Views and Reviews

As I write this, the Olympic torch is winding serpentinely across Canada, beginning in Vancouver, then heading up north, then heading to the east, and then back out to the west again. (Today the torch travelled from Fredericton to Bathurst, New Brunswick.) Looking at the assembled contributions in this issue of the Views and Reviews section, the journey of the torch seems an apt connective metaphor. Passed from hand to hand, the Olympic torch relay physically links thousands of individuals in a long chain spanning the country. This theme of the vast scale of the country rendered as experience by the combined mosaic fragments of individual participants is reflected first in two productions reviewed here which both assemble artists—writers, performers, and creative teams—from St. John's to Vancouver and everywhere in between. Fear of Flight created by Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland is in fact set aboard a transnational flight. The play features a series of monologues commissioned from eight contemporary Canadian playwrights. Travelling from voice to voice, the play questions not only our fear of flying, but fear in general—our reluctance to take chances, and the faith required to break free and take flight. Reviewers Barry Freeman and Robin C. Whittaker examine the effects generated by the juxtaposition of these diverse voices in this work of "choral theatre" structured by director Jillian Keiley's signature style of "kaleidography." And like the torch, Fear of Flight is destined for the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver.

The second play reviewed, City of Wine written by Ned Dickens and produced by Nightswimming, is also epic in scale—crossing decades of time as well as thousands of kilometres in space. A seven-play cycle, City of Wine recounts the great tales of Thebes over the seven generations from its inception, to growth, and then decline. To mount such a mammoth undertaking, individual plays were parcelled out to post-secondary theatre programs across the country. The productions then converged in Toronto for a four-day festival when all seven plays were staged in sequence. In his review, Alex Fallis considers not only the merits of the production, but also the pedagogical implications of such collaborations for the youthful theatre practitioners who participated in this unique endeavour.

Next up, Katherine McLeod reviews a recent production of the jazz opera Quebecité by George Elliot Clarke and D.D. Jackson. Previously produced in Guelph and Vancouver, Quebecité had its international debut in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in February 2009. A story of two multicultural couples who fall in love, the piece employs an accessible jazz idiom and provides many opportunities for improvisation (McNeilly). For a work that has still not yet been produced in Quebec, the significance of the geographical situation of this performance carries some weight. Concentrating on the effects of hearing the jazz opera live, McLeod speculates on how this deeply self-reflexive political work might communicate in a foreign acoustic environment. The specificity of the environment is also central to Vers solitaire—an MP3 audio walk through the streets and underground walkways of Montreal. In this ambulatory piece created by Olivier Choinière and the company L'Activité, the motif of the journey is shrunk to a very intimate scale, as a solitary audience member follows a mute solo performer. Reviewer and solo audience member Richard Simas carefully documents the strangeness and intrigue of this urban theatrical encounter.

Finally to wrap up the section, Jennette White reviews a new biography of Sharon Pollock written by Sherrill Grace, Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock. Presented with the Ann Saddlemeyer Award in June 2009, this book makes an important contribution to Canadian theatre history, but also to the field of biography studies. Grace is a personable guide throughout this work. She does not vanish into the pose of an anonymous narrator; rather she is careful to delineate her own subject position. She opens her process to the reader, allowing us to share her curiosity. Her questions become our questions. Reaching beyond the individual, Grace interweaves episodes and insights from the life of her subject into the larger tapestry of Canadian theatre, continually sketching the theatrical environment both on...