#CDNTimes

This week's edition of the #CdnCult Times concerns those core factors that motivate us as theatre artists. What is is that pulls us out...

Who the hell are we? Why can’t a Canadian National Theatre help us better understand ourselves?

This is the problem with the post-racial, post-cultural impulse. “Post” refers not to your culture and race and value system, but to mine. If I cannot become like you, then I am clinging to my ruinous history, and it is a barrier to me becoming like you. And if I refuse to become like you, you can, like the magistrate, just erase me from your view.

Three or four days in one city in a country of 5 or 10 million on continent of 750 million and suddenly I feel preternaturally qualified to tell everyone in Canada what it’s like in Iceland or Italy or Denmark. Of course, I’m too much of an intelligentsia chardonnay-sipper to say, “And the people – they’re just so nice!” but frankly it doesn’t feel that far off. So with that in mind here’s a couple things I remember …

This week, contributors from Vancouver, Saskatoon and (nominally) Ottawa approach different questions with regards to a National Culture. These pieces are integrally related to...

Amy: “Is it possible to have a national theatre?” Big Question for a big country. Laakkuluk: Do you two know each other? Matthew: No.

Where are we now? How do we dream of a collectivity today? Where will we see ourselves reflected back at ourselves? How can we know one another in all the complexity that each of us brings to a life? And, yes, we must try to understand what we mean when we say us.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the #CdnCult Times. Each Monday Tuesday, #CdnCult Times will publish a new set of posts about Canadian culture, theatre and...

The invitation to guest tweet seemed the perfect opportunity to get the course alive again: to directly connect the work we were doing in class to the conversations taking place in the digital world quite active around us. I was also excited because I thought this tweeting idea might serve to clarify the course’s major and most sophisticated concept (one that I had struggled to make clear to students in years past): the relationship between theatrical creation and history making.