Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre
Moderator: Taylor Marie Graham
Amanda Attrell, ““You stole it”: Truth in Cliff Cardinal’s Radical Retelling”
In the fall of 2021, Cliff Cardinal entered Crow’s Theatre’s mainstage from behind a red velvet curtain to radically adapt Shakespeare for Toronto’s theatre audiences: “Let’s just be here, together, for a moment, and acknowledge the land” (5). In As You Like It, which won the Governor General’s Award for English-Language Drama and toured internationally, Cardinal baldly speaks truths to his audience. His monologue confronts the lack of knowledge about Indigenous history and culture among settler descendants in Canada: “I’ve often wondered what these land acknowledgements accomplish. Aside from making white people feel good about themselves. Beat. Hi. Beat” (11). This paper listens to Cardinal’s use of direct address to understand how he conveys truth to his audience through humour, potentially upsetting language, and by concluding with the “saying . . . All my relations” (74).
In his performance, Cardinal baldly proposes a shift in a societal understanding of Indigenous culture that holds the potential to reorient the historiographer’s understanding of what we can “accomplish” when we “think about Indigeneity” and “acknowledge the land” (11). As such, this paper documents and records my experience of attending Cardinal’s performance during its premiere and twice more as it toured. I then consider Cardinal’s choice to refer to Residential Schools as “rape camps,” and how he depicts the cultural erasure enacted by genocide and forced adoption which continues to impact everyone who lives on this land now called Canada (52). Finally, I end by considering Cardinal’s conclusion to his “protest: a campaign to raise awareness to support Indigenous people” in which he brings the audience together as family, and into the performance’s ruse (15, 75). During CATR’s 50th Anniversary, I hope to look to the future with an expanded understanding of how historiographers of theatre can pay close attention to retellings of this country’s colonial past through listening to Cardinal’s land acknowledgement.
Amy Blondell, “…girls, girls, girls all up in here”: Self-Determination, Struggle, and Belonging in Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade and Dominique Morrisseau’s Confederates”
Whether women can be historical actors in the context of a political uprising is the question posed by Frances Koncan’s play, “Women of the Fur Trade” and Dominique Morrisseau’s play “Confederates”. Koncan, an Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright, sets her drama in what is now Manitoba during a Metis rebellion against encroaching settler colonialism. African American playwright Morisseau sets her play in two time periods, addressing institutionalized racism within the contemporary academy and in a Southern plantation at the beginning of the US Civil War. Both dramas illuminate the often-fraught struggle of women to forge alliances given a hostile context and competing personal and political needs.
Both playwrights work creatively with temporality activating historical memory and producing a twin consciousness in the audience. In “Women of the Fur Trade”, the women from “Eighteen something something” engage in continuous and often hilarious banter in contemporary language that often expresses a post-colonial consciousness. In “Confederates”, there is a bifurcated stage. On one, actors play contemporary faculty and students at a private university, and on the other they double as enslaved persons of African descent and white plantation owners, continuously reminding the audience about the antecedents of institutional racism. These two powerful plays illuminate structures of oppression and their corrosive effects on human social relations. The pivotal question they ask is whether and how, in the face of patriarchy and racism, alliances may be forged.
Katrina Dunn, “Prairie Theatre Exchange: Inside an architectural reinvention”
The persistence of theatre buildings as an amenity in the western city is, for Marvin Carlson, a sign of theatre’s ability to adjust alongside civic transformations and can be read as a map of theatre’s accommodation to the political, social, philosophical, and economic form of cities (Places 14-36). Many theatres in Canada aptly demonstrate this tethering, but Prairie Theatre Exchange is uniquely tied to a series of architectural structures seminal to the economic geography of Winnipeg and the company is poised to transform yet again as part of an urban renewal project linked to the downtown Indigenous community that will see its host environment shift from a beleaguered site of consumerism to a nexus of care. PTE takes its name from its first home in the Winnipeg Grain Exchange building, the historical seat of grain futures that drove the first century of the provincial economy. In 1989, the company moved to a new $3.5 million, 42,500 square foot venue with a distinctive thrust stage on the third floor of Portage Place Shopping Centre. Three levels of government have now signed agreements with True North Real Estate Development and the Southern Chiefs’ Organization that will enable the redevelopment of Portage Place into a campus for residential and affordable housing and health services with integrated mental health and addictions supports, in what the president of True North has called “an historic example of economic reconciliation” (“True”). This paper asks how the complex urban and cultural processes driving this architectural reinvention are changing the company’s programming and artistic process and whether a theatre so aligned with the machinery of civic capitalism can reorient towards spatial justice.
Biographies:
Amanda Attrell has a Ph.D. in English from York University. Her historiographic methodology seeks to listen to marginalized and unheard voices held in Canadian theatre archives and beyond. Her work appears in Linda Griffiths (Playwrights Canada Press, 2018) and Theatre Research in Canada (2023). She has a forthcoming piece on Infinity in Making Moscovitch (Playwrights Canada Press, 2026) and the co-created Secret Life of a Mother.
A social historian, Amy Blondell focuses on material survival, community efflorescence, political activism and desire. Her recent play, Rise Up at Liberty Springs, draws on interviews and archival materials to create a community story about persistent passions and political acts.
Katrina Dunn is an Associate Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media. Her chapters and articles explore the spatial manifestations of theatre, as well as ecocritical theatre. Her long career as director, artistic director, and producer has been recognized by a number of awards.