Scott Magelssen

CTR 163 (Summer 2015)
Performance Futures: Imagining Theatre in 2030

Edited by Jenn Stephenson and Laura Levin

Also available on Project MUSE

CTR 163 (Summer 2015): Performance Futures: Imagining Theatre in 2030, edited by Jenn Stephenson and Laura Levin, explores very recent innovations in theatre and performance, and asks what they can tell us about where the field is headed. Focusing on new formats of theatrical production and reception, contributors have been invited to answer the question: “What will the performance landscape in Canada look like in fifteen years?” This is not theatre in a distant sci-fi future but theatre that is just around the corner. The assembled collection brings together voices that are passionate and visionary, and address such disparate topics as the future of theatre in online venues, the future of interculturalism and cultural diversity in theatre, the future of theatre funding, and the future of theatre criticism. The script featured in this issue is Concord Floral, winner of the 2015 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. Written by Governor General Award-winning playwright Jordan Tannahill, and co-created with acclaimed artists Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner along with a group of exceptional Toronto teens, this powerful text exhibits alternative ways of representing the lives of tomorrow’s youth as well as more ecologically responsive human futures. Concord Floral is accompanied by an arresting series of staged photo-portraits by Erin Brubacher, which help reconceptualize the boundaries of a theatrical script and production.

Click here to read the full table of contents.

For more information about the Canadian TheatreReview or for submissions information, please contact:

Canadian Theatre Review
University of Toronto Press, Journals Division
5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M3H 5T8, Canada
Tel: (416) 667-7810 Fax: (416) 667-7881
Fax Toll Free in North America 1-800-221-9985
Email: journals@utpress.utoronto.ca
Website: www.canadiantheatrereview.com

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This spring (2015) I led a graduate seminar in the Center for Performance Studies at the University of Washington called “Emerging Discourses in Theatre and Performance Studies.” Throughout the ten-week term, we discussed readings in three areas: Ecocriticism, the Cognitive Sciences, and Affect Theory. Each of these areas represented discursive “turns,” that is, conversations that have emerged fairly recently in our fields and do not seem to be going away soon. The goal for the seminar, then, was for the students to become familiar with these discourses, so that they would be at the very least conversant with them in reading and at conferences, and, even better, equipped with “tool belts” of helpful concepts and resources for their own research.

We devoted roughly three weeks to a crash-course in each area, reading essays from special journal issues and collections and discussing them in the seminar. One of the benefits of taking on contemporary scholarly conversations was that when we had questions or confusions about particular concepts or arguments, we could contact many of the working scholars in the field to ask them directly, and our colleagues in the field were generous, thoughtful and timely in their responses. At the end of each unit, the students compiled a working inventory of provocative key terms and concepts that gave some shape to the conversation and that could serve as indexes for future term papers, dissertation chapters, conference presentations and publications.

Attached are .pdf files of our inventories, along with a syllabus for the course. We hope they might be useful springboards for a larger collective of scholars engaged in these conversations.

• DRAMA 587 Emerging Discourses Sp 2015 Syllabus
• EcoCritism Inventory
• Cognitive Sciences Inventory
• Affect Inventory

Additions, corrections, and suggestions are welcome in the comments section, below.

Seminar Participants: Monica Cortés-Viharo (Drama), Jay Eckard (Drama), Duygu Erdoğan Monson (Drama), Storm S. Sundberg (Dance), Robert Wighs (Drama). With thanks to Monica Cortés-Viharo for transcribing and organizing the inventories, and to Rhonda Blair, Amy Cook, Baz Kershaw, and Theresa May.

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CTR 162 / Spring 2015

Performing Products: When Acting Up Is Selling Out

Edited by T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko, Didier Morelli and Isabel Stowell-Kaplan

How can we, as artists, scholars, and critics, determine where art might and might not intervene into matters that exceed its immediate aesthetic parameters? Why is there such a pervasive fear within the art community that art might presume too much, getting in the way of “real action” and “real change”? Moreover, does art’s role, witting or not, within commodity culture render any political motivation it might carry with it a commodity as well? What do we do when acting up is already selling out? These tensions and confusions, these preoccupations and paranoias are precisely what we address in Performing Products: When Acting Up Is Selling Out. Featuring interviews, photo-essays, reflections on performances past, articles on the current state of performance as a set of deftly imbricated practices and economics, as well as one letter-cum-manifesto, we have deliberately blurred the lines between art, performance, and criticism in this issue: Percival P. Puppet discusses his copyright dispute with Marina Abramović; Istvan Kantor writes to Jeff Koons; Nicole Lizée talks of her love for merch in a world of avant-garde composition; Lawrence Switzky considers the redemptive possibility of exhaustion in marathon theatre; and many more artists and scholars reflect upon their own experience of performance in the current economy.

Click here to read the full table of contents.

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Performance and Human Rights in the Americas

Also available at CTR online

Motivated by recent artistic and scholarly efforts to query Canada’s place in the hemisphere, this issue features activists, artists, and researchers working at the intersection of performance and human rights both within and beyond Canadian borders. The performance actions examined in this issue travel across the geography and the history of the Americas in an effort to resist, redress, and protest human rights abuses. In the wake of the official opening of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, this issue raises timely questions about how performance can serve as a potent site of inquiry that interrogates the very terms and conditions of human rights discourse, particularly in the curation of Canada as a human rights leader. While each voice in this collection speaks to a distinct issue that is harrowing in scope (femicide, genocide, institutional violence, treaty rights, food insecurity, corporate violence), all unite in their call for continental coalitions and solidarity to expand inter-American dialogue northwards and to assess Canada’s role in the complex, ongoing, and unfinished history of human rights.  CTR 161 / Winter 2015

Click here to read the full table of contents.

The Canadian Theatre Review features thought-provoking plays and articles on currentissues and trends in Canadian theatre. CTRprovides the Canadian theatre community with in-depth feature articles, manifestos, slideshows, videos, design portfolios, photo essays, and other documents that reflect the challenging forms that theatre takes in the contemporary Canadian arts scene.

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CTR 160, Fall 2014

Actor Training in a Changing Landscape

Also available at CTR online

Featuring the voices of acting trainers, actors, directors, graduates, policy makers and theorists from across the country, this issue explores key challenges facing acting training in English-speaking Canada. It also begins to imagine ways through and beyond them. The concept of “diversities” is used as a central organizing principle to unpack monolithic realities blocking the development of acting training, including a current and troubling absence of diversity in institutional approaches to aesthetics, to questions of gender and sexuality, and to the cultural realities of the student population. From the classroom, to the rehearsal, to the stage, this collection of interviews, lively conversations, essays and manifestos is sure to shift and intensify the national discussion about acting training.

Click here to view the full table of contents.

The Canadian Theatre Review features thought-provoking plays and articles on current issues and trends in Canadian theatre. CTRprovides the Canadian theatre community with in-depth feature articles, manifestos, slideshows, videos, design portfolios, photo essays, and other documents that reflect the challenging forms that theatre takes in the contemporary Canadian arts scene.

You can also access CTR on the various online platforms below.

CTR Online (http://bit.ly/CTRONLINE)

Project MUSE (http://bit.ly/ctrPMUSE)

CTR on YouTube (http://bit.ly/ctrYTUBEVIDEOS)

Website (www.canadiantheatrereview.com)

Facebook (http://bit.ly/CTRFaceBook)

For more information about the Canadian Theatre Review or for submissions information, please contact:

Canadian Theatre Review
University of Toronto Press, Journals Division
5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M3H 5T8, Canada
Tel: (416) 667-7810 Fax: (416) 667-7881
Fax Toll Free in North America 1-800-221-9985
Email: journals@utpress.utoronto.ca
Website: www.canadiantheatrereview.com

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Canadian Theatre Review
Volume 159, Summer 2014
http://bit.ly/PMctr159

Also available at CTR Online

Digital Performance
Edited by Peter Kuling and Laura Levin

CTR 159 focuses on the vibrant experimentations with digital technology that are taking place within the performance field. In line with CTR’s interest in covering new directions in theatre, the issue explores how digital technologies are leading performance into new physical and virtual spaces. Plays are now routinely staged online and on social media platforms; site-specific shows use cellphone texting on city streets; and players engage in complex performances of self in the imaginative worlds of video games. CTR 159 stresses the social and political dimensions of theatrical encounters with “new” technologies and interrogates the role digital media plays in providing individuals from historically marginalized communities with DIY forms of self-expression.

Scripts featured in this issue include LANDLINE: From Halifax to Vancouver by Dustin Harvey and Adrienne Wong, a cellphone performance experienced simultaneously by spectators on opposite sides of the country, and How iRan: Three Plays for iPod by Ken Cameron, a shuffleable audio play on imprisoned Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan.

The issue also features excerpts from the theatrical experiments of Praxis Theatre—such as Section 98, an open source play that invites audiences to respond electronically to the show as it develops—and a slideshow surveying the use of digital technologies by theatre companies from across Canada.

For more information about the Canadian Theatre Review, please visit us at www.canadiantheatrereview.com

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Modern Drama Volume 57, Number 2 /2014
http://bit.ly/572smd

This issue contains:

The Chronotopic Dynamics of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society: The Triumph of Industrialism, or How Drama Becomes History
Erinç Özdemir
http://bit.ly/572amd

Ventriloquist Theatre and the Omniscient Narrator: Gatz and El pasado es un animal grotesco
Barbara Fuchs
http://bit.ly/572bmd

Parody, E.E. Cummings, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
James M. Cherry
http://bit.ly/572cmd

“A Little History Here, a Little Hollywood There”: (Counter-)Identifying with the Spanish Fantasy in Carlos Morton‘s Rancho Hollywood and Theresa Chavez’s L.A. Real
Courtney Elkin Mohler
http://bit.ly/572dmd

“Remove Your Mask”: Character Psychology in Introspective Musical Theatre – Sondheim’s Follies, LaChiusa’s The Wild Party, and Stew’s Passing Strange
Alisa Roost
http://bit.ly/572emd

Rethinking Sarah Kane’s Characters: A Human(ist) Form and Politics
Louise LePage
http://bit.ly/572fmd

Reviews
http://bit.ly/572gmd

Sean Carney, The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy, reviewed by Lily Cui

Leslie Atkins Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries, reviewed by Miriam Chirico

Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China, reviewed by Jen-Hao Hsu

Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real, reviewed by Liz Tomlin

Vassiliki Rapti, Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond, reviewed by Johanna Malt

Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990-2010, reviewed by Miriam Felton-Dansky

Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure, reviewed by Jessica Del Vecchio

Maurya Wickstrom, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew, reviewed by Jason Fitzgerald

Modern Drama was founded in 1958 and is the most prominent journal in English to focus on dramatic literature. The terms “modern” and “drama” are the subject of continuing and fruitful debate, but the journal has been distinguished by the excellence of its close readings of both canonical and lesser-known dramatic texts from a range of methodological perspectives. The journal features refereed articles written from a variety of geo-political points of view which enhance our understanding, both formal and historical, of the dramatic literature of the past two centuries; there is also an extensive book review section.

Complete Modern Drama Online archive now available! Modern Drama Online is a fully searchable electronic resource, featuring a complete archive of regular and special themed issues. The archive contains over 3000 articles and reviews dating back to 1958.

For submissions information, please contact the editor at:
Modern Drama Editorial Office
c/o Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies
214 College Street, 3rd Floor (room 326)
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5T 2Z9
Fax: 416-971-1378
Email: modern.drama@utoronto.ca

For further information, please contact

Modern Drama

University of Toronto Press – Journals Division
5201 Dufferin St., Toronto, ON  Canada M3H 5T8
Tel: (416) 667-7810 Fax: (416) 667-7881
Fax Toll Free in North America 1-800-221-9985
email: journals@utpress.utoronto.ca
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Burlesque

Edited by Shelley Scott and Reid Gilbert

CTR#158 offers an extended conversation about burlesque in Canada, from archival photos and historical contextualization to the most current interpretations of what neo-burlesque can be and what it can do. The audacious urban experience of Montreal lives beside the off-the-grid exuberance of Lasqueti Island. The details of costume construction in ancouver are considered alongside legal definitions that dictatecostumes in Calgary.

The issue offers an in-depth exploration of Toronto’s Operation Snatch, formerly The Scandelles, with two articles that chart the company’s trajectory from burlesque to political cabaret, a Scandelles script, and an interview with founder Alexandra Tigchelaar. Also exclusively online, Adriana Disman has curated a dialogue among socially conscious performers using neo-burlesque for social change. Whether conveying the experience of a male burlesque performer or drawing parallels with the community-building appeal of roller derby, the authors in this issue dissect, interrogate, and expand the definitions of burlesque.

Click here to read the editorial and view the full table of contents.

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