Theatre for the New World

By Patrick McDonagh

Someday soon in Toronto – if it hasn’t happened already – the term “visible minorities” will become a misnomer, as the people so designated will constitute over 50% of the city’s population. While Toronto boasts that it is the world’s most multicultural city, other major Canadian cities share its generally polyglot and multiethnic makeup. But does the theatre scene share this diversity as well?

Garnet Harding and Yanna McIntosh in Colleen Wagner’s The Monument, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams, presented by the Obsidian Theatre at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs in March 2006. © David Hou

Toronto has recently witnessed the creation of companies like Obsidian in 1999, Rasik Arts in 2000, and Fu-GEN in 2002 – to name just a few – dedicated to bringing cultural diversity to the stage. They join established companies like Cahoots Theatre Projects, founded in 1986 by Beverly Yhap, and Modern Times, co-founded in 1989 by current Artistic Director Soheil Parsa. Vancouver’s NeWorld Theatre (formed in 1992) and Montreal’s Teesri Duniya (1981) also strive to bring theatre from different cultural traditions to the Canadian stage.

Despite these efforts, diversity in the theatre world has lagged behind social demographics. As Nina Aquino, Artistic Director of Toronto’s Fu-GEN, recalls, “When I was a University of Toronto student writing about Asian Canadian theatre, there was absolutely nothing when I looked through catalogues. I felt as though I didn’t exist as an artist.” Something had to be done, she realized, and she decided to do it herself, forming Fu-Gen (for Future Generation) Theatre with Leon Aureus and Richard Lee. True to its name, Fu-Gen launched itself into prominence with Banana Boys, a play about five young Asian-Canadian men, which Aureus adapted from the 2000 novel by Terry Woo. “It was loud, bold, and unashamed, like bitchslapping any audience member who was expecting a play about the ‘immigrant experience,’” she says. Banana Boys drew a young Asian audience on its first appearance, but when remounted the second and third times, at Factory Theatre and the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, the word had spread beyond the Asian community. “The feedback was really positive,” says Aquino. “It’s young, fresh, and urban, and just happens to be about an Asian community experience.” But getting more home-grown plays on the boards demands that the company also invest in developing talent. “We have a shortage of writers, as Asian kids aren’t really encouraged to go into theatre,” says Aquino, “So we’re heavily into new play – and new playwright-development.”

“ “When your country looks like one thing and what gets put on stage doesn’t seem to remotely resemble it, you have a problem.” – Jovanni Sy ” –

The flip side, of course, is audience development. Rasik Arts was created by its AD, Sally Jones, to bring South Asian works to the Toronto stage. “Many of the people who came to see our first show, Nagamandala, had never been to a downtown Toronto theatre, and some were coming from as far as Hamilton,” she says. “I feel that we have helped create an audience of South Asian the-atregoers. When CanStage mounted Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy in 2003, they worked with the woman who helped us to bring in our audience for Umrao. And Ek Qatra Khoon—A Drop of Blood, a one-man show about Imam Hussein and the battle of Karbala, managed to pull in a Muslim audience, some of whom have stayed with us. People will come to the theatre if they can see something of themselves on stage.”

Sometimes, though, a solid creative community can exist, but still lack opportunities. “We had been knocking on doors trying to get companies to put on shows that re?ected the reality of the city, but then realized that we had enough people who had been around for a while to create our own company,” says Alison Sealy-Smith, AD for Obsidian Theatre, which produces plays by writers of African descent. “We felt a responsibility to tell our own stories, to train ourselves in our own discoveries, and to build bridges between cultures and communities. There’s a lot of beautiful African diasporic writing, and we want to showcase all of it.”

Dale Yim, Derek Kwan (on the gurney, lying down), Richard Lee, Insurp Choi and David Yee in Leon Aureus’ Banana Boys (adapted from the novel by Terry Woo), directed by Nina Aquino, presented by Fu-GEN at Toronto’s Factory Studio Theatre in 2004 and at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa in 2005. © Guy Bertrand

Federal and provincial funding organizations are seeing the light – and to some extent are even shining it. “A lot of the current activity is generated from the top down, as arts funding bodies have made intercultural arts a strategic imperative,” says Jovanni Sy, AD of Cahoots. “They compared the kind of art going on in theatre companies across Canada to the way the country was looking, and realized there was a huge and unjustifiable disparity. When your country looks like one thing and what gets put on stage doesn’t seem to remotely resemble it, you have a problem.” Groups like the Canada Council responded, he says, by setting priorities in their funding and changing the composition of peer juries. “You cannot overestimate how important these changes are. For instance, if your arts peer jury isn’t representative of the constituency, then the work won’t be either.”

The growth of theatres identifying cultural diversity as part of their mandate may also be exerting a gravitational pull on mainstream theatre. “There is a much greater representa-tion today than you would have had ten years ago, so there is certainly a recognition of artists working from other perspectives,” says Sy, who points to the multiethnic rosters of writers’ units at Tarragon, Passe Muraille, Factory, and CanStage as evidence. The change comes about in part because theatres recognize the artistic vitality of different cultural groups, and in part because of audience demographics, says Sealy-Smith. “I believe that from the moment of Obsidian’s incep-tion, we have had an impact on the theatre scene – just seeing the list of our thirteen founding members should have been a clarion call to the community. But some change would have happened on its own, as audiences out there are younger and browner – so what are theatres going to do?”

The changes have meant new opportunities all around. Rasik Arts is now developing a one-man show on the poet Rabindranath Tagore, star-ring veteran actor Ishwar Mooljee, which will probably be performed in 2008. “Ishwar has been slugging it out for years,” says Jones. “He’s 70 years old and has never had the opportunities available to younger actors today. I’m thrilled to be doing this piece with him.” On the other end of the career spectrum, notes Jones, “Anita Majumdar has become a big draw for playgoers in the South Asian community.” The 2004 NTS graduate has performed her one-woman play, Fish Eyes, at Theatre Passe Muraille, and has held recent roles in Cahoots’ Bombay Black and Modern Times’ bloom.

While greater opportunities now exist for actors working outside the traditional mainstream, the next challenge may be to change the way they learn their craft. “The diversity that exists in the theatre scene today is not something I see at the annual Theatre Ontario student show-cases,” says Sy. “The curriculum at most training institutions remains very Eurocentric, although theatre and performing arts have antecedents in many other cultures. Where is the diversity in the way we select and teach our students?”

A good question, and soon it may receive an answer. Several years ago, the National Arts Training Contribution Program, noting the Euro-centric training models employed by its recipients, began searching for ways of broadening the range of training possibilities. Sealy-Smith was part of a focus group advising the program as it tried to rewrite guidelines and application procedures to better nclude non-European processes of training and professional development in theatre. “Obsidian is not a training insti-tution in the way that NTS is, but we are a training ground providing opportunities that don’t exist elsewhere,” she says. “The changes being discussed would make it possible for us to have access to money to support this training.”

““Perhaps an intelligent mixing and matching of perspectives, whether they are ethnically, economically, or stylistically based, will lead to work that speaks more directly to our audiences’ experiences.” “ Marcus Youssef

Marcus Youssef, George W. Bush (!) and Camyar Chai in a promotion shot for The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil, directed by Guillermo Verdecchia, co-produced by neworldtheatre (Vancouver) and Cahoots Theatre Projects (Toronto), presented on tour across Canada from 2004 to 2006. © Tim Matheson

For the time being, of course, a Eurocentric aesthetic still dominates most of the country’s big stages. As Marcus Youssef (Acting, 1992), interim AD of Vancouver’s neworldtheatre, observes, “The canon at mainstream companies is European, and so is the audience. Most intercultural work is still happening in the smaller independent and alternative communities.” But the future is distinctly multi-hued. Canada – and especially the urban part of it – is increasingly, inevita-bly diverse, and the “multicultural” perspective, whatever that may be, is certainly no longer synonymous with an immigrant experience. “This massive, primarily urban shift gives us the opportunity not just to engage in a predictable, somewhat voyeuristic fetishization of displace-ment, but to actually look at what the multiple perspectives of artists from different places can bring,” says Youssef. “Perhaps an intelligent mixing and matching of perspectives, whether they are ethnically, economically, or stylistically based, will lead to work that speaks more directly to our audiences’ experiences.”

Consider the case of Elyne Quan, an Edmonton-based playwright, performer, and former co-AD of that city’s Concrete Theatre who knows about mixing and matching perspectives. “I don’t consider myself a hyphenated Chinese-Canadian writer, but simply a writer,” she says. “But I recognize that I come from a particular perspective, which I bring to the table.” Quan developed her first work, Surface Tension, after traveling to the United Kingdom as an exchange student in her early twenties. “I knew I was Chinese, but I didn’t know I was different from anyone else until that experience. When people would ask where I was from, I’d say ‘Canada’ – and that wasn’t a good enough answer. ‘Alberta?’ I’d say… I honestly didn’t know what answer they wanted from me.” Surface Tension – “more a performance piece than a play,” she says – explored the identity issues experience.

The challenges to “Canadian theatre” (“multi-cultural” or not) and the definition of “Cana-dian” are tightly entwined. “We’re constantly questioning our identity as Canadians within a global context,” says Sealy-Smith, noting that these questions have repercussions on stage. “When Djanet Sears does Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, she is not just telling a story, she is looking for a new way of telling stories, a hybridity of aesthetics.” What kinds of stories will be told in our theatres, and how will they be told, and what impact will they have? “We’re just at the beginning, trying to figure out all that stuff, and it’s exciting,” says Sealy-Smith. “The tenuous yet strong thread that binds all of our productions is the desire, in some way, to challenge or enrich the no-tion of what it means to be Canadian.” In this, Obsidian is not alone, but, along with other companies, is committed to bringing diverse perspectives to the stage, in the vanguard of a new Canadian theatre.

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