CTR
117 Winter 2004
Activist Theatre
Edited by Catherine Graham
Editorial
The
Théâtre Parminou: Thirty Years of History
On the changes in the Théâtre Parminou’s sense of
what social commitment means in practice for a Québécois
activist theatre
MAUREEN MARTINEAU
In
This Moment: The Evolution of “Theatre for Living”
A Historical Overview of the Work of Headlines Theatre
DAVID DIAMOND
Still “Activist”
after All These Years?
Reflections on feminism and activist theatre, then and now
CYNTHIA GRANT
The Carlos Bulosan Cultural
Workshop
A Discussion with founder Fely Villasin
CYNTHIA GRANT
Cross-cultural Experiences
in Activist Theatre
A Discussion with Lindi Papoff
CYNTHIA GRANT
Can an Immigrant South Korean
Theatre Artist Be Heard in Canada?
An interview with Huynhee Seo, a theatre artist from South Korea,
now living in Toronto, but no longer working in theatre
CYNTHIA GRANT
Political Theatre: Because
We Must
Reflections on what the medium and the times demand
SKY GILBERT
Towards
a Poetics of Popular Theatre
How do we want artistic accomplishment in popular theatre to be evaluated?
And who is defining “art” and “social action”?
EDWARD LITTLE
Strategic
Narratives: The Embodiment of Minority Discourses in Biographical
Performance Praxis
Creating a strategically reflexive site from which to transform critical
thought into emancipatory action
NISHA SAJNANI
Playing
for a Just World
The Work of Théâtre Teesri Duniya
RAHUL VARMA
Struggle
to Success: A Collective Drama on Anti-Bullying
How a group of university students overcame bullying and created a
performance
GEORGES BELLIVEAU
Disability
Arts and the Place of Mental Illness on the Stage
The Madness and Arts 2003 World Festival
KIRSTY JOHNSTON
SCRIPTS
Traps
Yvette Nolan
La ultima
puesta del sol / The Last Setting of the Sun
FREDDY GARCIA with CYNTHIA GRANT
VIEWS AND
REVIEWS
Where We
Are Now: Festival de théâtre des Amériques, 2003
Review by MICHAEL J. SIDNELL
Confessional Drama and Autofiction
in Montreal
Review by LOUIS PATRICK LEROUX
Wild Theatre:
The History of One Yellow Rabbit by Martin Morrow
Reviewed by KATHRYN BRACHT
Attracting
The Eyes and Capitalizing on The Wallets: The Problem with Toronto’s
New Public Performance Space
Review by NATALIE HARROWER
Editrial
What is “activist
theatre”? As the articles in this issue will show, it can mean
a broad range of things, ranging from theatre created with specific
communities to theatre that addresses pressing local issues and even
theatre that attempts to engage interest in issues that are happening
on a global scale. It is a kind of theatre that CTR has covered since
its inception, under titles like “political theatre,” “community-based
theatre” and “popular theatre” and often by relating
it to particular cultural communities, as in recent issues on Chinese
Canadian and Italian Canadian theatre. So why now use the term “activist”?
The term “activist
theatre,” while perhaps simply adding another term to an already
lengthy lexicon, does point to the connection between socially conscious
theatre production and broader social movements in Canada and around
the world. While these theatres and social movements differ in their
methods and specific goals, they do have in common a concern with
opening space in public forums for people whose voices often go unheard.
For theatre artists who engage in activism, one common concern is
an exploration of the ways in which the formal qualities of their
art form allow them to create discussion about the ways in which important
social issues affect the everyday lives of people in a local area.
Yet, as the articles in this issue clearly demonstrate, theatre artists
creating activist works in Canada, as elsewhere in the world, do not
all approach their creative work in the same way. By looking at a
range of projects with similar goals but different ways of achieving
them, I hope that we may learn to appreciate activist theatre projects
in ways that recognize both the importance of the cultural and sociopolitical
environments out of which they arise and the formal choices theatre
artists make in intervening in those environments. More broadly, such
a wide-ranging discussion of activist theatres may help expand our
sense of the role that dramatic performance can play in developing
alternative visions of public life by re-evaluating some of the terms
in which we consider the question.
Maureen Martineau’s
article on the history of the Theatre Parminou’s commitment to
different forms of activist theatre gives us an excellent example
in this regard. Tracing the changes in the troupe’s self-definition
and aesthetic goals by setting its history against the horizon of
changes in the broader political climate in Québec over the
last thirty years, Martineau demonstrates how much artistic decisions
are influenced by the environment in which they are made. David Diamond
makes a similar point in his discussion of how Headlines Theatre has
a history of creating “in the moment” and is currently exploring
not only geographical and cultural differences but the different ways
in which new technologies may allow us to develop public dialogue
around issues that affect many of us on an individual or neighbourhood
level. Cynthia Grant continues this discussion from a more personal
angle, tracing her individual history in activist and feminist theatre
to show how one artist’s thinking may evolve, in the company
of others, over a period of years. Grant’s concluding call to
question the boundaries of what has traditionally been known as theatre
is much influenced by her contact with theatre artists who have worked
outside Western liberal democracies. Her discussions with Fely Villasin,
Lindi Papoff, Huynhee Seo, who discuss theatre work done in the Philippines,
Israel, and Korea in relation to work here, help us understand what
activist theatre might be in other circumstances and how we can learn
from those who face greater risks in doing this work than is generally
the case in Canada.
The three articles
that follow all question the commonly accepted division of aesthetic
judgments from political goals in evaluating activist theatre. Sky
Gilbert introduces this line of argument with a critical reflection
on the dangers of divorcing discussions of form from discussions of
ideology. Reflecting on critical reaction to his two most recent plays,
The Boy Jones and Heliogabalus, he points to the ways in which an
audience that is uncomfortable with new categories of thought can
refuse to grapple with them by the simple expedient of writing off
new ways of thinking about the world as flaws in the theatrical form
of the piece that proposes them. Edward Little raises a similar point
from a different angle in his discussion of the need to develop a
poetics of popular theatre. The time has come, he asserts, to give
up the traditional dichotomizing of artistic form and ideology in
order to create a vision of this theatre as an “aesthetic weave
and a social weft in the creation of an artistic fabric.” Only
by doing this, he suggests, can we come to appreciate the real value
of the aesthetic choices made in creating activist theatre. Nisha
Sajnani follows with a discussion of a collective creation, by a group
of immigrant women from different cultures now living in Montreal,
that shows how such ideas can affect theatrical practice. Sajnani’s
reflections on the importance of the process of creating theatre clearly
demonstrate how the particular qualities of this medium can themselves
create a vehicle for exploring new public subjectivities that straddle
the boundaries of originary cultures to create new public spaces for
collective thought.
The last three
articles in this issue all discuss particular theatre projects and
the lessons that can be learned from them. Rahul Varma discusses the
production of his play Bhopal in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11
attacks. As a play that asks its audiences to think about terrorism
in the context of the damage routinely done to the populations of
“developing” countries by multinational corporations, the
production of Bhopal was itself a political act, rendered more urgent
by the global political situation in which it was produced. Varma’s
discussion of the difference in production and reception of the piece
in Montreal and Bhopal, India, serves as a further reminder of the
important role of the audience in creating meaning out of a theatrical
work. George Belliveau’s article on Wasn’t Me! – a
play on bullying created by education students at the University of
Prince Edward Island – points to the ways in which production
practices themselves may unknowingly reflect the very power relations
they seek to critique. Discussing the problem of bullying within the
troupe itself, Belliveau shows how the troupe’s ability to confront
and solve the problem influenced not only the final form of the work
itself but the attitudes of those who participated in creating it.
In the last article in this issue, Kirsty Johnson offers us a powerful
example of how a theatre festival focused on mental illness not only
increased the visibility of the problem in the larger community but
offered important opportunities for sharing skills by structuring
events in ways that allowed participants to learn from each other.
This is, undoubtedly, the great strength of all the projects discussed
in this issue: the opportunities for learning from each other that
are created when theatrical activity creates the kind of public spaces
that allow us really to converse across our usual social boundaries.
The two scripts
in this issue are stimulating demonstrations of this process at work.
Yvette Nolan’s Traps was designed as a piece that could tour
the areas most affected by the Burnt Church “Lobster Wars,”
in an effort to open up dialogue among the different cultural communities
that have fished the waters off New Brunswick for hundreds of years.
Her construction of a unique form, in which three actors play characters
from all three communities (English-speaking, Acadian and Native),
in a series of largely unrelated scenes, lays the responsibility for
opening up a dialogue squarely on the audience. This use of an aesthetic
form to cast the audience in the role of witness, rather than judge
or “objective” observer, is also found in Freddy Garcia’s
La ultima puesta del sol / The Last Setting of the Sun. Garcia’s
play tells the story of a young Salvadorian who flees the political
repression visited on him and his family because of his theatre work.
The play ends with his arrival in Canada, thus asking the audience
to engage with him out of an understanding of how he has come to be
here and what it has cost him to make this his new home, rather than
solely through their observations of his present situation. Taken
together, I believe these two scripts, like the articles in this issue,
are excellent examples of the ways in which activist theatre artists
in Canada are creating new forms of theatre that will allow us to
create new kinds of public spaces where we all take the responsibility
for learning to know and care for fellow citizens who may not share
our histories or our points of view.
