{"title":"Introduction: Festivals","authors":"R. Knowles","doi":"10.3138/tric.40.1_2.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.40.1_2.1","url":null,"abstract":"In Canada, as elsewhere, “the festivalization of culture” proceeds apace (Bennett et al). Even setting aside the ubiquitous music, film, and cultural festivals that have sprung up like mushrooms—not to mention mushroom festivals themselves (such as the “Fungus Among Us” Festival in Whistler, B.C.)—from the Sound Symposium in St. John’s to the Victoria Fringe Festival, and from the Island Unplugged festival on Pelee Island (Canada’s southernmost point) to the Alianait Arts Festival in Iqaluit, Nunavut, festivals dot the theatre and performance landscape in the land now called Canada. Across the country they turn small towns into tourist destinations and urban centres into “festival cities” (see Johannson, Thomasson). In editing the Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals I compiled a list of over forty international theatre, performance, and multi-arts festivals in Canada, a list that does not include music or sound, circus or visual arts festivals, nor does it include the various Shakespeare festivals (from the “Shakespeare by the Sea” festivals on the east coast to Bard on the Beach in BC), the big repertory seasons at Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake, or the many festivals such as the peripatetic Magnetic North that have no international component. In addition to all of these, there are twenty-one Canadian members of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (along with nine U.S.-based members), not including other “rogue” fringes.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87185193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Irena R. Makaryk and Kathryn Prince, eds., Shakespeare in Canada: Remembrance of Ourselves","authors":"Wes D. Pearce","doi":"10.3138/TRIC.40.1_2.175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/TRIC.40.1_2.175","url":null,"abstract":"As noted in the introduction, “[t]his collection is the final fruit of a [University of Ottawa] project marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death,” (11) and this collection of essays was primarily drawn from the Shakespeare + Canada symposium held at the University of Ottawa in April 2016. It is not surprising that the essays within, approach and situate both Shakespeare AND Canada from a wide range of disciplines, critical lenses, and theoretical positions. While the organizational structure is not always clear, Shakespeare in Canada is an approachable and engaging collection that demonstrates the deep connections between Canada and the Bard of Avon.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"16 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85069028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ecology and Site-specificity in Festival Production: A Conversation with Laura Nanni","authors":"Laura Levin","doi":"10.3138/TRIC.40.1_2.135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/TRIC.40.1_2.135","url":null,"abstract":"Laura Levin: In theatre and performance studies, we spend a lot of time talking about the artists who are featured in festivals, but much less time thinking about the curation of festivals as itself an important form of artistry. This means that we miss the important background work that curators and producers do.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"83 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77946224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Art for Everyone? Mush, Multiculturalism, and the Prismatic Arts Festival","authors":"Brittany Kraus","doi":"10.3138/tric.40.1_2.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.40.1_2.42","url":null,"abstract":"Founded in 2008 by Shahin Sayadi and Maggie Stewart, the Prismatic Arts Festival is a Halifax-based multidisciplinary arts festival that features the work of Indigenous and culturally diverse artists. This article examines the development of the Prismatic Arts Festival and the ways in which the festival has sought to negotiate, challenge, and transform Halifax’s artistic landscape by creating a model that is locally-grounded, nationally-networked, and fundamentally devoted to advancing the careers and profiles of Indigenous and culturally diverse artists in Nova Scotia and across Canada both within and outside of mainstream performance cultures. As the festival recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, this article traces the history of the Prismatic Arts Festival, its struggles and successes, and the complex negotiations the festival has made and continues to make in order to move toward a future of Canadian theatre in which cultural diversity and inclusivity are the norm, rather than the exception.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75123030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Knowledge/Playing Culture: Theatre Festivals as Sites of Experiential Learning","authors":"A. Budde, Sebastian X Samur","doi":"10.3138/tric.40.1_2.83","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.40.1_2.83","url":null,"abstract":"(A project of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto) This article discusses the 2017 festival-based undergraduate course, “Theatre Criticism and Festival Dramaturgy in the Digital Age in the Context of Globalization—A Cultural-Comparative Approach” as a platform for experiential learning. The course, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and based on principles of our Digital Dramaturgy Lab, invited a small group of undergraduate students to critically investigate two festivals—the Toronto Fringe Festival and the Festival d’Avignon—in order to engage as festival observers in criticism and analysis of both individual performances and festival programming/event dramaturgy.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73888461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Roots, Routes, RUTAS","authors":"Natalie Alvarez","doi":"10.7202/1068256ar","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1068256ar","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, author Natalie Alvarez examines how the Caminos and RUTAS festivals of Toronto’s Aluna Theatre harness the interactional, mass gathering of the festival and its high visibility to form a theatrical commons grounded in a heterogeneous and intercultural Americas, one that includes Latin American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbean artists that have historically been excluded both from the Eurocentric vision of “Latin America” and Canadian performance histories. With a producing mandate to foster Canadian-hemispheric cultural exchanges, Beatriz Pizano’s and Trevor Schwellnus’s curatorial practices aim to generate alternate genealogical routes of Canadian performance history for a new generation of artists to travel. The performance routes of these festivals speak to the critical role festivals can play in directing—and redirecting—transnational flows of knowledge and artistic production. But Pizano and Schwellnus’s curatorial aims are also driven by an interest in how festivals like RUTAS and Caminos can generate a structural shift in the kinds of artistic traditions that are sustained on Toronto’s stages and the ways in which they are sustained by fostering hemispheric collaborations and co-productions. The RUTAS and Caminos festivals demonstrate very powerfully the work that a theatrical commons can do to advance alternative producing structures and transnational coalitional politics.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73431981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transformational Kinstellatory Relations and the Talking Stick Festival","authors":"Lindsay Lachance, Selena Couture","doi":"10.7202/1068255ar","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1068255ar","url":null,"abstract":"This article charts the development of, and connections created through, the Vancouver-based Talking Stick Festival to inform how performance- making and gathering over shared interests can maintain artistic relationships and nurture respectful intercultural relations. We demonstrate this through genealogically connecting the Talking Stick Festival to the 1997 Festival of the Dreaming in Sydney Australia linking this theoretically to Indigenous ideas of transformational love, “grounded normativity” and kin relations that cross earthly boundaries. We examine the strategic ways that the annual festival builds networks of communication, including movement around territories, and the valuing of flexibility to honour accountability. And, of immense value to the rebuilding of broken kinship networks is the love and support for emergent artists as well as staff and volunteers who are mentored in the ever-expanding and continuous building of relations. We write explicitly from our own positions and discuss how we, the co-authors of this piece, have ourselves been transformed through interactions with the festival as a way to show how this kind of relationship building can create a shared future. We conclude that the organizers of the Talking Stick Festival create spaces that centre Indigenous resurgence through personal experiences of transformation and kinstellatory relations of co-resistance.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91181711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jacqueline Petropoulos, ed., Linda Griffiths, New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 9","authors":"Tonya Rae Chrystian","doi":"10.3138/tric.40.1_2.166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.40.1_2.166","url":null,"abstract":"The ninth volume in the New Essays on Canadian Theatre series is the first ever essay collection to give scholarly attention to the heterogenous works of the late Linda Pauline Griffiths, a collection long overdue in the critical records of Canadian theatre. Published in 2018 by Playwrights Canada Press, this volume is edited by Jacqueline Petropoulos and fills a critical gap by bringing together eleven myriad contributors from the Canadian academic and theatrical community, some of whom knew Ms. Griffiths personally, celebrating her theatrical legacy.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"23 10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80160489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peter Dickinson, C.E. Gatchalian, Kathleen Oliver, and Dalbir Singh, eds., Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Volume 8","authors":"X. Publius","doi":"10.3138/tric.40.1_2.177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.40.1_2.177","url":null,"abstract":"I begin my review in the same way Evalyn Parry begins the essay “Re: Form: (An Informal Set List of Considerations)” in this volume for two reasons. The first is because it’s equally true of this project, having never written a formal book review before and balking at the idea of writing this in anything but my queer tongue. The second is that this sentence fragment distills the productive fragmentation pervading this volume. A perusal of the essay titles demonstrates a community, or collection of communities, coming to terms with the tensions and struggles both within the myriad positionalities under the queer umbrella and between these and the larger cisheteropatriarchal Canada: “Constituting Community” (Stephen Low); “Queer Insularity” (Sean Metzger); “Proudly Welcoming” (Laine Zisman Newman); “Divisions Within” (T. Berto); “Productive Contrary” (Spy Dénommé-Welch).","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80216956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spirituality in Actor Training","authors":"James L. Forsythe","doi":"10.7202/1062396AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1062396AR","url":null,"abstract":"Elements of the spiritual practices of other cultures, specifically Taoism and Zen Buddhism, are employed in 'Western' conservatory acting schools. This article will examine the context of the relationship between spirituality and actor training using examples from the techniques of specific teachers working in the field.\u0000 Certains elements des pratiques spirituelles issues d'autres cultures, particulierement le Taoisme et le Boudhisme Zen, sont utilises dans les Conservatoires de theâtre «occidentaux». Cet article etudie le contexte des rapports entre la spiritualite et la formation d'acteur en s'appuyant sur l'exemple des approches de quelques professeurs qui travaillent dans ce domaine.","PeriodicalId":53669,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Theatrales au Canada","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73544576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}