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New issue is now available online!
Canadian Theatre Review
Volume 174, Spring 2018
Commemoration
CTR Online: http://bit.ly/ctrv174
Features
The Relentless Struggle for Commemoration
Selena Couture , Heather Davis-Fisch
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Where Water Meets Land: Water’s Time and Place’s Thought in Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain
Commemorations, by their definition, assume a truth about beginnings and endings. Through an assumption of singular national remembering, Canada’s celebration of its 150-year anniversary marks a symbolic violence against First Nation’s sovereignty and the effects of settler colonialism.
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Forgetting Asian Canadian Experimental Performance: Haruko Okano and Fred Wah’s High(bridi)Tea
In this article, I argue that High(bridi)Tea issues an important challenge to the developmental narratives of both dominant and “marginal” accounts of Canadian history and memory, including a still-formulating, pan-ethnic “Asian Canadian” history and memory that has been in the process of unfolding since the late 1960s. Developed and presented at the turn of the twenty-first century, after the federal government’s 1988 apology for Japanese Canadian internment but before apologies for restricting, and then eventually barring, Chinese immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1947, High(bridi)Tea recalls the painful multigenerational effects of national exclusion and internment on Chinese and Japanese Canadian subjects during the first half of the twentieth century.
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Stitch-by-Stitch: An Unsettling Labour of Re-inscription
On Canada Day 2017, author Helene Vosters hosted a Stitch-by-Stitch Unsettling Canada 150 sewing circle and picnic. Despite intermittent thundershowers, with umbrellas and soggy red thread in hand, a group of twenty to thirty intrepid stitchers embroidered text from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) 94 Calls to Action onto Canadian flags. By the time Canada 150 reached its Canada Day zenith, Vosters asserts, it had already become increasingly apparent that the story of a beneficent Canadian nation committed to equity and multicultural inclusivity that the celebrations sought to engender had been significantly eclipsed in mainstream and social media by critiques of the sesquicentennial’s ahistorical premise and its disregard for the ongoing violent effects of settler-colonialism.
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oh-oh Canada: Sweet Treats for Unsettling Futures
This photo essay offers a brief introduction to the hybrid curatorial/collaborative project oh-oh Canada, which I launched in Ottawa on Canada Day, 2016, as a performance art action at Parliament Hill. oh-oh Canada alludes to the way Canadians enthusiastically consume a set of narratives that characterize the nation as “peaceful, welcoming, and benevolent; a country built through diplomacy” and asks that we/they consider what is missing from these accounts. It does so through the free distribution of a line of “unsettled” maple sugar candies created by artists Adrian Stimson, Cecily Nicolson, Lisa Myers, Peter Morin, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, David Garneau, Michael Farnan, and myself.
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Memory, Milestones, and Monuments: A Peripatetic Exploration of the West Side of UBC Campus
Kelsey Blair , Sandra Chamberlain-Snider , Katrina Dunn , Julia Henderson
Reflexive walking practices have gained increased attention as creative and analytic tools in recent years. This article documents a performative event in this vein that occurred in April 2016 at the University of British Columbia as part of the West Coast’s annual Tri-University Graduate Colloquium in Theatre and Performance Research. The hour-long Amble explored a portion of the host campus reflecting on the Colloquium theme, “Milestones and Commemoration.” Presenters staged interventions at select sites as provocations to consider how institutions such as universities focus and direct complex layers of cultural memory and amnesia, forms of diverse representation (or lack thereof), and eruptions of collegiate performance and performativity.
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Negotiating Multiple Narrative Authorities at Eve of Confederation
This article explores the complex relationships between commemoration, history, and financial sponsorship and the resulting representations in our national historical narratives. Upper Canada Village’s Eve of Confederation, written to mark Canada’s sesquicentennial, is ostensibly a love story set in a small town in Confederation-era Ontario. However, a closer look reveals an intricate alliance of stakeholders—governmental, historical, and financial—that influenced the dramaturgy, performance mode, and content of the play. The article examines the play as an example of how the genre of historical performance combined with material conditions that dictate a creative process can appear to subvert, but ultimately reinforce, structures of authority.
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Canada Day/Memorial Day
In Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada Day is also Memorial Day. On the morning of 1 July 1916, the Newfoundland Regiment made its tragic advance on Beaumont-Hamel, as part of the Somme offensive. 1 July 2016 was the 100th anniversary of this horrible event and was marked by Princess Anne’s visit and the world premiere of Ours, an opera about Beaumont-Hamel by librettist Robert Chafe and composer John Estacio. The next year, Canada’s 150th anniversary, was marked by a morning of mourning for the regiment and then joining the rest of Canada in birthday celebrations and the opening of Dedication, a play by Ed Riche about the establishment of the war memorial in St. John’s. Throughout all, 1 July remains a day of death and a day of birth.
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A Confederation Minstrel Show: The Centennial Play of 1967
In a case study of The Centennial Play, commissioned in 1967 as a showcase the Centennial of Confederation, this article examines the problem of a commemorative performance that has no content or ideological function other than the exercise of power. The play was intended to be distributed free to amateur theatres across the country to spark a national, but after a humiliating and acrimonious premiere at the Ottawa Little Theatre, it was never performed again. This discussion of the play examines the reasons for its failure and argues that they derive from the racial and political hubris of a cultural elite that was blind to the vast changes underway across Canadian society. In the end, The Centennial Play flopped because it expressed nothing but the inability of a passing elite to cohere effectively enough to produce a monument to its own diminishing cultural power.
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The Spectre of Louis Riel: Opera, Archive, and the Silent Witness
“The Spectre of Louis Riel: Opera, Archive, and the Silent Witness” is a critical review of the Canadian Opera Company’s (COC) 2017 revival of Mavor Moore and Harry Somers’s 1967 production Louis Riel. The essay considers director Peter Hinton’s prompt for audiences to “question why we need to keep re-telling our history” by further questioning the COC’s use of Louis Riel as its subject when commemorating Canada and its use of the production’s original colonial structure in an attempt to demonstrate the concept of reconciliation.
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Homage to Joy Coghill
Joy Coghill was the Artistic Director of the Vancouver Playhouse when it produced The Ecstasy of Rita Joe in November 1967. And Joy was still the AD for a little while longer when Rita Joeopened the National Arts Centre in June 1969. Everything about those statements is revolutionary. Coghill was the first woman to be in charge of a major Canadian theatre. The new AD made a very brave decision by producing such a “problem” play. Further, Ryga’s play is recognized now as the script that proved “Canadian theatre” was not an oxymoron. Plus, Rita Joe spoke of hitherto unspoken, unrecognized themes by the dominant cultures: the Canada that systematically kills/steals the bodies and souls of Aboriginal peoples, women in particular.
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Braids of a River: Memory and Performance in the North
“Braids of a River: Memory and Performance in the North” charts the creative process of Gwaandak Theatre’s Map of the Land, Map of the Stars. This article dives into the rehearsal process and methodology of creation that connected the creators of the piece to the land and its hidden stories. The process is the thread that connects Indigenous theatre to reclaiming world-views and openly acknowledging cultural inheritance as well as drawing out stories and memory that are counter to sanctioned Canadian identity.
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Script
Map of the Land, Map of the Stars
Christine Clarke , Geneviève Doyon , Patti Flather , Andrameda Hunter , Leonard Linklater ,Yvette Nolan , Michelle Olson , Aimée Dawn Robinson
Before the highways, Yukon peoples freely travelled the rivers and trails, guided by the stars and their knowledge of the land. The play is about searching for our stories, gathering them, honouring them. It celebrates people’s deep connections between the land and the sky, which go back thousands of years for Yukon First Nations—the Indigenous people who lived here first. This play happens in many times and places. The audience time-travels back and forth with the seven performers to hear stories, songs, and dances from different times and people.
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For a full list of Views and Reviews, please visit: http://bit.ly/ctrv174
The major magazine of record for Canadian theatre, Canadian Theatre Review serves as a platform for discussion for a wide spectrum of the theatre community—performers, directors, designers, professionals, academics, teachers, critics, and theatregoers. CTR introduces new artists, publishes a significant new script in each issue, features unique photos and videos of productions, and provides a forum for the national discussion of new directions in theatre and performance. CTR compiles theme issues that present multifaceted examinations of a range of topics, an approach that supports its ongoing search for writers from historically marginalized communities. Well respected in Canada and internationally, CTR is committed to excellence in the critical analysis and innovative coverage of current developments.
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