Regional Reports: Theatre Criticism across Canada
- Regional ReportsTheatre Criticism across Canada
How do theatre practitioners regard reviewers in Ottawa? Can a freelance critic get (paid) work in Halifax? Who is blogging in Edmonton? Is theatre criticism flourishing anywhere in Canada? This article gathers reports commissioned from scholars, critics, and artists across the country tasked with taking the pulse of the critical landscape. Writers were asked to identify the main outlets of criticism and outstanding figures in their regions, and to discuss the relationship between mainstream journalism and the blogosphere. At a time when the decline of print journalism is having an ineluctable effect on critical discourse, the reports presented here offer an essential view of the relationship of theatre and performance practice, theatre criticism, and theatre education, training, and research across Canada.
Vancouver: Urgent Critical Response Needed by Alex Lazaridis Ferguson
The Prairies: Critics Dwindle Down to a Precious Few by Stephen Hunt
Toronto’s Changing of the Old Guard by Martin Morrow
Ottawa: Competing Priorities in the Nation’s Capital by Sarah Waisvisz
Quebec Theatre Criticism: A 2016 Portrait by Sylvain Lavoie
Criticism in Crisis: Theatre Reviews in Atlantic Canada by Amanda Campbell
Alex is a PhD candidate in theatre at the University of British Columbia and co-Artistic Director of Fight with a Stick Performance. He is also on faculty at the Bachelor of Performing Arts Program of Capilano University. He studies neuroscience, new materialism, and scenography.
Canadian Theatre Critics Association board member Stephen Hunt was a theatre critic and arts reporter at the Calgary Herald between 2006 and 2016. He teaches playwriting online at the University of British Columbia. His solo show The White Guy was produced by the Public Theatre in New York and published in Best American Short Plays 1997–98 (Applause Books).
Martin Morrow has reviewed Toronto theatre regularly for the Globe and Mail since 2010. He has also served as the theatre critic for the Grid, the Calgary Herald, and Fast Forward Weekly and frequently contributes to the online news site Torontoist. A two-time winner of the Nathan Cohen Award for theatre criticism, he is currently president of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association.
Sarah Waisvisz is a theatremaker and academic. Her current artistic projects include her one-woman show Monstrous, which theatricalizes her PhD dissertation on mixed-race identity and Caribbean resistance. She has published on art, theatre, and human rights in College Literature, Canadian Literature, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights.
Sylvain Lavoie is in the PhD in humanities program at Concordia University. A board member of the Société québécoise d’études théâtrales for many years, he has worked as a communications officer at the National Arts Centre, been a regular contributor of reviews to Spirale magazine for a decade, and co-edited Pierre L’Hérault’s writings on theatre (L’assemblée pensante, 2009).
Halifax’s Amanda Campbell is a theatre critic and writer, and the founder of The Way I See It (TWISI). She has a serious crush on the Canadian theatre and sometimes moonlights as a playwright. She has a BA (Honours) in theatre studies from Dalhousie University and a MA in drama studies from the University of Toronto.
