Project MUSE®: Canadian Theatre Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Canadian Theatre Review.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USIssue 141 (2010) through current issueLatest Articles: Canadian Theatre ReviewTWOProject MUSE®Canadian Theatre Review1920-941X0315-0836Latest articles in Canadian Theatre Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®XR Techno-Friction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961465
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While XR (extended reality) technologies have been used by theatre and performance artists for more than two decades, they have become much more prevalent in recent years as the COVID-19 pandemic demanded safe delivery formats and XR tools have become more accessible, in both cost and availability. From productions that have audiences enter new worlds via virtual reality headsets to site-specific experiences where participants use phones to view augmented reality images, XR performance offers creators new methods for imaginative world-building and interactive spectatorship while quickly redefining ideas of liveness and co-presence, long considered building blocks of the theatrical experience.The term ‘extended
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallXR Techno-Friction2025-06-04text/htmlen-USXR Techno-Friction2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®504612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04In the World of Maamawi: Together through the Fire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961466
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In initial encounters with Indigenous Elders, we are often asked the following two questions: Who are you, and where do you come from? There are no right or wrong answers; however, one is required to provide an answer, even when that answer is slow in surfacing. I first met with an Anishinaabe Elder in my early twenties, and these questions were asked of me. At the time, I knew nothing of where I came from or what cultural heritage was mine to reclaim, as I was raised by my foster family. The encounter pushed me to research my personal legacy and start the process of uncovering my mixed-blood Anishinaabe roots.Cultural heritage, once reclaimed, can inspire an individual to learn the stories of that culture
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallIn the World of Maamawi: Together through the Fire2025-06-04text/htmlen-USIn the World of Maamawi: Together through the Fire2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®327832026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Liveness Plus in Political Virtual Reality Performance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961467
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A technician hidden as an ‘invisible’ avatar fires a series of cues as the audience turns the corner to arrive underneath the flags that adorn the Novotel Hotel in downtown Toronto. As the sound of riot shields being hit by batons in unison swells, the light begins to fade, and a circle of riot cops surround the participants. Tommy Taylor, performing as both narrator and tour guide, shares the fear and confusion that permeated this scene at the 2010 G20 protests, while the nighttime lighting reflects the red-blue flash of police cars in puddles. The claustrophobic sensation of being kettled by police increases as the circle becomes smaller and smaller; meanwhile, megaphone instructions from the police make it clear
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallLiveness Plus in Political Virtual Reality Performance2025-06-04text/htmlen-USLiveness Plus in Political Virtual Reality Performance2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®542782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Ugly Crying in Virtual Reality: Unpacking Emotional Immersion in Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961468
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Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a compelling platform for immersive storytelling, gaining visibility across film festivals, technology exhibitions, and academic events. As a VR scholar and programmer for community-based film festivals, I have experienced a diverse array of VR works in settings ranging from major industry events to student showcases and even an artist’s basement. This exposure fuels my ongoing curiosity about how artists and creators are leveraging VR as a narrative medium and how these experiences are being presented to audiences new to this technology.Despite growing enthusiasm for this art form, VR remains relatively inaccessible for many. Its immersive nature, while innovative, presents
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallUgly Crying in Virtual Reality: Unpacking Emotional Immersion in Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close2025-06-04text/htmlen-USUgly Crying in Virtual Reality: Unpacking Emotional Immersion in Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®354612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Utilizing Extended Reality as a Pedagogical and Continuous Learning Tool for the Performing Arts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961469
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Promotional image for The Nefertiti Experience.Photo by Debbie DeerRaise your hand if you have normalized being asked if you are a robot by a computer during a routine captcha verification. The fact that we as humans are already vying for validity from the very tools that we often fear will make us obsolete is a true indicator that we have reached a turning point in human existence.Futurist Ray Kurzweil describes a point in the near future at around the year 2045 called ‘the Singularity’ when technology evolves so fast it is impossible to know what is on the other side (136). Kurzweil posits that during this period of singularity, ‘speed super intelligence’ will occur, with an artificial intelligence robot taking
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallUtilizing Extended Reality as a Pedagogical and Continuous Learning Tool for the Performing Arts2025-06-04text/htmlen-USUtilizing Extended Reality as a Pedagogical and Continuous Learning Tool for the Performing Arts2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®331682026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Trans Glitching in Social Virtual Reality
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961470
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We live in a media environment that prioritizes easily digestible, bingeable content, where great effort is made to suppress glitches—moments when digital coding fails and creates unanticipated ruptures. Expectations of seamlessness extend to emerging technologies like virtual reality (VR), which can be especially glitchy. In this article, I use autoethnography and participant observation to expand our understanding of transness by analyzing player responses to a glitch in a virtual world I created. The world contains a crevice that causes players to detach from their avatars, an event typically seen as an instance of dysfunction in VR. Instead of fixing the glitch, I enshrined it and invited my VR friends—many of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallTrans Glitching in Social Virtual Reality2025-06-04text/htmlen-USTrans Glitching in Social Virtual Reality2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®436962026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04this space is for you: Performing Site through Mixed Reality and Volumetric Capture
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961471
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The question of how to ‘enter’ a dialogue is an interesting one. (We’ll come back to that!) Can you tell me about the experimentation that you have been doing recently with volumetric capture for virtual reality [VR]? How did this start and then lead to the larger work you recently presented at the 2023 Prague Quadrennial?this space is for you wasn’t supposed to be a virtual reality work. It was planned as an augmented reality [AR] project on a mobile device, specifically crafted for a public space in Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles. It was a research project funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) just before the pandemic. And then the pandemic happened, and I had this grant for three years, and I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallthis space is for you: Performing Site through Mixed Reality and Volumetric Capture2025-06-04text/htmlen-USthis space is for you: Performing Site through Mixed Reality and Volumetric Capture2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®402022026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Imaginative Complicity, Interactive Tech, and the Challenges of Making Theatre in a New Digital Age
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961472
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In 2019, I was directing and dramaturging a play for family audiences, Rella’s Cambrian Dream. Written by Michael O’Brien, it takes an all-ages audience on a science-fantasy adventure back 530 million years to a remarkable time in our earth’s history— the Cambrian explosion. The heroes of the story are tiny ancient creatures whose unique soft-tissue fossils populate today’s UNESCO-protected sites in Canada’s Rocky Mountains and around the world. Scientists are constantly making new discoveries that inform how we interpret and visualize these creatures based on these fossils. Taking these characters’ journeys as a point of departure, our story explores our connection to our past and present through current
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallImaginative Complicity, Interactive Tech, and the Challenges of Making Theatre in a New Digital Age2025-06-04text/htmlen-USImaginative Complicity, Interactive Tech, and the Challenges of Making Theatre in a New Digital Age2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®290212026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Augmenting Reality, Expanding Community: Transformative Audio in Future Food Visions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961473
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At the intersection of Wyndham and Macdonell Streets in the heart of downtown Guelph, two figures stand with their eyes closed. They slowly open their eyes and turn to face one another. They are taking deep breaths and calmly gazing into one another’s eyes. Passersby look at the pair with some suspicion but avoid them and continue on their way. If someone looks closely, however, they will notice that the duo both wear earbuds. While they are connected to each other visually, they are actually listening to separate audio tracks that lead each listener through fictional stories as well as real lived experiences in the downtown Guelph area. At this moment, though, the two different audio narrators say the same thing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallAugmenting Reality, Expanding Community: Transformative Audio in Future Food Visions2025-06-04text/htmlen-USAugmenting Reality, Expanding Community: Transformative Audio in Future Food Visions2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®473972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04All around Us: The Unfamiliar Familiar
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961474
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As AI slowly permeates daily life, from medical and scientific research to the news in our feed and devices in our hands, I feel more uncertain about who is behind anything. Deferring to what is served up under an algorithmic guise of personalization will never be the same as a personal touch. It is a game that has sent us into a replay of the early days of Photoshop, alert for anomalies in the logic of an image, tone of a text, or sound of a voice. You know the email that comes in addressed to you, but, shortly after, the salutation font changes and you understand you’re on a list? Another name. This is data time.You are swimming in it—an exercise in semiotics. I am swimming in it too. The best learning is done in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallAll around Us: The Unfamiliar Familiar2025-06-04text/htmlen-USAll around Us: The Unfamiliar Familiar2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®270462026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Walking and Walking About: Reflections on a Repurposed Tool
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961475
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The This Is Nowhere audience gathers.Photo by Mel HattieAnyone who has ever collaboratively devised a show is familiar with a kind of crisis of authorship. When you’re making something in a room, inevitably one suggestion leads to another, ideas spark off one another, and eventually (hopefully) you end up with something that feels like a good thing. It’s the feeling you’ve been searching for up until this point, and it comes as a relief after the previous days of ritually banging your head against the wall. But, in all the excitement, you forget whose idea the good idea was or— more commonly—it is hard to identify a single good idea that set the creative process on the right track. The good thing came about as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallWalking and Walking About: Reflections on a Repurposed Tool2025-06-04text/htmlen-USWalking and Walking About: Reflections on a Repurposed Tool2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®339842026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Alone Together
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961476
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallAlone Together2025-06-04text/htmlen-USAlone Together2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®69112026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Relational Indigenous Performance Writing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961477
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This issue of Views and Reviews features three author responses by Indigenous authors on recent Indigenous performance writing.First, Mohawk/English scholar Laura Hall responds to Jill Carter’s (Anishinaabe Ashkenazi) new book, Retreating to Re-Treat: A Performative Encounter at the ‘Edge of the Woods.’ Next, Aotearoa (NZ)-based Indigenous dance artist Jade Whaanga responds to settler dance scholar Jaqueline Shea Murphy’s work, Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation. Finally, Cree dancer and scholar Sandra Lamouche responds to the new collection of plays and dramaturgical writings Staging Coyote’s Dream, volume 3, edited by Lindsay Lachance (Algonquin) and Monique Mojica (Guna Rappahannock).I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallRelational Indigenous Performance Writing2025-06-04text/htmlen-USRelational Indigenous Performance Writing2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®118592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04There’s Something in a Story: Retreating to Re-Treat
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961478
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There’s something in a story. A story told through movement and thought, song and poetry, is imagination in relationship with all of creation. These were my first thoughts on reviewing the wonderful Retreating to Re-Treat: A Performative Encounter at the ‘Edge of the Woods’, by the Collective Encounter with Anishinaabe theatre scholar Jill Carter. I read this book after an extended period spent chasing job security, writing academically, and attempting to tap into storytelling in my own ways. Within a few pages, I breathed deeply into the process and teachings and embodiment that this written work somehow encourages.The book opens with a teaching about our current time. As I type these words, my chest seems to want
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallThere’s Something in a Story: Retreating to Re-Treat2025-06-04text/htmlen-USThere’s Something in a Story: Retreating to Re-Treat2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®110662026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Dancing into Relationality through Reciprocity, Resistance, and Resurgence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961479
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The cover lay before me, evoking a sense of anticipation. Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation features a performer gripping flowing fabrics, their gaze and focus intent on what appears to be a pool of water. A dance of light and shadow sets the tone, with Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s name humbly placed to the left, foreshadowing the book’s focus on the storytelling, the dance, and the relations that hold the spotlight. Through critical compassionate insights, engaging conversations, and vivid descriptions of performances, the book highlights Indigenous contemporary dance as a way of being, while addressing ethical complexities in Indigenous studies and dance collaboration.Shea Murphy opens with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallDancing into Relationality through Reciprocity, Resistance, and Resurgence2025-06-04text/htmlen-USDancing into Relationality through Reciprocity, Resistance, and Resurgence2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®141242026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04Staging Coyote’s Dream
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961480
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Cover image for Monique Mojica and Lindsay Lachance’s Staging Coyote’s Dream Volume III.Credit: Playwrights Canada PressVolume 3 of Staging Coyote’s Dream, is a necessary testament, record, and assertion of self-determination and sovereignty in Indigenous performance. The text is radical in its centring of Indigenous practices in performance and going against colonial imposed ideas, structures, and all the ways in which Indigenous people, land, bodies, and stories have been exploited, harmed, and erased. Editors Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock) and Dr. Lindsay Lachance (Algonquin and Anishnaabe) highlight and offer examples and explanations of “Indigenous Dramaturgies as a Radical Relational Continuum” in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/470/image/coversmallStaging Coyote’s Dream2025-06-04text/htmlen-USStaging Coyote’s Dream2025-06-042025TWOProject MUSE®166802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-06-04