Moderator: Kim Solga

Location: Room 4275 - 3200 rue Jean-Brillant - Université de Montréal

(Building 27 on the UdM map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of Drama - University of Saskatchewan

Enacting the Exotic: Internment Camps, Yellow Fever and the Flashpoint of Asian Canadian Theatre

In an interview published in Theatre Journal, playwright David Yee claims that the first work of Asian Canadian theatre was Rick Shiomi’s Yellow Fever (Yee E-24). Asian diasporas have been present in Canada as early as Chinese railroad workers in 1880. Shiomi’s own ancestors were active theatre makers in Vancouver as early as 1910 (Li 11n2).Why then, does Yee consider Yellow Fever the first work of Asian Canadian Theatre? What is the distinction between Asian Canadian Theatre and theatre by Asians in Canada? How do these distinctions privilege a particular performance of cultural resistance? This essay calls for a retroactive broadening of the Asian Canadian theatre corpus by highlighting the resistant potential and adaptability found in the displaced traditions of diaspora. Examining documented experiences of Japanese Canadians who lived in internment camps in New Denver, I engender the art-making practices of these detainees as a conflict between art, state and space which Ngugi wa Thiong’o refers to as “enactments of power”.

From this framework, I then investigate the 1983 production of Yellow Fever from ahistoriographical perspective, reading playbills, reviews and scholarship in the context of arising panethnic Asian Canadian movement and the state project of multiculturalism. Through cross examination of these two periods of theatre history, I highlight the event of Yellow Fever as an extension of the conflict undertaken by Asian diaspora of the earlier 20th century.

Works Cited

Yee, David. Interview by Sean Metzger. Theatre Journal, vol. 72, no. 3, September 2020, www.jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/online-content/issue/volume-72-number-3-september-2020/were-future-provocateurs. Accessed 15 October 2023.

Li, Xiaoping. “Performing Asian Canadian: The Theatrical Dimension of a Grassroots Activism.” Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, vol 1, edited by Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles, Playwrights Canada Press, 2011, pp.11-28.

Sungwon Cho, University of Toronto

Sungwon Cho is a Korean-Canadian theatre practitioner and scholar. They are currently enrolled at the Master's program at University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Their research interests include Asian Canadian Theatre, site-specific performance and the applications of theatre technologies.

Dramatic Reflections on the War in Ukraine from the Canadian Prairies

In a recent article decrying the lack of Ukrainian plays being staged in major Canadian theatre centres in response to the 2022 invasion, Andrew Kushnir cites one notable exception to his complaint: Punctuate!Theatre’s largely Western Canadian 2023 tour of First Métis Man of Odesa [FMMO]. While Kushnir credits the Western Canadian theatre scene as being more progressive in this regard than at least some of the institutions in Central Canada, this paper argues that he does not go far enough in considering the extent to which Western theatre centres like Edmonton have generated other war plays centered on the conflict in Ukraine even prior to the 2022 invasion, and the extent which FMMO itself references and builds on them. 

This paper seeks to explore:(1) the larger currents of Ukrainian historical and cultural/lingual/artistic survivance in Alberta underlying playwright/performer Matthew MacKenzie’s playful quip that “the city that I’m from is [nick]named Edmonchuck”(6) (2) the texts and development history of the two other Edmonton-generated war plays Barvinok and Alina, indirectly referenced in FMMO and (3) the extent to which the interleaving texts and production histories of all three plays reflect a multi-textured examination of war lived, survived, and remembered that is both grounded specifically in local prairie community, and internationally in the experience of warfare in Ukraine not only between 2014 to 2022 and beyond, but even farther back to World War II.

Andrew Kushnir. “Why is Canadian Theatre So Russian Right Now?” Feb 24, 2023. Intermission

MacKenzie, Matthew and Mariya Khomutova. First Métis Man of Odesa. TS. 16 May, 2023. pp. 1- 46.

Moira Day, University of Saskatechewan

Moira Day is a professor emerita of Drama at the University of Saskatchewan. A former book editor and co-editor of Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada she has published and lectured widely on Canadian theatre, with a particular focus on women and prairie theatre prior to 1960.