Can You See Me Yet? A Meditation on Canadian Theatre
I bounded up to my theatre teacher and told him I couldn’t wait to audition for the next season of plays at our high school. “Don’t bother auditioning, Andrea,’ he said, ‘there are no black parts.’ Well, at least he said it out loud. Eventually my school produced ‘The Crucible’ and guess which role I played? No, not Abigail, but nice try.
Why doesn’t (does) (doesn’t) (does) Canada Have a National Theatre?
The NAC is a theatre that is dedicated to celebrate and strengthen Canadian voices and our unique way to tell stories. It’s an impossible goal – to make a theatre that attempts to give voice to a Canadian ideal – but the trying is everything. So I was pretty surprised (and heart-kicked I admit) to learn from Kate Taylor in her Globe and Mail article of July 24 – that Canada doesn’t actually have a National Theatre. But not being in Toronto, and not being completely mobile in our seasons doesn’t mean that we don’t exist.
Diversity + Theatre Form
My hope is that we can move forward also dealing with diversity in form. That our perceptions and our expectations of what theatre can look like will not have to fit into the Western or European constructs that most of us learned in theatre school and/or the proven model that is selling tickets to the aging subscription audience.
