20 - Canadian drama: performing communities

Summary

Canadian theater historiography

Theater, like historiography, is a process of analyzing and evaluating a society’s past and present. It articulates particular places and times to address private and public issues that may transcend these particularities, and helps to shape the society it reflects. Theater history can be read as voicing a national narrative or as countering a national narrative, as culturally validating or iconoclastic. In Canada, where a vast and diverse geographical and social landscape challenges imaginative configuration, theater has developed in diverse communities which resist the imposition of a cultural center. A persistent loyalty to local and regional place troubles the imperative to articulate a coherent national identity. Nor should Canadian theater be read in evolutionary terms, as a chronological development through clearly discernible phases. Its origins and forms speak to its collaborative, dynamic, amorphous, and performative nature.

Theatrical ritual and performance have existed in Canada long before colonization in the form of First Nations ceremony and dance. However, these Indigenous performances have been occluded by a long-standing historical assumption that the first performance was a Masque entitled Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle France at Port Royal, Acadia (now Nova Scotia), written in 1606 by Parisian lawyer Marc Lescarbot, and enacted in barges and canoes by voyageurs dressed in Native regalia to celebrate the return of a French official from an exploratory sea voyage.