Performing the Intercultural City by Ric Knowles (review)

In the introduction to Performing the Intercultural City, Ric Knowles states that his book is intended to deal with what he calls the shifting ecologies of contemporary intercultural performance in Toronto (ix). He is interested in “the performative constitution of social identities and intercultural memories, the development of diasporic cultural forms, performative cultural mediation, and the emergent circulation of performance networks” (4). As part of a critique of both official multiculturalism and traditional intercultural theories, he seeks to understand how “individual gendered, raced, and classed subjectivities and community identities within the contemporary multicultural city are not just reflected or given voice but are constituted through performance” (2–4; emphasis in original). Adopting the frames of actor-network theory, rhizomatics, relational aesthetics and radicants, and heterotopics (5), Knowles focuses on the network of companies and actants that he identifies as constituting Toronto’s performance ecosystem. For him, this means analyzing the work of people of colour and companies that challenge the hegemony of whiteness on the city’s stages (17). Therefore, his definition of Toronto’s intercultural performance excludes commercial, mainstream, and classical theatre, as well as francophone and regional Canadian drama. He also excludes productions emerging from European diasporic communities, such as Jews and Roma, and communities of gender and sexual difference. These exclusions may disappoint readers, such as myself, who are drawn to the book’s title.

In the two chapters of Part One, Knowles lays out his critique of official Canadian multiculturalism and government policies for funding the arts. He laments the commodification of ethnicity, the exclusion of First Nations, and the emphasis on cultural memory and heritage that seems aimed at managing diversity with nostalgia. The challenge he sees is to create new diasporic identities through performance in the contemporary urban environment. Two of the examples he proposes—Fish Eyes by a Bengali Canadian and Singkil by a Filipina Canadian—incorporate traditional dance forms in ways that he claims embody new diasporic identities. The Scrubbing Project, by mixed-race Indigenous women, attempts a collective healing of trauma and a renewal of cultural memories through performance. Body 13 brings together a group of immigrants from diverse non-European countries who work through difficult memories to forge new identities. For reasons that escape this reader, Chapter Two also includes a discussion of The Sheep and the Whale, a translation of a French-language play by a Moroccan immigrant to Quebec, which is about Maghrebian and sub-Saharan migrants trying to reach Spain on a Russian ship.

Part Two examines the “development of culturally specific dramaturgical forms emerging from the histories and historicized bodies” as an “essential step in the performative constitution of intracultural community identities in diaspora” (65). Chapter Three presents Filipino Canadian dramaturgy as developed by the Carlos Bulosan Theatre, founded in 1982 as the Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop. Knowles begins with some historical background on the ethnic and religious diversity of the Philippines and Filipino immigration to Toronto, followed by brief descriptions of key productions in the evolution of a distinctly Filipino Canadian dramaturgy. Miss Orient(ed) uses the beauty pageant form to play with and undermine stereotypes. The collective creation People Power employs an episodic structure to tell the story of the assassination of Ninoy Aquino and the popular, nonviolent uprising that toppled the Marcos dictatorship. Going back to earlier historical periods, In the Shadow of Elephants dramatizes resistance to Japanese occupation and other colonial powers, using dance, music, and puppetry, and invoking precolonial belief systems.

Chapter Four, “Indigenous Knowledge, Contemporary Performance: Dramaturgies of Decolonization,” covers a diversity of topics and productions whose connections to the Toronto performance scene often seem tenuous. In describing Native performance culture, Knowles includes works that draw from different First Nations and that cross national boundaries. It was not entirely clear to this reader how the pages on Indigenous mounds in Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Oklahoma, or on a play centred on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Sideshow...