Moderator: Sasha Kovacs
Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
‘Waiting for You For Sure Tonight 8.30 by the Tree =GODOT=’: Alumnae Bring the Absurd to Halifax.
Near the shores of Halifax Harbour, filling the 1,280-seat Queen Elizabeth High School auditorium, the University Alumnae Dramatic Club remounted its acclaimed Toronto premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in competition at the Dominion Drama Festival on May 15, 1958. Featuring mid-century acting stalwarts Kenneth Wickes, Ivor Jackson, and Powell Jones, future Queen’s professor Fred Euringer, and a young Reg Barnes, the production was led by first-time director Pamela Terry and produced, perhaps ironically given the all-male cast by the company that is today North America’s longest-running women-run theatre group, now known as Alumnae Theatre Company. As in Toronto six months earlier, it was the first time Haligonians had seen Beckett’s puzzling and dramaturgically controversial play in which nothing happens twice, produced by “these mysterious ladies whom we never saw.” 2 In front of DDF festival patron and Governor General Vincent Massey, Alumnae earned the Festival Plaque for the best production in English; Wickes earned best actor, having arrived in Canada from England just one year earlier. 3
Drawing from extensive archival research for my forthcoming book that traces the impact of the now-105-year-old, non-professionalizing “Alumnae” on Canadian theatre, this paper focuses on one production that garnered Alumnae national attention, made names for the actors involved, moved audiences to a “real standing ovation,” 4 and led adjudicator Philip Hope-Wallace to conclude that the “standard of amateur acting in Canada is higher than in England.” 5
Robin Whittaker, Associate Professor, St. Thomas University
Bio: Robin C. Whittaker, Ph.D., is an associate professor at St. Thomas University, where he teaches dramatic literature courses. His current research activity focuses on non-professionalizing theatre practices, including his forthcoming book on Alumnae Theatre Company. He is the co-creator of the verbatim play No White Picket Fence (Talonbooks 2019) and editor of Hot Thespian Action! Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse (AUP 2008), and since 2013 he has sat on CATR’s Board, currently serving as President.
The Lecture on Heads Comes to Halifax, c. 1785-91
One of the most enduring performance pieces of the eighteenth century, the Lecture on Heads, arrived in Halifax in 1785 courtesy of a touring actor named Mr. Moore (Kahan 197-203). Originally staged in 1764 at the Little Haymarket Theatre in London by George Alexander Stevens, the Lecture was deceptively straightforward. For more than two hours, Stevens (as himself) introduced audiences to a series of life-like heads made of wood and paper maché, which represented a cross-section of contemporary London society: heads included that of a quack doctor, jockey, cuckold, Methodist parson, lawyer, old bachelor, old maid, and so forth. Moreover, the Lecture’s simple scenography and flexible dramaturgy made it highly attractive to imitators like Moore, who could purchase one of the many pirated versions of the play text that circulated from the 1760s onwards and prepare their own version, complete with prop heads. Within a decade, the Lecture travelled throughout the British Empire, with stops in India, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and most American colonies. My paper will analyze accounts of the Lecture’s appearance in Halifax and consider how travelling actors like Moore not only participated in the dissemination of Steven’s satirical commentary but also enfolded Haligonians within a much larger effective community of colonial theatregoing that extended up and down the shores of North America and into the Caribbean. This paper aims to address Halifax’s glaring absence from most studies of transatlantic performance culture (Maddock Dillon; Roach; Wilson) while also reflecting on the Lecture’s unique migratory history.
Marlis Schweitzer, Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance, York University
Bio: Marlis Schweitzer is a Theatre and Performance Studies Professor at York University. Her most recent book, Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (2020), received the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association and was named a finalist for the 2021 ATHE Outstanding Book Award.
Relational Dramaturgy: Lessons from the Archives and Beyond
This paper bridges past and present to draw out insights into dramaturgical theory, training, and practice as it relates to new play development in the land known as Canada. Since the rise of theatrical nationalism in the 1970s, English Canadian theatre has been centred on new play development. At the front end of this developmental wave were several influential figures who dramaturged a generation of plays at the end of the twentieth century. Their formative contributions to the nascent canon of Canadian drama are revealed through analysis of archival records. These records provide insight into the methods deployed by these early dramaturgs in developing new work; they also expose the often unexamined or obscured aesthetic and ideological values embedded in early developmental processes. Finally, drawing on my archival research into the dramaturgical work of such late-twentieth-century figures as Urjo Kareda, Bill Glassco, and James Reaney, this paper explores how the ideological coding of play development practices has affected the representation of race, sexuality, gender, and other marginalized subject positions both on and off stage. In the process, I bring this earlier generation of new play dramaturgs—and the lessons we can learn from their archives—into conversation with twenty-first-century dramaturgs, such as Jessica Watkin and Lindsay Lachance, whose work reveals the potential for a new wave of developmental dramaturgy, a turning of the tide grounded explicitly in the transparency of values and consciousness of relationality, responsibility and interdependence.
Jessica Riley, University of Winnipeg
Bio: Dr. Jessica Riley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at The University of Winnipeg. Her research and teaching focuses on theatre history, historiography, dramaturgy, and Canadian drama. Jessica is the editor of A Man of Letters: The Selected Dramaturgical Correspondence of Urjo Kareda. Her work has been published in the Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies, Performing the Intercultural City, Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada.