Theatre And Transformation In Contemporary Canada

In Canada, adaptation is a national mode of survival, but it is also a way to create radical change. Throughout history, Canadians have been inheritors and adaptors: of political systems, stories, and customs from the old world and the new. More than updating popular narratives, adaptation informs understandings of culture, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as individual experiences. In Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre Kailin Wright investigates adaptations that retell popular stories with a political purpose and examines how they acknowledge diverse realities and transform our past. Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre explores adaptations of Canadian history, Shakespeare, Greek mythologies, and Indigenous history by playwrights who identify as English-Canadian, African-Canadian, French-Canadian, French, Kuna Rappahannock, and Delaware from the Six Nations. Along with new considerations of the activist potential of popular Canadian theatre, this book outlines eight strategies that adaptors employ to challenge conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous, Black, queer, or female. Recent cancellations of theatre productions whose creators borrowed elements from minority cultures demonstrate the need for a distinction between political adaptation and cultural appropriation. Wright builds on Linda Hutcheon's definition of adaptation as repetition with difference and applies identification theory to illustrate how political adaptation at once underlines and undermines its canonical source. An exciting intervention in adaptation studies, Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre unsettles the dynamics of popular and political theatre and rethinks the ways performance can contribute to how one country defines itself.

How do dramatic forms shape social formations? This study of Canadian dramatic structures asks this question of an extraordinarily wide range of contemporary plays. Knowles begins with a look at inherited naturalistic and modernist forms based, respectively, on time and space. He then uses this division to extend his inquiry first into post-naturalist forms of collective and collaborative creations, community plays, and historical metadramas, and then into postmodernist structures of environmental theatre and “dialogic monologue.” The book ends with a brief epilogue on the structures of “spacetime,” as Canadian theatre moves “towards a quantum dramaturgy.” From Michael Cook and David French through George F. Walker, Judith Thompson, and Sally Clark, to Monique Mojica, John Mighton, and feminist performance art, this book revolutionizes the study of contemporary Canadian drama. It’s a thoughtful and timely advance in our ways of thinking about dramaturgical form and meaning in Canadian theatrical production, and in Canadian society.

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 collection of writing by celebrated scholars and artists that explores the state of political performance in contemporary Canada.

Historians of theatre face the same temptations and challenges as other historians: they negotiate assumptions (their own and those of others) about national identity and national character; they decide what events and actors to highlight--or omit--and what framework and perspective to use for telling the story. Personal biases, trends in scholarship, and sociopolitical contexts influence all histories; and theatre histories, too, are often revised to reflect changing times and interests. This significant collection examines the problems and challenges of formulating national theatre histories.The essayists included here--leading theatre scholars from all over the world, many of whom wrote essays specifically for this volume--provide an international context for national theatre histories as well as studies of individual nations. They cover a wide geographical area: Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America. The essays contrast large countries (India, Indonesia) with small (Ireland), newly independent (Slovenia) with established (U.S.A.), developed (Canada) with developing (Mexico, South Africa), capitalist (U.S.A.) with formerly communist (Russia), monolingual (Sweden) with multilingual (Belgium, Canada), and countries with stable historical boundaries (Sweden) with those whose borders have shifted (Germany).The essays also explore such sociopolitical issues as the polarization of language groups, the importance of religion, the invisibility of ethnic minorities, the redrawing of geographical borders, changes in ideology, and the dismantling of colonial legacies. Finally, they examine such common problems of history writing as types of evidence, periodization, canonization, styles of narrative, and definitions of key terms.Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories will be of special interest to students and scholars of theatre, cultural studies, and historiography.

A collection of 18 original essays on contemporary Canadian theatre by drama specialists in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere.