It relates the artistic training
experiences and the career paths of actors from Canada's western, eastern and
central provinces. The conceptual framework deals with issues of
motivation, identity development, commitment and artistic evolution.
Various models serve as a foundation for the research: Deci and Ryan's
self-determination theory (2002), the Association canadienne d'Žducation de
langue franŤaise
(Canadian French-language education association) model of identity development
(2006) and Csikszentmihalyi's creativity model (2006). The two main
methods of data collection are individual interviews and focus groups. In
the last five years, all participants have worked for at least one of the 14
theatre troupes that are members of the Association des thŽ‰tres
francophones du Canada
(Canadian French-language Theatre Association). As models that inspire
young francophone students, these artists give hope that a career in French
theatre is possible in the Canadian linguistic minority context. This
study allows us to better understand the artistic evolution and identity
development of artists and communities. The results also fuel dialogue on
the underlying links with the fields of education, the arts and language, and
highlight their complementary nature.
Mariette ThŽberge currently teaches at the University of
Ottawa's Faculty of Education in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in
Education, and her publications focus on art education, specifically drama /
theatre education in a francophone linguistic minority context. She is
Chair of the editorial committee for the refereed journal ducation et
francophonie.
Thibault,
Laurence. (Ottawa) Personal representations in the creative processes of French
theatre productions for adolescents in Ontario
Theatre professionals participate in the building of the
cultural and linguistic identities of franco-ontarian adolescents through performances
and workshops (MinistŹre de l'Žducation de l'Ontario, 1998, 1999, 2000, ThŽ‰tre
Action, 2003, ThŽberge, 2006a, 2006b). The present doctoral research aims to
understand how theatre professionals create shows for French adolescents in
Ontario. Three sub-questions support the inquiry : What personal
representations underlie the creative process? How do these representations
interact with the group's collective representations? How does the creative
process unfold during rehearsals?
Psycho-sociological
notions of representations and collective representations (Barus-MichŹle,
Enriquez et LŽvy, 2003) will guide the data analysis. The conceptual framework
also includes Csikszentmihalyi's (1999) Systems Model of Creativity in which creativity is defined as
emerging from the interactions between a domain, a person, and a field. Both
theoretical references will allow for an analysis at the personal and group
levels.
This
qualitative research is an ethnomethodology (Coulon,1987) : data collection
includes rehearsals observation (fall 2006, Ottawa), group discussions, and
personal interviews with eighteen participants. Data analysis will be both
inductive and informed by the conceptual framework.
This
research will offer a better understanding of the companies' works and artistic
visions as they create shows for adolescents in a context of cultural and
linguistic minority. It also aims to participate in the current discussion on
the link between culture, language and education in French communities throughout
Canada (Haentjens et Chagnon-Lampron, 2004). Preliminary results will also be
presented.
References
Barus-Michel, J., Enriquez, E., et LŽvy A. (Dir.), (2003). Vocabulaire
de Psychosociologie ; RŽfŽrences et positions. Ramonville Saint-Agne, France :
ditions ŽrŹs.
Coulon, A. (1987). L'ethnomŽthodologie. Paris, France : Presses
Universitaires de France.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a Systems
Perspective for the study of Creativity. Dans R. J. Sternberg (Ed.). Handbook
of Creativity. (pp.
313-335). Cambridge, Massacusetts : Cambridge University Press.
MinistŹre de l'Žducation de l'Ontario. (1998). Le curriculum
de l'Ontario en Žducation artistique de la 1iŹre la 8iŹme annŽe. Toronto : Imprimeur de la Reine
pour l'Ontario.
MinistŹre de l'Žducation de l'Ontario. (1999). Le curriculum
de l'Ontario en Žducation artistique 9e et 10e annŽe. Toronto : Imprimeur de la Reine
pour l'Ontario.
MinistŹre de l'Žducation de l'Ontario. (2000). Le curriculum
de l'Ontario en Žducation artistique 11e et 12e annŽe. Toronto : Imprimeur de la Reine
pour l'Ontario.
ThŽ‰tre Action (2003). La force du thŽ‰tre, secteur scolaire.
Ottawa, Ontario : ThŽ‰tre Action.
ThŽberge, M. (2006a). Construction identitaire et Žducation artistique
dans un contexte canadien francophone minoritaire. ConsultŽ le 13 mars 2006,
sur
ThŽberge, M. (2006b). Construction identitaire et Žducation
thŽ‰trale dans un contexte rural franco-ontarien. Education et francophonie, XXXIV (1). ConsultŽ le 13 mars 2006 http://www.acelf.ca/c/revue/index.php
Laurence
Thibault is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Education, at the University of
Ottawa. She is originally from France, where she studied English literature and
civilization as well as French as a foreign language. She also completed a
Masters degree in English, with a minor in Theatre, in 1997 at Southern Oregon
University. Throughout her teaching practice in the United States, France, and
Canada, Laurence has continually associated drama to her cultural approach of
language learning. In 2005, she designed an intermediate French course based on
Ç process drama Č (Bolton, 1979), French in Drama, for the Alliance franŤaise of Ottawa. She presented that
project at the 2006 edition of the CSSE congress, among others. She is
currently teaching part time at the University of Ottawa, and engaged in a
doctoral research that involves two theatre companies from Ottawa, in order to
document and understand the representations professionals have of the
adolescent public and the connections between these representations and the
creative process during the rehearsal periods. The connections between arts,
education, and cultural identity in a linguistic minority context constitute the
premise to this ethnomethodological research. The data collection, including
extensive observation, group discussions and individual interviews, was
completed in the fall of 2006. Laurence is currently conducting the data
analysis.
Tracey,
Dawn. (Alberta) Ronnie Burkett's Street of Blood
Since the emergence of the realist tradition at the end of the
nineteenth century, puppetry in the West, particularly in North America, has
been relegated to the realm of children's theatre. While puppets still
make appearances on the adult stage when human actors cannot meet the
requirements of the text—as in Julie Taymor's The Lion King, for instance—it is still
relatively unusual to see a puppet in a role that might easily be played by a
human actor. In the theatre of Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett, this notion
of puppetry is thoroughly challenged. Burkett's casts of predominantly
human-like marionettes portray lengthy narratives and are capable of evoking
powerful emotional responses from their exclusively adult
audiences. This poses an important question: aside from their
ability to perform superhuman feats and represent non-human characters, what do
puppets contribute to an adult audience's theatre-going experience? This
paper will explore Burkett's 1998 show Street of Blood, a sprawling prairie epic that
includes themes such as Canada's tainted blood scandal, AIDS, homophobia, and
religion. Drawing primarily upon audience reception and puppet theory, I
will demonstrate the ways in which Burkett's early work combines puppetry,
improvisation, direct interaction, and manipulation of his own role as a solo
performer in order to engage the audience's imagination in a playful process of
co-creation. The spectator becomes an active and integral component of
the theatrical production, thus closing the gap between audience and
performance and activating the audience's emotions in a unique and powerful
way.
Dawn Tracey is in her final year of the MA in Dramatic Theory
and Criticism at the University of Alberta where she intends to defend her
thesis in April 2007. Dawn also holds a BA Honours in Theatre Studies
from Dalhousie University/University of King's College. She has been the
recipient of several awards including the SSHRC Master's Scholarship, the University
of Alberta Recruitment Scholarship, and the Queen Elizabeth II Graduate
Scholarship.
Turner,
Mark. (Toronto) The City's Limits: Reflections on the Impact of
'Metropolitanism' Upon Theatre and Performance Research in Canada
This paper is directly influenced by, and is in some ways a
reaction to, my experiences at last year's ACTR conference at York University
in Toronto, ON. According to the Statistics Canada website, the demography of
this country has undergone a dramatic shift: at the turn of the century, 63% of
the population lived in rural areas while at the turn of the twenty-first
century 80% of the population lived in urban areas[1]. The rise of the city as
the dominant dwelling site (and in particular the multi-cultural metropolis),
has had the unfortunate side effect of establishing a polarity between the
urban and the rural. In turn, this polarisation is also manifest in the scope
and manner of performance research in Canada. Indeed, if we are to take last
year's conference as a representation of dominant themes in Canadian
performance research, performance(s) in rural Canada are of virtually no
concern. Significantly, in a conference such as ACTR – one which
"aims to shape Canada's theatrical present and future by preserving and
interpreting our theatrical past and investigating areas of contemporary theory
and performance"[1] – it can be said that this mandate is executed
through a distinctly urban/metropolitan lens. Urban performances are accounted
for through urban inspired theoretical models. Rural subjects of academic
pursuit are in turn marginalized and trivialized and have become something of
the order of "light" scholarship. I am thinking here specifically of
a paper in last year's conference where one of the presenters – himself
from a rural area, played up his "ruralness" to entertain those in
attendance for his presentation. What this paper aims to do is to first provide
a more general account of the "metropolitization" of Canadian theatre
scholarship through a discussion of the exclusionary implications of current
popular theoretical models and second, to provide some tentative
recommendations to bring rural performance back into the popular discourse.
Mark Turner is currently a third year PhD student at the
Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. He has
received his B.A. (Hons.) in English from Memorial University of Newfoundland
in 2001 and his M.A. from the Drama Centre in 2003. His primary interests are
in Newfoundland and Labrador theatre and film as well as performance theory. In
March of 2006, his adaptation of the first Newfoundland and Labrador
full-length film – The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood – received a two-week run at the
Glen Morris Studio Theatre in Toronto. He is currently in the process of
preparing to tour the production and is also writing a new play based upon the
paintings of Newfoundland and Labrador artist, Jonathan Howse. Mark was also
the recipient of a Heather McCallum scholarship to begin an archival project
devoted to Newfoundland and Labrador film which is currently in process. This
past November, Mark also participated in the American Society for Theatre
Research seminar "The Stakes of Performance Research" with his paper,
"En-Acting the Lost Nation: The Mummers Troupe and the Origin of
Discursive Neo-Nationalist Dramaturgies on the Newfoundland and Labrador
Stage".
Wilkinson,
Lydia. (Toronto) "'Just Watch Me': Watching Canada Watch Itself Through
Linda Griffiths' Maggie & Pierre."
In her article, "I Am a Thief...Not Necessarily Honourable
Either," Linda Griffiths discusses her experiences while touring Maggie
& Pierre, and
notes that "it was different to play Trudeau in Montreal than in
Calgary. The writing didn't change but the relationship to the audience
had to remain alive."[1] Reception of Maggie & Pierre's 1980/81 tour was inevitably
influenced by regional relationships to Trudeau's politics, as well as shaped
by a political and social climate in which the limitations of Trudeau's
political career and apparent fairytale marriage had been recently
exposed. Trudeau sought to bridge divides between French and English, as
well as Western, Central and Eastern Canada, by encouraging unification and
bilingualism. Yet regional concerns were not always acknowledged or
addressed in his policy for a unified nation. This paper will identify
locally specific receptions of this work and consider how responses reflect
regional Trudeau sentiment. Particular attention will be given to coverage of Maggie
& Pierre's
first national and eventually international tour (the show headed to New York
for a disappointingly short run late in 1981). Using documents of
reception and anecdotal information from Griffiths herself, I will examine the
complexities of conceptualizing art for a Canadian audience that is politically
unified, but culturally and socially divided.
Lydia Wilkinson is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Centre for
Study of Drama, University of Toronto. She is co-editor of an upcoming
book entitled Performing Adaptations: Essays and Conversations on the Theory
and Practice of Adaptation, based on the FOOT 2006 Festival of Original Theatre of which
she was co-artistic director. Lydia is publicist at the Drama Centre and
is also directing an upcoming production of Still Stands the House for its 2006-2007 season. Recent
theatre projects include assistant director and dramaturge of Shakespeare in
the Rough's 2006 production of Antony and Cleopatra, and intern dramaturge for Nightwood's
2006 Groundswell Festival.
Zatzman,
Belarie. (York) Bridging Communities: "Common Plants" an
international theatre research project (Wants to be paired with Rudakoff)
"Common Plants" is an international theatre research
project which involves students and artists in the creation and performance of
notions of home and identity. "Common Plants" also includes an
interactive virtual website, linking international participants. This
paper will examine the youth component of the project, drama pedagogy, and the
site specific work that took place in Iqaluit, Nunavut and Cape Town, South
Africa. Drawing upon the metaphor of the garden, devised theatre
practices provided an opportunity for youth to "cross-pollinate" the
issues and tensions of their lived experiences, provoking creative responses
based upon exploring difference and commonality; bridging communities by
narrating stories of history, identity and location.
Belarie Zatzman is Associate Dean in the Faculty of Fine
Arts, York University. Her research focuses on issues of history,
identity and memory in drama and arts education. She has published
extensively and works internationally in fine arts and Holocaust education. She
has been invited to give workshops or papers in such venues as the
Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People, Toronto; Stratford Festival of Canada,
and the
International Drama Education Research Institute. Among
her recent publications are: "Narrative Inquiry: Postcards from
Northampton" in Ackroyd, Judith, ed. Research Methodologies for
Drama Education (2006);
"Staging History: Aesthetics and the Performance of Memory" in The
Journal of Aesthetic Education (2005); and "The Monologue Project: Drama as a
Form of Witnessing" in Booth and Gallagher's (eds.) How Theatre
Educates (2003).
Panels (Abstracts
and Biographies)
Ambivalence(s) of Invention:
Dramaturgical Approaches to Creation"
Pil
Hansen, University of Copenhagen
Bruce
Barton, University of Toronto
D.D.
Kugler, Simon Fraser University
This panel will share examples of
dramaturgical approaches to creation that are ambivalent about distinctions
such as developmental and production
dramaturgy, process and product, dramatic and performance
texts, event and audience. The
chosen approaches are situated between theory and practice and will be analyzed
with attention to specific empirical contexts as well as to more general
possibilities of application and development. The panel begins from the
premise that transitional spaces between recognizable entities and distinct
categories enhance the scope of dramaturgical attention and competence.
Ą
Bruce Barton:
"Learning to Tango: Dramaturgies of/in Devised Theatre" (15 min). Emphasis:
Issues, observations, and evolving speculations relating to processes of
generation, experimentation, and composition in physically-based devised
theatre (based on ongoing dramaturgical work with several physical theatre
companies in Canada). Particular focus will be directed towards a
phenomenological reconsideration of "instinct" and
"intuition."
Ą
Pil Hansen:
"A Perceptual and Strategic Approach to Complex Dramaturgical
Creation" (20 min). Emphasis: Dramaturgical strategies and
analytical tools of relevance to the dramaturge when engaged in composition in
general (extracted from Danish and Canadian dramaturges, reimagined through
theory of memory, perception, and performativity, and further developed/tested
in practice with Danish dramaturges).
Ą
Barton &
Hansen: "A Case in Point: Moving Stage Lab 2006" (10
min). In 2006, Barton and Hansen were
commissioned by the Danish chapter of the International Theatre Institute to
design and facilitate Moving Stage Lab 2006, an ambitious laboratory on
theatrical devising for 24 professional performing artists from Scandinavia and
the Baltic countries. Conducted with three Canadian directors and a Danish
drama pedagogue, the project combined perceptual reflection forums and physical
devising workshops.
Ą
D.D. Kugler (20 min): Why do so many new play developmental programs look so much
the same?—the playwrights unit, the pre-scheduled reading or workshop
festival, etc. After two plus decades
of evolution in Canadian play development, have we arrived at a
one-size-fits-all process? The
process is clearly effective, and I am not discounting the considerable work
that particular process has produced.
But have we stopped thinking—really thinking—about the
developmental process itself? Are
we doing play development by rote—merely imitating, or adopting, the
existing structures?
Ą
Questions/discussion (20
min)
Bruce Barton is a Canadian scholar, dramaturge, and
playwright who teaches performance studies, playmaking, and dramaturgy at the
Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. Both his primary areas of research and
his artistic practice focus on intermedial theatre/performance and physical
dramaturgies of the performing body.
He has published extensively in Canadian and International periodicals
and is the author of two books: Imagination in Transition: Mamet's Move to
Film (2005) and Marigraph (2004). His current research projects include a large
scale study on new play development in Canada and multiple, praxis-oriented
explorations of physically-based dramaturgies. He is also the editor of Theatre Research in Canada, the nation's primary scholarly journal on theatre and
performance studies. Barton is
also an award-winning playwright who works extensively as a dramaturge and
collaborator with physically-based theatrical devising companies. His stage
plays, which have been produced across Canada, include Still, Life (1993), Roswell (1998, 2001), and Taking Art (2004), and his nationally broadcast radio dramas include Gros
Morne Variations #3 (1998) and Two
Strangers (2003). His work has been celebrated (National
Playwriting Competition finalist, Merritt Award nomination) and published (New
Canadian Drama 8: Speculative Drama
from Borealis Press).
Pil Hansen recently completed her Ph.D. dissertation, Dramaturgy
and Perception: a developmental experiment in intersections between theory and
practice, at the University of
Copenhagen, where it was
identified as a highly original work of research. Hansen's field of
specialization involves connections between neuro-cognitive theory of
perception & memory and performance practice. Originally from Copenhagen
and now based in Toronto, Hansen's professional background is in the
production, touring, and dramaturgy of modern dance. She is presently freelancing in Canada and Scandinavia as a
dance dramaturg, workshop leader (reflection/devising & practice-based
research), scholarly consultant on methodological design, and teacher of
complex dramaturgy. In these functions she has recently been/is contracted by
the International Theatre Institute, Nordic Centre for the Performing Arts,
Nordic Summer University, University of Toronto, the Dramatic Institute in
Stockholm, and Publice Eye/Sara Gebran.
DD Kugler is a freelance director/dramaturg and, since 1998,
Associate Professor in the Theatre Area of School for the Contemporary Arts, at
Simon Fraser University, where he teaches directing, dramaturgy, playmaking,
and theatre history. His SFU
productions include Howard Barker's Seven Lears and The Possibilities, Michael
Hollingsworth's History of the Village of the Small Huts: Laurier, Charles Mee's Big Love, and Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.
During
eight seasons as Production Dramaturg with Toronto's Necessary Angel Theatre,
he adapted Marc Diamond's Property, and
(in collaboration with Artistic Director Richard Rose) co-authored Newhouse, as well as the adaptations of Michael Ondaatje's Coming
Through Slaughter, and Timothy
Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage. During five seasons as Artistic
Director of Edmonton's Northern Light Theatre, Kugler primarily developed and
directed new work by Canadians, such as: Tom Cone's True Mummy, Connie Gault's Otherwise Bob, Vern Thiessen's Blowfish, Padma Viswanathan's House of Sacred Cows, and Colleen Wagner's The Monument.
Since
moving to Vancouver, Kugler has collaborated as dramaturg in the development of
several premieres: Lucia Frangione's Espresso at Pacific Theatre, Linz Kenyon's Cowboy King and The I.O.U-Land at Caravan Farm Theatre, and four dance/theatre
productions with Battery Opera: Spektator, Cyclops,
Reptile-Diva, and [storm]. He served
as developmental dramaturg, and recently directed the premiere of Mansel
Robinson's Picking Up Chekhov at
Alberta Theatre Projects.
Kugler
served a two-year term (2000-02) as the first Canadian president of Literary
Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA).
A Tyranny of Documents II: The Return of the Theatre Historian as Film Noir Detective
Alan
Filewod, University of Guelph
Paula
Sperdakos, University of Toronto
Alexis
Butler, University of
Toronto
Moderator:
Stephen Johnson, University of Toronto
Premise of the
Panel--Microhistory:
The problems and pitfalls of writing
theatre history in the 21st century were usefully discussed by Tom Postlewait
in 'Writing History Today' (Theatre Survey Nov
2000); he suggests that practitioners of theatre history look closely at the
'microhistorical' direction in historical research, as particularly well-suited
to the discipline. Microhistory tends toward the micro-scopic examination
of the individual event and document, in an effort to tease out of minimum
evidence a complex set of relationships; in his phrase, this is history 'in the
Chekhovian mode.' More particularly, microhistory values what its
practitioners call the 'opaque document' or 'the exceptional normal'--in fact,
suggesting that the most irritating documents are the most valuable precisely
because they are 'opaque.' It is the joke we don't 'get' that exposes the
cracks in our own preconceptions of a society; our effort to understand it,
with any luck, enriches our understanding.
This is all well and good; but theatre
historians are particularly inclined by necessity to make much of little, and
there are dangers. The documentary evidence--in particular for such an
ephemeral art as theatre--can be so 'opaque' as to be incomprehensible, and the
patterns among them so apparently arbitrary that there can be no
resolution. Microhistory may favour the ironic-but-humanistic mode of
Chekhov, but in our darker moments in the archive, this gives way to Beckett,
and interpretation fails. If the historian is a detective, the model is,
sometimes, less Hercule Poirot than Mike Hammer in the film Kiss Me, Deadly--who
can't begin to realize the implications of the mystery he's trying to solve,
but who can't stop himself from following the clues.
See Postlewait's article for reference
(available on line). Also 'On Microhistory,' by Giovanni Levi, in New
Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Polity
91), 93-113; and the very useful 'Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know
About It,' by Carlo Ginzburg (Critical Inquiry 20:1 Autumn
93), 10-35 (available on line).
The call for papers expands on this
rationale. It is my wish to have a larger panel of shorter (10 or 15
minute, depending on numbers) papers, treating one document only, and framing
the historian as detective. I hope to be able to put together a mix of
academics early in their careers as well as seasoned veterans--though this
depends on response. I do not wish to restrict the call to Canadian
content. I will organize and moderate, offering only introductory remarks.
Women's Caucus Mentoring Roundtable
Moderators:
Louise Forsyth (Saskatchewan), Sherrill
Grace (UBC), Rosalind Kerr (Alberta), Alexis Butler
(Toronto).
At the ACTR meeting in 2006, members of
the Women's Caucus were unanimous in their recognition of the need for
mentoring for graduate students and junior colleagues, as well as of the need
to discuss the questions that need to be addressed and the processes by which
mentoring programs could be most effective. These needs are evident for both
women and men at early stages of their career. This round table will be led off
by four brief position papers on: What mentoring arrangements could best
support graduate students and junior colleagues? What mentoring arrangements do
senior colleagues see as most needed? What is the ACTR already doing to provide
support for graduate students and junior colleagues and what else could it be
doing? Format of the round table will encourage participation by everyone
attending.
Moderators: Louise Forsyth
(Saskatchewan – Emerita), Sherrill Grace (UBC), Rosalind Kerr (Alberta),
Alexis Butler (Toronto).
Alexis Butler is in the third year of
the PhD program at the University of Toronto's Graduate Centre for Study of
Drama. Also an actor and theatre educator, her research presently focuses on
the history and culture of burlesque in Toronto.
Louise H. Forsyth (University of Saskatchewan, Women's
and Gender Studies, French and Drama) is Professor emerita at the University of
Saskatchewan, where she taught and did research in Women's & Gender
Studies, Languages and Linguistics, and Drama. Her research is on women
playwrights and poets of QuŽbec, as well as on feminist theories of
theatricality. She has published articles and books on several QuŽbec writers
in English and in French and is currently preparing a three-volume anthology of
contemporary plays by francophone women in English translation to be published
2006-2007 by Playwrights Canada. She is a founding member of the ACTR/ ARTC
(formerly ACTH/ AHTC), of which she served as president, and from which she
received an award of lifetime achievement. Administrative positions held
include: Chair, Department of French (U. of Western Ontario), Dean, College of
Graduate Studies and Research (U. of Saskatchewan), and President, Humanities
and Social Sciences Federation of Canada/ FŽdŽration des sciences humaines du
Canada. She is currently a member of the editorial board of Theatre Research
in Canada and of the Advisory
Committee for the research project, "Equity in Canadian Theatre: The
Women's Initiative."
Sherrill Grace is professor of English
at UBC where she teaches Canadian literature. Her most recent book, co-edited with Jerry Wasserman, is Theatre
& AutoBiography (Talon, 2006), and her 2001 book Canada
and the Idea of North (McGill-Queens) is appearing in
paperbook in May 2007. She is
currently writing a biography of Sharon Pollock: Making Theatre: A Life of
Sharon Pollock.
Rosalind Kerr is Associate Professor of
Dramatic Theory in the Drama Department of the University of Alberta. Her 2
main research areas are the sixteenth-century commedia dell'arte actresses and
experimental and Queer Canadian Theatre. She has recently edited a volume, Lesbian
Plays: Coming of Age in Canada (Toronto: Playwrights'
Canada Press, 2006)and has anotheredited collection forthcoming on Queer
Theatre in Playwrights' Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English.
Chair of Women's Caucus, she is a long-time and enthusiastic member of ACTR.
Workshops
(Abstracts and Biographies)
Martina, Natasha
(Saskatchewan) The exploration of breath
within contemplative practices and how that manifests itself within an actor's
training
It seems within today's actor training
there seems to be a conflict between the views on contemplative practices. I
refer to such methods as Tai Chi, Yoga and Meditation. We often hear the
practitioner speak about the mind and body connecting as one but s/he rarely
gives insight into how an actor can achieve this symbiosis. In the past, I have
experienced individual hesitation over contemplative practice out of fear that
the actor will withdraw inwards and hence fail to connect the inner life to the
outer life: that the actor will be self obsessed with the inner workings of the
emotional life of the character forgetting to translate the work out to an
audience. Also, there is a belief that contemplative practice only reflects the
mental and physical manifestation of that particular individual, limiting the
actor's ability to experience something outside him/herself.
As
a movement practitioner, I believe that good actor training is based on a comprehension
of how an actor thinks, feels and moves as an individual prior to having the
capacity to layer on other physical or emotional qualities of a specific
character. Hence, my role as a pedagogue is to help the actor decipher between
fundamental and expressive movement, which is connected to a clear thought,
feeling and action. My definition of fundamental movement incorporates
alignment, strength, posture, awareness, receptivity and breath. While
expressive movement goes beyond the fundamentals linking the inner and outer
life connecting thought, feeling and action.
Part
of this work relies on training the actor to be comfortable with the power of
stillness and of listening to his/her inner tempo dictated by the beating of
his/her heart and rate at which he/she breathes. Through Yoga, Meditation and
Tai Chi, I take my students on a personal journey which has them analyze how
their breath affects their ability to sense not only within but three hundred
and sixty degrees around the body. This allows them to be perceptive not
only of their personal space but of the other actors with whom they share the
space and a connection.
Within
this workshop, I will explore methods of how to introduce motivated breath
within contemplative practices that express clear emotional and physical score.
I will reflect on the power of self-awareness and how our relationship to
breath translates a clear thought, feeling and action out to the audience. This
workshop will be practically based asking individuals to be equal participants
within this format.
I
will require a cleared space that can accommodate 20 people, which should be
the maximum number of participants. I invite individuals to audit the workshop,
limiting the number to 10 people.
Natasha Martina is an Assistant
Professor at the University of Saskatchewan where she teaches movement for
actors and acting. Previously, Natasha was Head of Movement at The London
Centre of Theatre Studies. In
addition, she taught at Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford
College and East 15 Acting School, all located in London, UK. Also, Natasha free-lances as a Movement
Director, and is currently working on a new devised project for the summer of
2008. As a performer, Natasha has
worked for over ten years with various theatre companies across the United
States and Canada. Some of her favorite roles include: Rosella Stoley, The
Neighbor's Wife (Unspun Theatre, Dora Award for best
new play 2005), Eva in Kindertransport
(Center Stage, Seattle, WA and The Invisible Theatre, Tucson, AZ), Isabella in Edward II and young
Elizabeth in Richard III (The California Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley, CA).
Her other professional credits include television, voice-overs, and motion
capture work.
Education & Studies MA in Movement
Studies – Central School of Speech and Drama – London, UK BFA in
Acting – Cornish College of the Arts – Seattle, WA
Walsh, Lionel. (Windsor) Introduction
to Michael Chekhov Acting Technique
Participants will be introduced to the
basic techniques developed by Russian actor/director Michael Chekhov, who
rejected Stanislavski's highly personal approach to acting in favour of a
psycho-physical pathway for the actor, in which the body and psychology are in
constant interplay. The exercises
which will be explored are designed to excite the imagination, giving rise to
images and sensations which incite action and inspire the actor in the creation
of character. Exercises will
include Staccato/Legato, Qualities of Movement, Imaginary Body, and
Centres. Participants should wear
comfortable clothing which permits freedom of movement. Number of participants
limited to 25. Observers welcome.
Lionel Walsh is the Director of the
School of Dramatic Art at the University of Windsor, where he teaches acting,
improvisation, and character study.
He received his certificate as a Master Teacher of Chekhov Technique
from the Michael Chekhov Association in 2002, and has conducted workshops at
universities and conferences in Canada, the United States, and Great
Britain. He is a member of CAEA,
the Michael Chekhov Association, and ACTR. As an actor and director, he is particularly interested in
experimenting with the use of Michael Chekhov Technique to inject an element of
theatricality into the vision and performance of the play. He is Vice-President of Awards for the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education, President of the Council of
Ontario University/College Theatre Programmes, and is a recipient of the
University of Windsor Alumni Association Mentorship Award.
Heimbecker,
Donna. (SNTC) Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company Workshop/Lecture
on Aboriginal Youth Theatre.
Donna Heimbecker is the founding general manager of the
Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company (SNTC). Donna works collaboratively with professional
artists and cultural leaders in developing innovative Aboriginal cultural/arts
programming, that improves the quality of life of 'youth with potential',
artists and communities. Donna has been instrumental in moving SNTC's vision
and commitment forward through a Community Economic Development Strategy that
includes an extensive infrastructure and program expansion. Donna's efforts
support in filling a void in Aboriginal cultural/arts programming and service
provision across the nation.
Guest Speakers
(Abstracts and Biographies)
West-words into the 21st Century: Assessing
Western Canadian Playwriting at the Millennium: past developments, present
challenges, future directions
Link to the West-words conference site here.
Keynote Speakers:
Don
Kerr (Saskatchewan)
Mieko
Ouchi (Alberta)
Bruce
McManus (Manitoba)
Don Kerr is the author of five books of
poetry, seven plays, a short fiction collection, a teen fiction novel, and
non-fiction books on politics and the history of the city of Saskatoon. He
served on the Saskatoon Public Library Board for 11 years, and as chair for
five of those years. He was the first chair of the Saskatoon Heritage Society
and the first chair of the Saskatoon Municipal Heritage Committee. He is
currently the elected Saskatchewan governor for the Heritage Canada Foundation.
Mieko Ouchi Actor, writer, director and filmmaker,
Mieko Ouchi received her training through the University of Alberta BFA Acting
Program, Banff's Women in the Director's Chair Program and the National Screen
Institute. Film/television work includes roles in the series pilot The
Orange Seed Myth and Other Lies Mothers Tell (1998
AMPIA nom for Lead Performance Female), A People's History of Canada and
the lead in Anne Wheeler's The War Between Us (Atlantis/CBC)
among others. Besides free-lance writing and directing for two series on the
Life Network, she has written and directed the award-winning documentaries Minor
Keys (NFB/CBC's The Nature of Things) and Shepherd's
Pie and Sushi (NFB), as well as the multi
award-winning shorts By This Parting and Samurai
Swing. Her films have screened at over thirty
film festivals across North America, Europe and the U.S.
Mieko's first full-length play The Red Priest (Eight Ways To Say Goodbye) premiered
at ATP in 2003, and has had subsequent productions at Workshop West, The Globe,
The Tarragon and the Thousand Islands Playhouse. Published by Playwrights
Canada Press, it has been translated into Japanese and was a finalist for the
Governor General's Award for Drama in 2004 and the winner of the Canadian
Authors Association Carol Bolt Prize in 2005. Her second play The Blue
Light, about notorious Nazi filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl, premiered at ATP in 2006 and has had subsequent productions at
Workshop West and The Firehall Arts Centre. The Blue Light is
being published by Playwrights Canada Press and is being translated into
Japanese and Russian this year, and will be read at the Chekhov International
Theatre Festival in Moscow in the summer of 2007. This season, her
translation of Parisian playwright Mohamed Rouabhi's TYA play Jeremy Fisher, a
commission from the Banff Centre premiered at Concrete Theatre, and her newest
full-length play, The Dada Play, a commission for the Red
Deer College Theatre Arts Program also premiered on their main-stage.
Mieko is the Co-Artistic Director of Concrete Theatre and the president of the
Edmonton International Film Festival. In 2003, she received the Queen's Golden
Jubilee Medal for her work in the arts community of the City of Edmonton.
Bruce McManus has worked exclusively as
a playwright, Artistic Director and teacher of theatre for the past fifteen
years. He is the author of twenty plays including The Chinese Man Said
Goodbye, Ordinary Days, Schedules, Calenture, and Selkirk
Avenue, which was nominated for a Governor
General's Award for Drama in 1998 and has been produced in both Canada and the
States. Adaptations for the stage include Three Sisters and A
Doll's House produced at Prairie Theatre Exchange
in 1998 and A Christmas Carol produced at MTC in 2005.
His newest work, All Restaurant Fires are Arson, is
scheduled for production at Prairie Theatre Exchange in the 2007-08
season. An extremely active member
of the Manitoba arts community since 1981, he has also written for radio and
film. He served as Artistic Director of Theatre Projects Manitoba, a
professional company devoted to developing and producing new work by Manitoba
playwrights (1995-2000), was a
founding member of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, regularly works as
a dramaturge and mentor to many
established and developing playwrights and continues to work closely with the
school, community, university and professional theatre in Winnipeg . He has
been playwright in residence at various time at MTC, PTE, the University of
Winnipeg and the Manitoba Association of Playwrights.
Remembering Mavor Moore
Allan
Boss (CBC Alberta, U of C)
A.G. (Allan) Boss is the Entertainment & Drama
Producer for CBC Radio in Alberta.
He recently produced and directed the radioplays An Eye For An Eye and Conversations with my Neighbor's Pitbull for
CBC's Sunday Showcase. His
CBC IDEAS program updrafts, the dramatized examination of a person's recovery
from a brain injury, was nominated for a 2004 Peabody Award, a New York
Festivals Award, a Gabriel Award and a Prix Italia. In 2004 Boss commissioned
and co-produced, with One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre, the radioplay Andrew
Allan's Chair for CBC's Sunday
Showcase. Boss 's satire and drama has been featured on CBC radio programs in
Alberta and across the country on such shows as Friday Scrum, The Current,
Sunday Showcase, and Sounds Like Canada. Boss produces Alberta's premier
writing contest, Alberta Anthology, for the CBC; the Alberta Anthology 2006
book, published by Frontenac House, is presently on store shelves.
Boss has a Ph.D. in Canadian Theatre History from the
University of Calgary. He has an
M.F.A. in Film Production (Screenwriting Specialization) from Concordia University
in Montreal and a B.F.A. in Creative Writing (Drama Specialization) from the
University of Victoria. He is an active member of the Alberta Playwrights
Network and the Playwrights Guild of Canada. His produced stageplays include The
Chair, My Burning Bush, and Curves
in the Road. His latest stageplay, Swimming
with Goldfish, dramaturged by
Governor General's Award recipient Vern Thiessen, was commissioned by
Edmonton's Walterdale Theatre last November and had a workshop production there
in May, 2006 and a second workshop production (Jagged North Productions) in
Calgary in September. Most
recently he has been commissioned to write the play Harriet's Halloween for
Quest Theatre.
Roundtable
on Aboriginal Playwriting in Saskatchewan
Keynote Speakers:
Mark
Dieter
Ken
Williams
Maria
Campbell
Moderator: Alan Long (Saskatchewan)
Kenneth T. Williams is the first
Aboriginal person to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting from the
University of Alberta. From 2000 to 2006 he worked as the Toronto, Ottawa and
Saskatchewan correspondents for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network's
national news show. In 1997, his play Project 7 was workshopped at Native Earth
Performing Arts (NEPA) Weesageechak Begins to Dance Festival of new plays and
playwrights. In 2000, NEPA workshopped Thunderstick.
Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company (SNTC) produced Thunderstick in 2001, which
was his first professional theatre production. Thunderstick was
also produced by Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. His next play for SNTC was
A.W.O.L. Aboriginals Without Official Leave, which
was produced in 2003 through the Circle of Voices program. His next play, Suicide
Notes, was produced by FuSha Theatre at
Toronto at its 2004 Summerworks Theatre Festival. Kenneth's newest play, A
Box for Bones, was workshopped at Factory Theatre's
cross currents festival in 2005 and again at SNTC in 2006. It will also be
featured at this year's SpringFest in Saskatoon in May, with SNTC producing it in
October. In 2007, Kenneth was named as one of four writers-in-residence for
SaskFilm. He is also working on the long-awaited sequel to Thunderstick and
another play plus a feature film script.