Fresh Print in Canada

This issue features reviews of four new and noteworthy publications by Canadian researchers and artist-scholars. Together, these books raise questions about the ways in which performance works to constitute and cohere a sense of collectivity and nationhood. Ideas of nation and collectivity, these publications remind us, are processual, formed in and through the affective encounters that performance affords. In contradistinction to the “liveness” of performance, it might be tempting to think about theatre and performance studies scholarship as an exercise in belatedness and “retroactive substantialization,” to borrow Lauren Berlant’s phrase (848), capturing performances that once took place and ossifying them in the historical past. But these exciting recent publications exemplify how the critical writings on performance play a vital role in this formative process, allowing us to be attendant upon ideas of nation and belonging as they are produced in an “ongoing historical present” that “stands here as a thing being made, lived through, and apprehended” (Berlant 848). All four of these publications are especially attentive to the ongoing negotiations of the historical present as it unfolds.

In her review of Erin Hurley’s National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion (University of Toronto Press, 2011), Jen Harvie directs our attention to how Hurley situates her analyses of performance phenomena within the ongoing contestations of québécité (Quebecness) and the “national legitimation crises” that have complicated Quebec’s sense of selfhood (Harvie 84). Through her engagements in contemporary affect theory, Hurley examines the “representational labours” at work in the formation of nation (Hurley 3). Affect, Hurley attests, allows us to identify and isolate “the nation-form’s most necessary and fundamental labour”; citing political philosopher Etienne Balibar, this particular “labour” is framed as the “fundamental problem” of nation: “to produce the people. More exactly, it is to make the people produce itself continually as national community” (qtd. in Hurley 169).

In their award-winning collection of essays on Asian-Canadian theatre,¹ editors Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles wrestle with the complicated task of acknowledging how solidarity is produced among Asian-Canadian theatre companies while resisting the potentially homogenizing effects of “Asian-Canadian” as a descriptive category. Parie Leung, in her review of Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre (Playwrights Canada Press, 2011), examines how the collection produces “multiple solidarities” not only among artists and scholars working in various regions and fields of study, but also among the complex constellation of ethnicities that comprise the demonym “Asian Canadian”—one that is, the editors assert, “arguably still under construction” (qtd. in Leung 89).

Feminist theatre scholar Kim Solga reviews Shelley Scott’s history of Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre, Nightwood Theatre: A Woman’s Work Is Always Done (Athabasca UP, 2010), in the broader-context of recent studies reporting rather unsettling statistics on the status of women in Canadian theatre. Solga highlights how Scott captures the company’s tricky negotiations of “its status as Canada’s ‘national’ women’s theatre” and its strategic invocations of feminist alliance that “ghosts,” according to Solga, Scott’s “own work in the book”: the company positions itself “in such a way that neither downplays its feminism, nor alienates by the use of that highly charged, yet potentially galvanizing word” (Scott qtd. in Solga 87). In Solga’s view, Scott’s book serves as an important archive of the formation of feminist theatre in Canada.

Our Views and Reviews section concludes by rounding out the issue’s broader theme of ethnography and performance with a final word from our editor Brian Rusted as he takes a close look at contributor Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma-Women (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010). Through a methodology that hinges on Kazubowski-Houston’s own creative research process as a practitioner, the book reveals how performance is, as Rusted puts it, “embodied as epistemology and representational practice” (91). In a performance creation process that aims to give voice to the Roma women of Poland, the book reveals how self-reflexive understandings of Roma identity get played out over competing ideas about theatrical representation.

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