Views and Reviews

Views and Reviews Natalie Alvarez This issue's Views and Reviews constellates performance events from Vancouver to Edmonton and Toronto to Montreal, each of which, in differing ways, calls into question the politics of visibility—and invisibility—in performance. As Natalie Rewa's piece on Tu vois ce que je veux dire? reminds us, we often take for granted performance's privileging of the ocular and with it, the delicate movement that is always at play in performance between visibility and invisibility, retrieval and obscurity, exposure and concealment. In a review that profitably examines two shows in conjunction with one another—Bruce Ruddell's Beyond Eden and Marie Clements' The Edward Curtis Project in Vancouver—Beverly Yhap examines how both shows perform "a kind of exhumation," bringing into view "received ideas of culture and privilege—of who occupies and creates any given artistic 'canon."' But these shows also examine the problematics of "preservationist strategies" and the kinds of erasure that can result in the museum's or the anthropologist's desire to plunder cultures "in the name of conservation." Yhap's response to a particularly powerful stage image in The Edward Curtis Project points to a potential hazard the work of the preservationist shares with that of artistic representation: "how to assert visibility against [the] sweeping panorama of seductive nostalgia"? The question of "how to assert visibility" also pervades Scott Sharplin's view piece, which documents the recent emergence of a new multidisciplinary company in Edmonton, Alberta devoted to Aboriginal arts—Alberta Aboriginal Arts (AAA). As the province with the highest Aboriginal population density, Sharplin asks why "the hearty, complex stew" of Aboriginal arts "somehow still remains invisible" in Alberta. AAA co-founders Christine Sokaymoh Frederick and Ryan Cunningham aim to foster and make visible Canada's "fastest growing and least visible cultures on both a national scale," as Sharplin concludes, "and right on their very own block." Like Yhap, Barry Freeman places two productions in dialogue with one another, Project: Humanity's The Middle Place and Cahoots Theatre Company's A Taste of Empire, both in Toronto. In The Middle Place, the company brings into view the often imperceptible problem of youth homelessness through verbatim theatre, comprised of transcribed interviews with residents of Toronto's Youth Without Shelter. In A Taste of Empire, the obscured material relations behind the food we eat are made distressingly and, at times, squeamishly transparent in the form of a cooking show in which sous-chef Jovanni prepares a traditional Filipino dish called rellenong bangus for his audience. As the fish is [End Page 104] gutted and stuffed with a "foreign mixture," the audience is taken through a history of not only Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, but also of the impacts, as Freeman says, of "the new imperialism of globalization" that now undergirds "systems of food production." After this visceral lesson on cooking, imperialism, and globalized food production, the audience is placed in a profound ethical quandary when they are invited to sample the fruits of Jovanni's labour: what is worse, to eat or not eat the fish? The spectator is made similarly visible and, at times, complicit in our final two views/reviews, which take us to Montreal's 2010 Festival TransAmériques. Both of the shows under examination deal with the politics—and poetics—of visibility. In their analysis of the Roman Tragedies, an intermedial adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra by Amsterdam's Toneelgroep, Natalie Corbett and Keren Zaiontz examine the "dynamic of constant visibility" created by an "aesthetic of surveillance." Through a glut of media technologies, the mise-en-scène situates Shakespeare's tragedies "in an era of globalized accessibility [and] digital reproduction" which, for these reviewers, raises questions about the "kinds of engagement" that are possible in these cultural conditions. Corbett and Zaiontz's examination focuses on the "spatial complicity and visible passivity" of the audience who, in a flow of movement between auditorium and stage, are made "visible, yet silent observers" of political intrigues and the formation of political personas generated by the media they, in turn, appropriate. As in the Roman Tragedies, participants of Tu vois ce que je...

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