Taking Root, Routing Talk: Charting the Terrain of Asian Canadian Theatre

In 2006, Canadian Theatre Review published theatre scholar Ric Knowles’s interview with Nina Lee Aquino, then artistic director of Toronto’s fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company. Given Aquino’s “astonishing range of roles in theatre in Toronto” (Knowles 75), the interview served as a glimpse, through her experience and expertise, into the formative processes of theatre creation by “artists of colour” in Canada and more specifically in Toronto—whether perceived as alternative to the mainstream, as specific to a particular ethnic community, or under the broader banner of “Asian Canadian” work. Founded in 2002, fu-GEN’s “Asian Canadian” appellation compelled Knowles to ask Aquino: “I wonder whether fu-GEN represents a community that already exists or whether it helps to constitute such a community—to performatively bring ‘Asian Canadian’ into being as a category?” (77). Indeed, both Knowles and Aquino refer to the notion of “producing solidarity” among theatre artists, even if the actual definition and constitution of “Asian Canadian” remained deeply complicated. Three years later, this idea of an “Asian-Canadian community” within the context of theatre-making was solidified with the publication of the two-volume Love + Relasianships (2009), the first national anthology of Asian Canadian plays. Edited by Aquino, the anthology is, according to her, “a definitive record of a theatrical movement, a movement that reflects a multiplicity of styles and genres, joined together by the singular fact that they are a series of plays written by us, for us … and for Canada” (viii). To complement this formal aggregation of work and to contribute to the continued movement of Asian Canadian theatre, Aquino and Knowles co-edited Asian Canadian Theatre (2011), which is the subject of this review. This volume of essays not only investigates critically the being that is Asian Canadian theatre, but also strives in some ways to produce multiple solidarities—between theatre artists across regions, between scholars and artists, and between the fields of Asian American theatre and performance studies, Asian Canadian studies, and Canadian theatre studies.

Book cover of Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre (Playwrights Canada Press, 2011) edited by Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles, featuring Nadine Villasin in rehearsal for In the Shadow of Elephants.

Photo by Ric Knowles

Cover design by Leon Aureus

As the first volume of the new book series, New Essays on Canadian Theatre (NECT), this publication includes contributions from scholars and artists who attended GENesis: [the first] Asian-Canadian Theatre Conference, held in Toronto in May 2010, sponsored by fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company and the University of Guelph. In fact, according to Knowles and Aquino in their introduction, both the volume of essays and the conference were intended to inaugurate Asian Canadian theatre and performance studies as a scholarly field (vii). At the same time, they point out several problematic issues with such a celebratory way of “participat[ing] in a rhetoric of ‘firstness’” (vii), which is more broadly underpinned by the politics surrounding gaining visibility and recognition after long periods of absences and invisibility in the cultural landscape.

One of these key “visibilities,” then, is the term “Asian Canadian Theatre” itself. Knowles and Aquino assert that it does not “delineat[e] … any obvious or pre-existing entity in the world” (vii). Instead, “it is constituted as an object in discourse by the very acts of founding theatre companies, holding conferences, and publishing books that adopt and map a certain body of work and a certain set of practices as their terrain, giving the field that name” (vii). Further, the term is bound up in the complexities of “Asia” (a western concept) and “Asian” (a grouping strategy as a result of western imperialism), the latter of which, due to its “grouping together of heterogeneous and often conflicting peoples” (viii), also reveals differences in “grouping practices” in Britain and Canada under those terms. Noting how the label “Asian Canadian” is a “relatively recent construct” when...