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Showing 8177–8192 of 9267 results
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The York Factory Express
$24.95Every March between 1826 and 1854, the York Factory Express began its journey from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s headquarters on the Pacific Ocean, where the express-men paddled their boats up the Columbia River to the base of the Rocky Mountains at Boat Encampment, a thousand miles to the east. At Jasper’s House they were 3,000 feet above sea level. Their river route would return them to salt water once more, at York Factory, on the shores of Hudson Bay. It was an amazing climb and an amazing descent, and they would do a similar climb and descent on their journey home to the mouth of the Columbia. The stories of the York Factory Express, and of the Saskatchewan Brigades they joined at Edmonton House, are told in the words of the Scottish traders and clerks who wrote the journals. However, the voyageurs who made the journey possible are the invisible, unnamed Canadiens, Orkney-men, Iroquois, and their Métis children and grand-children, who powered the boats back and forthacross the continent every year. But their history was oral. If the traders had not preserved the stories the voyageurs told them, we would not know this history today – as it is portrayed in The York Factory Express.
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Theatre and (Im)migration
$25.00Theatre and (Im)migration shines a bright light on the impact that immigrant artists have made and continue to make on the development of Canadian theatre, from themes, characters, and world issues to financial structures and artistic techniques. This collection of essays demonstrates how the increased presence of immigrant theatre artists actively contributing to English and French Canadian theatre prompt their audiences to rethink fundamental concepts of nationalism and multiculturalism. Contributors include Moira Day, Alan Filewod, Aida Jordão, Ric Knowles, Natasha Martina Koechl, Rebecca Margolis, Lisa Ndejuru, Nicole Nolette, Eleanor Ty, and many more.
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Theatre and AutoBiography
$29.95That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and students of AutoBiography, a research subject now viewed as respectable in academic circles, have recently mapped the contours and shifting parameters of the autobiographical and the biographical processes, thereby contributing to the profile and stature of both.
This collection brings theatre practitioners together with academics from three continents in a groundbreaking exploration of the interdisciplinary realm of Theatre and AutoBiography. On the theoretical side, the contributors draw on a range of contemporary theorists: from Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas to Judith Butler, Mieke Bal and Homi Bhabha; from Elin Diamond and Jill Dolan to Leigh Gilmore, Paul John Eakin and Philippe Lejeune.
In general terms, auto/biographical performances have become hugely popular forms in Europe and North America because we live in a culture of me or I at a time when access to cultural production is easy. AutoBiographies satisfy our desire for story at the same time as they promise to give us truths (if not Truth). With the post-postmodern return of the author and the waning of a deep-seated antihumanism associated with modernist ideology and aesthetics, a desire for agency, voice, visibility and subjectivity has resurfaced with a renewed passion.
The playwrights discussed here could scarcely be more broadly representative of British and North American drama in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: from W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett to Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock and David Mamet; from Spalding Gray and Karen Finley to Linda Griffiths; and from Orlan to Sally Clark, R. H. Thomson, Monique Mojica and George Seremba, the range of styles performances and subjectivities is extraordinary.
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Theatre and Performance in Toronto
$25.00Includes:Toronto’s Baby Building Boom by Sandra Souchotte Ketchum (1979)Growing Pains: Toronto Theatre in the 1970s by Robert Wallace (1980)from In the Beginning Was Toronto: The Emergence of an Alternative Theatre Movement in English Canada by Renate Usmiani (1983)from A Dialectical Drama of Facts and Fictions on the Feminist Fringe by Amanda Hale (1987)Erasing Historical Difference: The Alternative Orthodoxy in Canadian Theatre by Alan Filewod (1989)Six Million Dollars and Still Counting by M. NourbeSe Philip (1993)Space Administration: Rereading the Material History of Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto by Michael McKinnie (1999)Toronto’s Spectacular Stage by Susan Bennett (2005)Multicultural Text, Intercultural Performance: The Performance Ecology of Contemporary Toronto by Ric Knowles (2009)Evicted in—and from—Toronto: Walker’s Beautiful City at Factory Theatre by J. Chris Westgate (2009)Building Utopia: Performance and the Fantasy of Urban Renewal in Contemporary Toronto by Laura Levin and Kim Solga (2009)Decolonizing the Gathering Place: Chocolate Woman Dreams a Gathering House in Toronto by Jill Carter (2011)The Foster Children of Buddies: Queer Women at 12 Alexander by Moynan King (2011)Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada.
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Theatre Histories
$25.00Includes:The Toronto Lyceum: A Study of Early Canadian Theatre in Miniature by Richard Plant (1976)Infinite Variety or a Canadian “National” Theatre: Roly Young and the Toronto Civic Theatre Association, 1945–1949 by Anton Wagner (1988)Dora Mavor Moore: Before the New Play Society by Paula Sperdakos (1989)William Aberhart: The Evangelist as Subversive Political Dramatist by Moira Day (1990) Feminist (Theatre) Historiography/Canadian (Feminist) Theatre: A Reading of Some Practices and Theories by Susan Bennett (1992)Performing Politics: Propaganda, Parody and a Women’s Parliament by Kym Bird (1992)“Getting to” Canadian Theatre History: On the Tension Between the New History and the Nation State by Stephen Johnson (1992)Stories of Interest: Some Partial Histories of Mulgrave Road: Groping Towards a Method by Ric Knowles (1992)On Native Ground: Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Postmodernism/Postcolonialism Axis by Denis Salter (1992)Out of the Closet: Dramatic Works by Sarah Anne Curzon, Part One: Woman and Nationhood: Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812 by Celeste Derksen (1994)A Golf Club for the Golden Age: English Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Strange Case of Roy Mitchell by Scott Duchesne (1997)Captain George Vancouver and British Columbia’s First Play by James Hoffman (2000)Performance and Memory in the Party: Dismembering the Workers’ Theatre Movement by Alan Filewod (2003)Introduction to Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English by Monique Mojica and Ric Knowles (2003)“Seeking Clues of Queerness”: Researching Contemporary Canadian Queer Theatre by Tony Berto (2009)Sinking Neptune: Introduction by Donovan King (2009)Sinking Neptune by The Radical Dramaturgy Unit, Optative Theatrical Laboratories (2006/2009)Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada.
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Theatre in Alberta
$25.00Includes:
A Literary Perspective on the Plays of W. O. Mitchell by Diane Bessai (1984)Elsie Park Gowan: Distinctively Canadian by Anton Wagner (1987)
CKUA: Radio Drama and Regional Theatre by Howard Fink (1987)
The Banff School of Fine Arts 1933–1969: “A Theatre of the People” by Moira Day (1989)
“The Country Mouse at Play”: Theatre in the Peace River District 1914–1945 by Moira Day (1991)
“The Actors Excelled Their First Efforts”: Amateur Theatre in Lethbridge, Alberta, 1885–1990 by Ches Skinner (1996)
Reacting to the Right[eous]: The Political Plays of Frank Moher, Lyle Victor Albert, Raymond Storey and Greg Nelson by Anne Nothof (1996)
World on a String by Liz Nicholls (1998)
“Introduction” to Scraping the Surface: Three Plays by Lyle Victor Albert by Lynne Van Luven (2000)
Calgary’s Wild Ride: How the High Performance Rodeo Inspired and Transformed a Theatre Community by Martin Morrow (2005)
Globalisation’s Marginalia: Anglo-Canadian Identity and the Plays of Brad Fraser by Roberta Mock (2006)
The Construction of Masculinity in Sharon Pollock’s Whiskey Six Cadenza by Mark Vincent Diotte (2008)
Canada’s Citadel Theatre and the Alternatives by Diane Bessai (2008)
Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada. -
Theatre in Atlantic Canada
$25.00Includes:
Mermaid Theatre: The Mythic Dimension by Donna E. Smyth (1978)
On the Edge: Michael Cook’s Newfoundland Trilogy by Brian Parker (1980)
The Political Dramaturgy of the Mummers Troupe by Alan Filewod (1987)
Not Leaving Home: Growing up Artistically in Atlantic Canada by Bryden MacDonald (1990/91)
The Subjects of Salt-Water Moon by Robert Nunn (1991)
AnOther Story: Women’s Dramaturgy and the Circulation of Cultural Values at Mulgrave Road by Ric Knowles (1995)
On the Margins: Eastern Canadian Theatre as Post-colonialist Discourse by Mary Elizabeth Smith (1996)
Too Distant Voices: The Publishing of Dramatic Texts in the Maritimes by Bruce Barton (1999)
Icycle: New Languages. Newfoundland’s Artistic Fraud Creates New Languages for Theatre, New Languages for Icebergs by Denyse Lynde (2003)
Cultural Evolution in Newfoundland Theatre: The Rise Of The Gros Morne Theatre Festival by Michael Devine (2004)
Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd by George Elliott Clarke (2004)
from “God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!”: The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays by Jerry Wasserman (2005)
TheatrePEI: The Emergence and Development of a Local Theatre by George Belliveau, Josh Weale, Graham Lea (2005)
Building Bridges: English & French Theatre in New Brunswick by Glen Nichols (2005)
Can I Get a Witness? Performing Community in African-Nova Scotian Theatre by Maureen Moynagh (2006)
Crossing the River: Zuppa Circus’s Penny Dreadful by Roberta Barker (2008)
On the Edge of the Eastern World: John Barlow’s Inspiration Point and Atlantic Canadian Aboriginal Theatre by Len Falkenstein (2010)Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada.
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Theatre of the Unimpressed
$14.95How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it.
Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between?
A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form.
Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination.
‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom “interdisciplinary” is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail
‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General’s Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)
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Theatre Passe Muraille
$29.95In celebration of its fiftieth year of producing and providing space for new and diverse Canadian theatre, this book gathers touching tributes, funny anecdotes, fascinating photos, memorable reviews, and treasured memories of success and failure within and beyond the walls of Theatre Passe Muraille. Artists, creative teams, and theatre associates from throughout the theatre’s history have something juicy to share.
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Theatre Without Borders
$22.95Who are the artists who are currently invigorating Canadian theatre? They are the artists who come to the theatre through the “back door”—eccentrics, absurdists, puppeteers, clowns, raconteurs, and solo performance artists who are looking at our place in the world through physical comedy, satire, subversive humour, ingenuity. Their creations are generous, inventive and always infused with a high level of virtuosity. Much of this work is “borderless”—that is to say it breaks down the borders between the public and performer—mocking our preoccupations and pretensions, communicating stories with images, allusion, metaphor and unforgettable characters that fully engage the audience.
The artists profiled in this lively book have toured their works extensively, have performed to audiences around the globe to great acclaim and have influenced young performers through teaching and performance.
Through in-depth interviews, photographs and representative texts readers are also given the opportunity to be introduced to an astounding cross-section of influential English and French Canadian performance artists who are truly creating theatre without borders.
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their biography
$18.00Would it be possible to compose a book that appears to be “about” its author, but is indirectly about something else, like identity or relationships or language? Maybe a book not written by a hero… but by many?
This was the challenge taken up by Kevin McPherson Eckhoff in his fourth book, their biography: an organism of relationships. This collaborative memoir collages together word-portraits from friends, family, coworkers, strangers, robots, and even adversaries in order to create a silhouette of not a single person, but of the manacles that connect people to one another.
their biography is meant to make people think–it’s broad array of voices and poetic/prosaic forms disturbs comfortable patterns of reading, and its subject is as much about the contributors as the author. Eclectic and desolate, confessional and dubious, this record of relationships defies authorship, biography, and individualism.
Fans of Gregory Betts’s “Facebook Poem Project” or Rachel Zolf’s Tolerance Project, along with anyone compelled by contemporary poetry and conceptual art, will connect with this pixelated investigation into identity, and the true meaning of ‘self’ as we and others define it.
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Theme for Diverse Instruments
$18.95Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories, some of which were first published in The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States. Jane Rule is also the author of Desert of the Heart and Memory Board.
In the sensual and tender “Middle Children,” two closeted young lesbians radiate the joy of their love into the tumultuous lives around them.
In “A Television Drama,” Carolee Mitchell witnesses the capture of a wounded fugitive?and the blurring of the boundaries between reality and unreality.
Young Maly learns to contend with the games of her brother and his new friend by devising a game of her own in “My Father’s House.”
In “My Country Wrong,” an American lesbian returns at Christmas time to Vietnam-era San Francisco.
In the humourous story “House,” an uninhibited, nonconformist family tries conventionality on for size.Ruth hires Anna?but the women’s relationship encompasses far more complicated issues than Anna being Ruth’s “Housekeeper.”
In the unforgettable “In the Basement of the House”, a young woman grapples with the forces that entwine her life with a conventional-appearing husband and wife.
And in a story that ranks with the greatest ever written, lesbian Alice occupies “The Attic of the House.”
This outstanding collection, from one of the most gifted writers of our generation, deserves a permanent place on your bookshelf.Review adapted from lesbianfunworld.com.
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Then Now
$16.95A lyrical exploration of memory, family, catastrophe, immigration, and colonialism, Then Now was inspired by the discovery of letters written by Daphne Marlatt’s father, Arthur Buckle, who left England in the early 1930s to join a British accounting firm in multiracial Penang, Malaysia. He continued living and working there until taking leave in 1941, returning after WW II, whose looming threat striates his early letters, and staying until 1951. Decades after the letters’ composition, Marlatt began writing poems in response to them, interwoven with memories they provoked from her post-war childhood there. These poems are written from a sense of place and home on Canada’s West Coast now on the brink of another catastrophe, global climate change, so that throughout the book, “There Then” permeates any “Here Now” of immigrant consciousness and highlights the impermanent quality of “home.”
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Then We Were One
$19.95Shocked by his brother’s death from psychological trauma sustained in the Vietnam War, Fred A. Reed sets out on a journey of personal discovery. By way of Greece, the Balkans, and the mystical Anatolian highlands, in pursuit of iconoclasts in Syria and Lebanon, he comes under the spell of Islam. In its embrace, he finds renewed brotherhood and liberation.
International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is a specialist on Middle East politics and religion. He has reported for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada, Montreal Gazette, and Le Devoir. He is a three time winner of the Governor General’s Award for Translation.
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then/again
$18.95Michelle Elrick’s then/again is a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places–an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother’s birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast–as well as the memory-warped terrain of the poet’s past houses.In brief poetic capsules that combine to form long, lyrical narratives, Elrick enfolds layers of tactile and remembered experience, offering continual moments of surprise. In the observer’s eye, the double act of perceiving and writing lends transformative and mythic properties to the everyday: “a heron drums a pattern of shadows on the surface of the sea, wings tick with quartz regularity. bay clouds spot red, bulbs of peach bloom, smoulder and die down into blue.” The collection is infused by a sense of nostalgia and longing within the present moment, illustrating the elusiveness of home even while it is being lived: “I watch as the day opens, expanding its geometry. diffuse light penetrates the blind. hot sun yellows cold concrete (caress stretching across the courtyard).”Each quiet moment of reflection builds upon the others to produce a sense of place that is as immediate and fleeting as home itself. Elrick has an uncanny sense for capturing and illuminating those moments that will later glow in memory.”I am thrilled with the sudden left turns within these poems. A reader, in almost every stanza, ends up in a different place than where she assumed she was going to go. There are wonderful small grenades of surprise and such deftness with the syntax and diction.” -Lorna Crozier
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Theogony / Works and Days
$17.95C.S. Morrissey’s brilliant translations bring a modern, lyrical sensibility to Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod’s two great poems that paved the way for subsequent achievements in Greek philosophy. Theogony tells of the first generations of the gods and recollects how Zeus established his cosmic reign of justice. Works and Days examines the two-fold role of competition in life, what Hesiod calls “the bad strife” and “the good strife” and how they affect our struggle to maintain order in the wake of chaos and the primeval void.