{"title":"Verbatim Voices: An Investigation of Housing and Development in Kingston","authors":"Dylan Chenier","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Verbatim theatre is a sub-genre of the documentary theatre movement committed to authentic representations of ordinary people and events. As such, it has become a popular tool for Canadian theatre artists to examine contemporary political issues by presenting a plurality of perspectives on the same issue. Through the creation of an original verbatim play on housing in Kingston, I hope to test the effectiveness of verbatim in shaping people’s understanding of Kingston’s current housing crisis. By showcasing the perspectives of a diverse range of citizens, this play will consider the toll the housing crisis is taking on different people. This article examines the ways verbatim is especially well poised to represent Kingston’s housing crisis.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"68 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47036174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When the Crow Caws: Performance and the Relational Politics of Hospitality in Hurmat Ain and Rabbya Naseer’s Art Practice","authors":"Laura Levin","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the complex meditation on domestic environments as relational spaces in Hurmat Ain and Rabbya Naseer’s solo and collaborative art practices. Often rooted in physical sites and material elements of domesticity—from live performances in bedrooms and kitchens to installations with textiles and food—their works orchestrate intimate situations where the meeting of performer and spectator doubles as an encounter between visitor and inhabitant, citizen and foreigner, guest and host. In doing so, the artists reveal how practices of hospitality—the everyday rituals through which ‘home’ is enacted and extended to others—serve to uphold cultural, patriarchal, and nationalist values, while simultaneously opening up space for their transformation.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"54 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41288108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sounds of Rebellion: A Radionovela by and for Migrant Domestic Workers","authors":"M. Célleri","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When the world went into lockdown in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic sensitized people to how power dynamics and access to capital play a role in how we access housing and experience being at home. This article focuses on the creative ways that migrant domestic workers are negotiating their relationships with the houses in which they live and work in the context of economic, social, and physical vulnerability and deep-seated inequalities. It introduces the work of a Madrid-based migrant women’s collective of domestic workers, most of whom are migrant women from Latin America and the Caribbean, called Territorio Doméstico. The article focuses on their latest performance project, the radionovela Querían brazos y llegamos personas, an eight-episode audio soap opera released in November 2020 over SoundCloud and later adapted for a stage performance. Written and performed by domestic workers during COVID-19, Querían brazos y llegamos personas is an important cultural product that demonstrates the connections between home and power, home and migration, and home and gendered labour politics.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"62 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48403581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On How to Live Well: Houses as Theatres of the Good Life in Mexico City","authors":"Sunita Nigam","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, the author explores the contours of housing as performance by examining a sampling of cases drawn from mid-twentieth-century Mexico City. In her analysis of the erection of modernist middle-class housing projects, suburbs, and architectural sculptures against the informal housing system that expanded throughout the national capital from the 1950s through the 1980s, the author reads housing as shifting performances of race, nation, citizenship, capitalist development, and class aspiration. Together, these readings reveal how houses are more than shelters; they are also theatrical practices that offer competing visions of ‘the good life.’","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"25 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46007889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pam Hall as House: A Conversation","authors":"H. Ain, Pam Hall","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This conversation between artists Pam Hall and Hurmat Ain, which took place in December 2021, is framed within a ‘house’ as a metaphor and a verb, in response to Pam Hall’s work. Hall’s practice is a way of life and houses many lives within itself. The following conversation gives insight into Pam Hall’s practice around women’s labour, everyday life, domesticity, and performance of living. It would not be possible to speak of Hall’s many years of artistic production in a few hours, yet this interview is an attempt to capture a fraction of that vast practice, or prayer, as Hall often refers to it. The reader is being invited on a walk with Hall through an imagined house, in the hope that this exercise provides context for witnessing a specific stream of her works and thoughts around performing house/housing.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"46 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44588689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Blink of an Eye","authors":"Hannah Foulger, Tanner Mason, Ben Townsley","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Hannah Foulger talks with Ben Townsley and Tanner Mason about their production Blink, written by Townsley, which is a guided meditation and radio play, initially produced in September 2020. Mason and Townsley discuss creating in-person work during the pandemic that translates to an at-home, personal experience in podcast form. Mason notes, “We produced the show in a very, very special nugget of time.… We had the necessity of keeping people safe, but in a creative way.”","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"103 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43735263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"HGTV’s House Hunters and the Right to Coziness","authors":"S. Fraiman","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the complex appeal of home-buying and renovation shows on the cable channel HGTV. While their popularity is clear, their political implications are murkier. Some media studies scholars accuse the genre of fostering consumerism, conformity, and neo-liberal nationhood. Others admire its inclusion and “non-special treatment” of queer and racially diverse participants. My own feminist reading notes the limits as well as merits of the diversity defense and offers to appreciate the shows’ contribution in somewhat different terms. Focusing specifically on House Hunters (1999–present), I credit this home-buying series with asserting the primacy of domestic life in conjunction with a host of related values conventionally coded and subordinated as ‘feminine.’ In the hegemonic scheme of things, qualities coded as ‘masculine’ (the aggressive, historic, large-scale, public-sphere, self-reliant, and individualist) occupy a superior position. House Hunters challenges this gendered hierarchy by reveling in the modest, everyday, small-scale, private-sphere, interdependent, and relational. It does so, moreover, in a gender-neutral way: no longer written off and relegated to women, the little things that happen in houses are made paramount for male and female viewers alike. Adding a further twist, I close with an episode whose homebuyers have histories of social marginality and economic insecurity. In this context, the desire for domestic ‘coziness’ is less about conformity to bourgeois norms and more about feelings of safety and belonging in relation to place.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"20 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48521764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When in Quarantine: Bringing Theatre Home with Boca del Lupo","authors":"Graeme McClelland","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Sherry J. Yoon and Jay Dodge of Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo Theatre sit down to discuss the process and creation of Plays2Perform@Home, an anthology of plays that won the 2021 Canadian Association for Theatre Research Patrick O’Neill Award. In a separate interview, one of the contributing playwrights, Santiago Guzmán, discusses his play Mona, Lisa and reflects on how his artistic practice has shifted and grown through the pandemic. All three artists meditate on what it has meant to create theatre during the pandemic and offer hopes and projections on the future of performance as audiences begin returning to theatres.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"100 - 102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46748369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing at Home in the Pandemic: Boca del Lupo’s Plays2Perform@Home Collection","authors":"Signy Lynch","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores Vancouver theatre company Boca del Lupo’s Plays2Perform@Home collection. Generated as a way for audiences to bring the theatre home with them during the pandemic, the collection is composed of twenty short plays across five regional box sets, and was commissioned by Boca del Lupo in partnership with several other theatre companies across Canada. The author offers some observations and personal highlights from the collection, and reflects on what it means to perform these plays at home. She complements her analysis of the plays by drawing on her own experiences performing some of the pieces at home with her family, re-creating the intended experience of the collection. Because of the unusual circumstances of their production, Lynch suggests that it is valuable to examine the Plays2Perform@Home pieces through an immersive and site-specific lens, rather than a purely dramatic one. She argues that the plays that succeed the most in performance are those that seriously consider the experience of their audience-performers and incorporate the expected conditions of performance into their dramatic works. The article also includes a full listing of the plays in each box set.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"191 1","pages":"82 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44449742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}