Panel: (Re)defining Canadian Theatre

Moderator / Animé par: Moira Day
Location: Silver Room, Atlas Hotel

• Amanda Attrell, “‘This new idea now appears impossible’: Maria Campbell, Jessica, and Linda Griffiths in Conversation”

Yvette Nolan discusses the collaborative relationship between Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths during the 1980s in Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture: “I do not think there is a more honest, painful, illuminating chronicle of the abyss between First Nations and settler descendants than The Book of Jessica” (22). Where existing scholarship on this book focuses on the text, largely arguing it contains Griffiths’s authoritative voice, in this paper I shift the object of study to the process of the project. Seeking Campbell’s voice held in archives brings her perspective into the study of this intercultural theatre collaboration. The Book of Jessica was created within theatre methods created by settler descendants, the collective creation method as directed by Paul Thompson, yet overlooking Campbell’s dedication to the project has led to inadvertently missing the important representation of her life in Jessica. Exploring archival remnants of this process and the conversations between Campbell and Griffiths form the core of this paper. Campbell suggested they record their conversations, taking this intercultural relationship to embodied interaction which is “key to the production of knowledge in Indigenous cultures,” and away from Thompson’s collective creation methods (Morra 19). Therefore, I first attend to Campbell’s discussion of “the abyss” between herself and Griffiths (22). Second, listening to Campbell’s thoughts on the project sheds light on why she helped to create Jessica using her autobiography. Jessica is Campbell’s “gift” to her community, the story of a Métis woman finding her voice by reconnecting with her past (125). By considering the entirety of their conversations rather than taking The Book of Jessica as final product I argue, with Yvette Nolan’s discussion of the play, that the relationship between Campbell and Griffiths demonstrates the need to consider this collaborative process as an ever-rippling process.

• Allen Baylosis, “Performing Filipinx Canadian on the Vancouver Stage in a Post-Pandemic Diasporic Present”

This paper seeks to respond to the question posed ten years ago: “Is there Asian Canadian theatre in Vancouver?” By curating a list of Filipinx Canadian theatre and performances staged in Vancouver in the post-pandemic diasporic present, this paper asserts that such transformative efforts against the concept of “museumization” allow us to reexamine the emergence and efflorescence of new Filipinx Canadian performative forms. Beyond merely providing an extensive list of productions, this study departs from a historical timekeeping to an explorative inquiry that asks: “What are the implications of theatre and performance for minoritarian world-making, which contributes to the global heritage embodied by the Filipinx Canadian artistic communities within and through Vancouver?”

• Robin C. Whittaker, “Making Theatre/s History: Alumnae Theatre Company and Nostalgia Houses”

In 1972, Alumnae Theatre Company was 55 and moving into a 101-year-old Edwardian firehall in Toronto’s working-class-but-gentrifying Corktown neighbourhood. Critic Urjo Kareda wrote then that there is a “special grace in the images of this building’s past, in time-stopped photos of firemen, touching displays of old equipment. Here, we feel, is a civilized, authoritative environment for theatre-going.” Alumnae’s history would now be entwined with the building’s first-responder history. They saved an elegant building from demolition by creating the city’s newest theatre; at the same time, they fell victim to accusations of being increasingly outdated in an obsolete edifice. As the youthful baby-boom generation were beginning to redefine theatre practices and audiences in North American cities, the trendsetting “Alumnae” and their new old building became one and the same: a nostalgia house. Now in their 107th year, Alumnae is North America’s longest running women-led theatre group. They are also a “nonprofessionalizing company,” which I define in my recent monograph (Alumnae Theatre Company, UTP 2024) as a group that has declined to turn professional in union affiliation or, usually, remuneration, yet operates alongside professional companies within a dynamic and reciprocal theatre ecology. Comparably, Michael McKinnie argues that Toronto’s acclaimed Theatre Passe Muraille moved into an historic building that “became a spatial commemoration of the company’s own history” (McKinnie City Stages UTP 2007, 87). I wish to further suggest that when inhabiting historic buildings, the historicity of longstanding theatres is brought to the fore in ways that, paradoxically, they may celebrate yet find disadvantageous.

Biographies

Amanda Attrell

Allen Baylosis

Allen Baylosis is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, where his research focuses on contemporary aesthetic performances, popular art and culture, theorizing the notion of “kálat” (Tagalog for queer/ing hot mess) through the lens of transnational queer mess materialism, erotics, sexual politics, and the Filipinx diaspora.

Robin C. Whittaker

Robin C. Whittaker (STU, Fredericton) researches nonprofessionalizing theatre and Atlantic theatre histories. He is author of Alumnae Theatre Company: Nonprofessionalizing Theatre in Canada (UTP 2024), co-creator of the verbatim play No White Picket Fence (Talonbooks 2019), and editor of the play anthology Hot Thespian Action! (AUP 2008). He is also president of CATR.