Introduction: Performance Futures

In its scope of interest, Canadian Theatre Review is a forward-looking entity, concerned always with developments in performance in Canada, the writers attentive to trending theatrical events and perspectives that are innovative and cutting-edge. Each issue of Canadian Theatre Review is a report from where we are now. Immediately now. But thinking about the temporal situation of now inevitably entails awareness of how we got to now and speculation about where we go next. The recent Progress: International Festival of Performance and Ideas, presented by Toronto’s SummerWorks in partnership with the Theatre Centre, embodied a similar impulse. In a reflexive interview on the festival’s name, curator Michael Rubenfeld was asked to consider the question, “What is progress?” In his response, Rubenfeld lauded the concept of progress and recognized its power for change but resisted the notion that progress always and necessarily entails growth, offering instead a secondary definition connoting “increasing in scope or severity” (Poon). That same intonation is at work here in this issue on the topic of performance futures. By bringing together a bold cadre of avant-garde voices, we aim to enrich the ecology, stimulating consideration of how change happens, envisioning what kinds of changes we hope for and what kinds of changes we fear.

Contributors to this issue were tasked with considering these futures, not at long range but in the middle distance. These futures are not a thousand years away, nor even a hundred years. We asked them to look around the next corner, to peek ahead a mere fifteen years from now to 2030—a future we can reasonably expect to experience. A future with one foot in the present. And as we look to this near future, our current situation with all its challenges and opportunities comes into sharp focus. Writing about nowhere places and not-yet places, Jacques Rancière says that utopia is a space of dynamic ambiguity, negotiating the relationship between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. On the one hand, it is, as a non-place, radical and category-breaking, “the extreme point of a polemical reconfiguration of the sensible”; on the other, “it is also the configuration of a proper place, a non-polemical distribution of the sensible universe where what one sees, what one says or does are rigorously adapted to one another” (40). It is on this fulcrum that this issue rests, balanced between what is and what ought to be, between accommodation and adaptation to current conditions and radical, iconoclastic rethinking of the foundations of those conditions.

Mel Gordon in “A History of the Future (to 1984)” gives a short précis of several dozen historical utopian plans for theatre and performance, supplemented with illustrations of these futuristic theatre structures and systems. “Almost by definition, these immodest suggestions, projects and predictions had to have an impracticable, socially undesirable, or technologically unfeasible aspect” (13). Failure is the common denominator of these utopian visions; otherwise, as Gordon points out, they would actually exist. Included in this gallery of failure are such eminent figures as Plato, Francis Bacon, Richard Wagner, Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and, of course, the Italian Futurists, among many others. In the same journal issue, Tony Kushner offers his flippant listing of what the future might hold, asserting, “Oh why bother to talk about the theatre of Utopia, or anything having to do with Utopia, when all you have to do is read the paper in the morning and every hope you ever had will be dashed?” (9). This is the crux of thinking about the future. Consideration of the future hinges on drawing attention to present dilemmas. And even with this burden, we believe that taking time to engage the imagination with these airy fantasies is important regardless of the actual answers proposed. True, looking to the future is inevitably an exercise in failure and disappointment, but, nevertheless, we will look and we will hope.

First, it is impossible not to talk about how digital applications in their myriad forms have invaded and reconfigured nearly every facet of social, political, artistic, and economic interactions in the early twenty-first century and, by extension, how these technological advances will profoundly transform the nature of performance. In the first article in the issue, interdisciplinary performance artist Liz Solo, based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, documents her adventures in hybrid space. Working at the borders of the live and the virtual, Solo describes various projects that employ augmented-reality devices and applications to allow these two worlds to blend, thereby bringing together far-flung bodies of artists and audiences in mixed physical/non-physical environments. In a large country like Canada, where we are physically separated by great distances, the technology of virtual worlds affords us new ways to interact and share common experiences. Sarah Garton Stanley is also thinking about how the alternate spatiality and interconnectivity of online platforms cannot just house a community but allow the community to bring itself into being through the collation of its varied views. Here, she reports on the vision for SpiderWebShow—a performance “magazine” unbound from print and paper—to operate as a repository for a national imaginary. The intersection of technology and the self-reflexive performative imagination is also a theme for designer Andy Moro. Co-founder and co-director of ARTICLE 11, Moro meditates on the communicative qualities of projected light as a medium, different from steel or glass. But technology alone is not the whole story as he traces an autobiographical journey to find his home among collaborative teams of fellow artists to practise what Moro calls “designaturgy.”

When we talk about community, we talk about inclusion and connectivity, but we also talk about exclusion and about the entrenched systems and habitual patterns of thinking that create boundaries among us. Mumbi Tindyebwa of IFT (It’s a Freedom Thing) Theatre, Toronto, and Corey Payette of Urban Ink, Vancouver, consider how the work they make today and the work they want to make tomorrow both responds to and resists mainstream conventions and mainstream attitudes of spectatorship. Each imagines a future where methods of training, structures of narratives, styles of storytelling, even modes of how we occupy space, are radically transformed, shedding confining Eurocentric assumptions and instead embracing African and Indigenous influences respectively. Thinking about the state of theatre, Matthew Causey lists three suppositions but qualifies them by defining his suppositions as “uncertain beliefs.” Supposition number two on his list proposes that we “have exhausted the questions of identity (i.e. race, gender and so on) isolating the markings and interests of the individual in manners that are similar to the digital transformation of consumers into commodities … reduc[ing] the individual to an isolated identity that is traceable, identifiable and eventually disposable” (299). I am not convinced that we have indeed reached the end of identity, but Causey’s notion that these markers may someday make us disposable resonates with Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s contribution to this issue. St. Bernard imagines herself fifteen years in the future—a future where we have finally reached peak equity, a future where all possible stories are heard and appreciated. Without her accustomed fortified position on the margins, now that there are no margins, St. Bernard is lost … that is, until she finds a new cause to champion.

Another persistent concern that inevitably arises when we look to the future is the environmental question of resource sustainability. For Payette, people are the key sustainable resource as he emphasizes the value of training to broaden the reach of Indigenous and culturally diverse voices in theatre institutions across Canada. Guardian theatre columnist Lyn Gardner is also concerned about sustainability when she speculates about future challenges, expressing concern “for non- or less text-based theatre including live art, circus, street arts, cross-boundary and digital art” in an era of reduced government funding when access to key resources of space and funding gets squeezed. She draws attention to the critical balance between protecting a legacy and enabling emerging work and grassroots creation. Theatre WhyNot artistic director Ravi Jain is also thinking about how to reconfigure the currently unequal distribution of resources between larger, more established companies and smaller, more recent incarnations. He argues that it is imperative for the sustainable health and diversity of the theatre ecosystem that emerging artists have access to the water, air, and sunshine of theatre production: principally funding and the associated resources of space, time, and expertise. This same focus on prosperous interdependent networks that benefit the whole pertains to not only theatrical production but also theatrical reception. As the epicentre of critical reach and authority is fragmenting, breaking from a few established critics located in traditional media like print and radio to numerous grassroots self-authorizing critics in the blogosphere, the discussion about the role of the theatre critic has reached a crucial point. Looking at examples both in Canada and in the United Kingdom, Karen Fricker assesses the challenges of this new situation.

Extending this democratizing focus, two pairs of writers document site-specific performance experiments that prioritize the active and interactive audience in the creation of the work. In different ways, both performances direct attention to notions of the everyday, finding innovative ways to impose new insights that transform the way we interact with our comfortable landscapes. For Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton, the central question is, “What does this community taste like?” In Hunter, Gatherer, Purveyor, the pair investigates the vegetation in different localities, comparing the distribution, type, and use of neighbourhood plants, both wild and cultivated. Ultimately, their foraged finds are processed into teas and popsicles to be consumed in situ by the audience. Mariah Horner and Grahame Renyk also report on a performance that invites us to reconfigure our relationship to a familiar object, in this case a large, flat, round stone in a public park. In Stones in the Woods, the stone itself is cast as an actor. From its long-ago history, along the continuum to our present connection, the stone persists after we are long gone, communicating its trajectory now permanently linked to my trajectory into the future. (Even now, I am thinking about that stone, still there across the park, quietly buried under the snow.) How we preserve the past undoubtedly affects how we live in the present and establishes the preconditions for how we imagine ourselves into the future. As Laine Zisman Newman writes, “[H]ow we recall what has been will shape what can be.” In her essay on queer women’s performance archives, Zisman Newman advocates for a messy and tangled archival practice that eschews a singular, closed narrative, rejecting separations between past, present, and future and facilitating dialogue between these positions.

Finally, for this issue’s script, we are thrilled to present Concord Floral, written by the 2014 Governor General’s Award–winning playwright Jordan Tannahill and co-created with acclaimed multidisciplinary artists Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner. By turns lyrical and brutal, the play uncovers the secretive lives of twenty-first-century teens who find refuge from a hostile adult world in an abandoned suburban greenhouse. In parallel with the fourteenth-century youths of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the teens tell stories as a diversion from the plague, a cruel plague that they may have spawned themselves. Like the stone in the park, the Concord Floral greenhouse is also a character in its own story, observing the passing dramas of generations of teens in its broken glass-paned walls. In the last line of the play, the greenhouse speaks: