Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies

Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies
Author: Heather Davis-Fisch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781770917750

Challenging the idea of a singular narrative of Canadian theatre history and centring on questions of historiography and methodology, the essays in this collection investigate performances that have been excluded from mainstream theatre histories and re-evaluate well-known theatre movements to explore cultural memory. This collection asks, how do we remember performances of the past and why do some stories survive while others have been largely forgotten? Contributors draw on recent critical developments in performance studies, historiography, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric studies to explore topics ranging from the affective labour performed in life writing by World War I veterans, to a reconsideration of the role of dramaturgs in the alternative theatre movement, to a microhistory of petitions protesting minstrel performers appearing in Toronto, to a timely consideration of digital technologies in performance art documentation.

Canadian Performance Documents and Debates

Canadian Performance Documents and Debates
Author: Anthony J. Vickery
Publisher: University of Alberta
Total Pages: 665
Release: 2022-08-24
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1772126047

Canadian Performance Documents and Debates provides insight into theatrical activities from the seventeenth century to the early 1970s, and probes important yet vexing questions about Canada as a country and a concept. The volume collects playscripts and archival material such as photographs, petitions, performance programs, and musical scores to explore what these documents tell us about the values, debates, and priorities of artists and their audiences from the past 400 years. For each of the 31 chapters, leading and emerging scholars offer introductions that rethink the artistic, economic, and socio-political significance of plays, dance, opera, circuses, and other performance genres and events. This collection challenges readers to rethink Canadian theatre and performance history, and will be of interest to students and scholars of theatre, dance, music, and Performance Studies. Contributors: Clarence S. Bayne, Kym Bird, Justin A. Blum, Amy Bowring, Jill Carter, Jenn Cole, Cynthia Cooper, Heather Davis-Fisch, Moira J. Day, Ray Ellenwood, Alan Filewod, Howard Fink, Liza Giffen, J. Paul Halferty, James Hoffman, Erin Hurley, John D. Jackson, Stephen Johnson, Sasha Kovacs, Sylvain Lavoie, Louis Patrick Leroux, Allana C. Lindgren, Denyse Lynde, Erin Joelle McCurdy, Wing Chung Ng, Glen F. Nichols, M. Cody Poulton, VK Preston, Daniel J. Ruppel, Jordan Stanger-Ross, Paul J. Stoesser, Christl Verduyn, Anthony J. Vickery, Anton Wagner

Performance Studies in Canada

Performance Studies in Canada
Author: Laura Levin
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0773549862

Since its inception as an institutionalized discipline in the United States during the 1980s, performance studies has focused on the interdisciplinary analysis of a broad spectrum of cultural behaviours including theatre, dance, folklore, popular entertainments, performance art, protests, cultural rituals, and the performance of self in everyday life. Performance Studies in Canada brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the national emergence of performance studies as a field in Canada. To date, no systematic attempts has been made to consider how this methodology is being taught, applied, and rethought in Canadian contexts, and Canadian performance studies scholarship remains largely unacknowledged within international discussions about the discipline. This collection fills this gap by identifying multiple origins of performance studies scholarship in the country and highlighting significant works of performance theory and history that are rooted in Canadian culture. Essays illustrate how specific institutional conditions and cultural investments – Indigenous, francophone, multicultural, and more – produce alternative articulations of “performance” and reveal national identity as a performative construct. A state-of-the-art work on the state of the field, Performance Studies in Canada foregrounds national and global performance knowledge to invigorate the discipline around the world.

The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance

The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance
Author: Tim Prentki
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1351120131

The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance provides an in-depth, far-reaching and provocative consideration of how scholars and artists negotiate the theoretical, historical and practical politics of applied performance, both in the academy and beyond. These volumes offer insights from within and beyond the sphere of English-speaking scholarship, curated by regional experts in applied performance. The reader will gain an understanding of some of the dominant preoccupations of performance in specified regions, enhanced by contextual framing. From the dis(h)arming of the human body through dance in Colombia to clowning with dementia in Australia, via challenges to violent nationalism in the Balkans, transgender performance in Pakistan and resistance rap in Kashmir, the essays, interviews and scripts are eloquent testimony to the courage and hope of people who believe in the power of art to renew the human spirit. Students, academics, practitioners, policy-makers, cultural anthropologists and activists will benefit from the opportunities to forge new networks and develop in-depth comparative research offered by this bold, global project.

Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850-1960

Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850-1960
Author: Gilli Bush-Bailey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000509362

This collection uncovers connections and coincidences that challenge the old stories of pioneering performers who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It investigates songlines, drama, opera, music theatre, dance, and circus—removing traditional boundaries that separate studies of performance, and celebrating difference and transformation in style, intention, and delivery. Well known, or obscure, travelling performers faced dangers at sea and hazardous journeys across land. Their tracks, made in pursuit of fortune and fame, intersected with those made by earlier storytellers in search for food. Touring Performance and Global Exchange takes a fresh look at such tracks—the material remains—demonstrating that moving performance does far more than transfer repertoires and people; it transforms them. Touring performance has too often beenconceived in diasporic terms, as a fixed product radiating out from a cultural centre. This collection maps different patterns—ones that comprise reversed flows, cross currents, and continually proliferating centres of meaning in complex networks of global exchange. This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students in theatre, music, drama studies, and cultural history.

Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance

Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance
Author: Jaye T. Darby
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350035068

This foundational study offers an accessible introduction to Native American and First Nations theatre by drawing on critical Indigenous and dramaturgical frameworks. It is the first major survey book to introduce Native artists, plays, and theatres within their cultural, aesthetic, spiritual, and socio-political contexts. Native American and First Nations theatre weaves the spiritual and aesthetic traditions of Native cultures into diverse, dynamic, contemporary plays that enact Indigenous human rights through the plays' visionary styles of dramaturgy and performance. The book begins by introducing readers to historical and cultural contexts helpful for reading Native American and First Nations drama, followed by an overview of Indigenous plays and theatre artists from across the century. Finally, it points forward to the ways in which Native American and First Nations theatre artists are continuing to create works that advocate for human rights through transformative Native performance practices. Addressing the complexities of this dynamic field, this volume offers critical grounding in the historical development of Indigenous theatre in North America, while analysing key Native plays and performance traditions from the mainland United States and Canada. In surveying Native theatre from the late 19th century until today, the authors explore the cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual concerns, as well as the political and revitalization efforts of Indigenous peoples. This book frames the major themes of the genre and identifies how such themes are present in the dramaturgy, rehearsal practices, and performance histories of key Native scripts.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction

The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction
Author: Graham Wolfe
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2023-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000951936

Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, some of history’s most influential novelists have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their work into conversation with a vital field. A valuable resource for students, scholars, and admirers of both theatre and novels, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction offers a wealth of new perspectives on topics of increasing critical concern, including intermediality, theatricality, antitheatricality, mimesis, diegesis, and performativity.

Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad

Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad
Author: Cecilia Morgan
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2022-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228013275

By the late nineteenth century, Canadian women had begun forging careers as professional actresses, appearing not just in Canada, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. They played an integral role in theatrical networks and helped shape transnational middle-class culture. Taking the approach of feminist collective biography, Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad writes the lives of women who, despite their renown during their lifetimes, have been all too easily forgotten. Cecilia Morgan examines these “sweet girls’” childhoods, their experiences of work, touring, and company management, the plays in which they appeared, and the celebrity they enjoyed. In so doing she shows how women helped convey messages about race, empire, and white identity in popular culture. Investigating a period from the 1870s to the 1940s, Morgan demonstrates how actresses evolved within a period of change in theatre, how they coped with new challenges, and how they brought their craft to new media. Paying particular attention to the careers of Margaret Bannerman, Tony Award-winner Beatrice Lillie, Margaret Anglin, Julia Arthur, and Frances Doble, among many others, this book explores how being an actress abroad became work as well as profession for Canadian women. Extensively researched and generously illustrated, Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad argues for the importance of theatre, both to Canadian women’s history and to our understanding of Canada in a transnational world.

Moving Together

Moving Together
Author: Allana C. Lindgren
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1771124849

Moving Together: Dance and Pluralism in Canada explores how dance intersects with the shifting concerns of pluralism in a variety of racial and ethnic communities across Canada. Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contributors examine a broad range of dance styles used to promote diversity and intercultural collaborations. Examples include Fijian dance in Vancouver; Japanese dance in Lethbridge; Danish, Chinese, Kathak, and Flamenco dance in Toronto; African and European contemporary dance styles in Montréal; and Ukrainian dance in Cape Breton. Interviews with Indigenous and Middle Eastern dance artists along with an artist statement by a Bharata Natyam and contemporary dance choreographer provide valuable artist perspectives. Contributors offer strategies to decolonize dance education and also challenge longstanding critiques of multiculturalism. Moving Together demonstrates that dance is at the cutting edge of rethinking the contours of race and ethnicity in Canada and is necessary reading for scholars, students, dance artists and audiences, and everyone interested in thinking about the future of racial and ethnic pluralism in Canada.

The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies

The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies
Author: Lu Ann De Cunzo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 932
Release: 2022-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 110865987X

Material culture studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the relationships between people and their things: the production, history, preservation, and interpretation of objects. It draws on theory and practice from disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, such as anthropology, archaeology, history, and museum studies. Written by leading international scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive view of developments, methodologies and theories. It is divided into five broad themes, embracing both classic and emerging areas of research in the field. Chapters outline transformative moments in material culture scholarship, and present research from around the world, focusing on multiple material and digital media that show the scope and breadth of this exciting field. Written in an easy-to-read style, it is essential reading for students, researchers and professionals with an interest in material culture.