Rob Appleford, Ed.: Aboriginal Drama and Theatre

ROB APPLEFORD, ed. Aboriginal Drama and Critical Perspectives on in English.Vol. 1. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2005. 187pp. ALAN FILEWOD, ed. Histories Critical Perspectives on in English. Vol. 13. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2009. 226pp. SUSAN KNUTSON, ed. Shakespeare Critical Perspectives on in English. Vol. 18.Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2010. 214pp. It's a measure of the critical and political orientation of the superb Critical Perspectives on in English series that the first volume is devoted to Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. In its title, of course, the volume lays claim to a specific sense of the field: whatever Canadian Theatre will emerge from the series, it will begin by embracing Aboriginal drama and theatre--a set of vexed terms in themselves--as constitutive. General editor Ric Knowles animates the teaching of drama and in schools and universities with this initial gesture, and whether it's Lewis Baumander's 1987 and 1989 productions of The Tempest, set on the Queen Charlotte Islands in the late eighteenth century and featuring two First Nations actors--Monique Mojica and Billy Merasty--as Ariel and Caliban, or the repeated engagements with the of Mojica, Tomson Highway, and other writers and performers, the Canadian theatre that emerges from this series maps its diversity from this point of departure. What do these three volumes have in common and how do they sketch the ambition of the series: to bring together the most important critical work (Aboriginal Drama and iii)--a mix of previously-published and newly-commissioned pieces--in the field, to open a perspective on the emergence of the formal discipline of Studies, and to fill in gaps in representation and correct historical injustices and imbalances, particularly those concerning marginalized communities (Canadian Shakespeare iii). In the Histories volume, Alan Filewod has been guided by a set of thematic concerns operating across the articles: an urgent commitment to feminist analysis (Susan Bennett's Feminist (Theatre) Historiography/Canadian (Feminist) Theatre), to the interplay between local and national identity formations (Ric Knowles's account of Mulgrave Road), and to the interface--marked in Denis Salter's landmark essay On Native Ground: Historiography and the Postmodernism/Post-colonialism Axis--between historiography and the competing paradigms of postcolonial and postmodern analysis, two terms of the art coeval with the configuration of Studies itself. These motifs are traced in other volumes, too, whether it's the localism of the classroom in Tony Dawson's essay on university actors meeting the universal bard in Susan Knutson's Shakespeare, on the ways in which nationalism is both reproduced and interrogated in specific Shakespeare productions and by the institutional function of festivals like Stratford, or indeed, in one of the central essays of Aboriginal Drama and Theatre, Knowles's self-conscious engagement of the productive friction between Aboriginal performance and an emerging academic discipline: is there a sense of the cultural work that this performance might perform in shifting power relationships within contemporary and 'American' (in its broadest senses) societies (107). Beyond charting a wary encounter with / / Studies, each of these volumes evinces a different grasp of the interplay between specific writers, companies, and productions and the development of framing analytical paradigms. Aboriginal Drama and opens, for instance, with Tomson Highway's 1987 On Native Mythology, an intense and personal effort to locate the task of the playwright in relation to the desire of we Indian people to defend its dreamlife, its particular landscape, and to share that something terribly relevant and beautiful with general audiences (3). …

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