Sarah Ferguson: Feminist Canadian Women Directors(’) Take on Tradition

My presentation addresses the lack of scholarship on feminist Canadian women directors, looking at their work involving texts of the Western theatrical canon. Canonical texts set the bar for excellence and for social and cultural acceptance. That these definitions have been carved out from almost exclusively men’s work has certainly skewed artistic and cultural appreciation in our country. I am in the process of interviewing several Canadian women directors who define themselves as feminists to explore how they have used the uniqueness of performance to challenge social structures within canonical texts that through their constant repetition may have acted as tools that normalize those social structures. My presentation will be the distillation of my in-depth interviews, speaking to common themes within each woman’s work or to the breadth of individual explorations that are being done by Canadians. Either way, these results may provide a window onto how theory in praxis may impact social and cultural constructs as well as push accepted artistic boundaries.