Introduction: Documenting And Debating Performance In Canada

a sourcebook aLWays has TWo subJecTs: the topic it addresses and the cultural moment in which it is published.Canadian Performance Documents and Debates: A Sourcebook offers a selection of playscripts and reproduced archival materials that provide insight into theatrical activities from the seventeenth century to the early 1970s.This range of material encourages readers to consider the many ways that performance has been defined and documented over a span of more than 350 years.At the same time, this sourcebook reflects the contemporary view that communities, confederations, colonies, and nations are mutable concepts-social experiments with everchanging and often-contested ideological parameters and protocols.Our intention has not been to create a definitive, or even a comprehensive, historical overview of the country's theatrical past, but rather to facilitate twenty-first-century debates about how performance and its material remnants can raise important, yet vexing, questions about "Canada" in its many permutations.To help pursue the double focus of this volume, an impressive group of leading and emerging scholars, artists, and arts administrators has been gathered.The result is a vibrant and varied mix of voices and perspectives that complements the diversity of tones, styles, and convictions conveyed through the performance documents examined in this collection.Some of the contributors were invited to provide new English translations of theatrical texts in acknowledgement that translations are always historically situated and interpretative.Others were asked to write introductions for each chapter as a way to rethink the artistic and sociopolitical significance of well-known plays and theatrical events.Still others were requested to write introductions to initiate conversations about documents and modes of performance that traditionally have not received much attention.Indeed, several of the primary sources included in the collection are appearing in print for the first time.The contributors highlight several issues and themes that will resonate with contemporary readers.Several discuss a sense of apprehension about gender and race that is present in the documents they introduce.Others foreground how economic factors have tacitly determined the feasibility and contours of creativity.Still others grapple with how government agendas and political allegiances have impacted human rights as well as artistic expression.The mobility of ideas is also broached by some contributors who explore how theatrical trends that circulated transculturally were localized and then relaunched.While many of these topics reflect the perspectives of the people that is cohesively "Canadian in spirit" (vii).The achievement of that spirit is challenged by two pressing issues: that "Our theatres are under alien influences" and that "We accept in the main what Broadway sends us" (v).In short, Massey articulates qualms voiced by several subsequent anthology editors: a desire to contribute to the formation of a singular, unified national theatre in the face of perceived foreign cultural dominance and a lack of nature: "In January 1972 I was asked to join a growing but still fledgling organization whose aim was to develop and promote B.C. plays.This organization was the New Play Centre and from my first meeting with its founders, Sheila Neville and Douglas Bankson, I became swept up in the fervour surrounding the Canadian Playwright.This fervour, born out of a new national awareness Before proceeding further, it is worth noting that the phrase "the lands now known as Canada" is neither straightforward nor without debate.In fact, perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of this volume for twenty-firstcentury readers will be the use of the word "Canada."A collection of theatrical performance documents that extends back to 1606 needs to acknowledge that over the four centuries covered in this volume, the meaning of "Canada" and

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