Thirty-five critics provide a unique overview of the contemporary performing arts and their cultural and economic impact in French and English Canada, in a province-by-province assessment of playwrighting, theatre production, opera and dance, radio and TV drama. Over 70 production photographs and an extensive bibliography and index make this one of the most important books on Canadian theatre in the last decade.
Thirty-five critics provide a unique overview of the contemporary performing arts and their cultural and economic impact in French and English Canada, in a province-by-province assessment of playwrighting, theatre production, opera and dance, radio and TV drama. Over 70 production photographs and an extensive bibliography and index make this one of the most important books on Canadian theatre in the last decade.
A companion anthology to Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance, the work contained in this volume provides a snapshot of Canadian contemporary queer performance practices--from solo performance to political allegory to family melodrama to intersectional narratives that combine text, movement, and music.
In Performing Autobiography, Jenn Stephenson presents an innovative new approach to autobiography studies that links the growing field of research to drama. Stephenson’s analysis engages with performance histories to demonstrate the extent to which the dramatic form, which recasts autobiography as ambiguously fictive, ensures that the experience of the plays remains open to revision, alteration, and interpretation. As such, Performing Autobiography understands this form not to be the impossible documentation of the backward-looking narrative of one’s life, but rather an evolving process of self-creation and transformation. Stephenson explores the autobiographical form by analysing seven works by Canadian playwrights written and performed between 1999 and 2009, including Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie, Daniel MacIvor’s In On It, and Timothy Findley’s Shadows. Her analysis encourages us to see autobiography as a uniquely political act, one that, where enacted on stage, illustrates the variety of ways that self-reflection and interpretation has an expanding role in contemporary culture.
In light of Canada's changing demographics and cultural fragmentation, fifteen essayists cover such issues as queer culture, feminist perspectives, Native and Asian theatre, regionalism and cultural immediacy in contemporary Canadian theatre.
How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)
The second volume of the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre covers the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, including the United States. Entries on twenty-six countries are preceded by specialist introductions on Theatre in Post-Colonial Latin America, Theatres of North America, Puppet Theatre, Theatre for Young Audiences, Music Theatre and Dance Theatre. The essays follow the series format, allowing for cross-referring across subjects, both within the volume and between volumes. Each country entry is written by specialists in the particular country and the volume has its own teams of regional editors, overseen by the main editorial team based at the University of York in Canada headed by Don Rubin. Each entry covers all aspects of theatre genres, practitioners, writers, critics and styles, with bibliographies, over 200 black & white photographs and a substantial index. This is a unique volume in its own right; in conjunction with the other volumes in this series it forms a reference resource of unparalleled value.
