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OurStory

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The drive to Norway House

Last Sunday, on CBC The Sunday Edition, I heard Murray Sinclair the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee speak about the impact of residential schools on seven generations of Aboriginals in Canada.

As Michael Enright said in his opening remarks:

“There is no easy way of talking about this part of Canada’s legacy”

Why should our story be easy?

In Clifford Cardinal’s gripping and devastating play huff, a teenaged boy trying to make sense of the world named Wind, introduces a white teacher working on the reserve:

“You have to be a special kind of person to teach in the reserve school system. It helps if you’re a saint. Or have some weird control issues and a terrible resume. May I present Miss Ratface from Milton, Ontario.”

When I was a young stage manager, back in the eighties, the first touring gig I did was a feeling yes feeling no. We went up to Norway House north of the 53rd parallel in Manitoba. It was my first time that far north and on a reserve. As we drove, the plant life got closer to the ground and looked much more muscular. The poverty in 1987 at Norway House was incredible. Like I could not believe it. Or it was not to be believed.

While there we made friends with the teacher and his wife who were constructing a house from found lumber on the reserve. It was a cool project, unlike any other project happening up there, and it was far away from all the other houses. Separate. We were touring Manitoba with a show about sexual abuse and we had a very strong talk back mechanism whereby students who felt they needed to share could find one of us within set times following the show; we were trained in what to do.

At Norway House, where time as I understood it stood still, it was surreal. Like we were Martians with “training” who were landing with our strange tidings from a completely different planet. While helping the teacher build his house, I was carrying a very heavy piece of timber and I stepped directly down onto a nail that went directly up into my foot. It was not easy to withdraw the nail. It was an ugly business and I immediately turned into a hop a long character. A hop a long character in a lot of pain.

The next day as we headed toward the school with our show and our training, the kids levelled me with theirs. They mocked my pain as I tried to walk, and they mimicked me with absolute and gleeful perfection. I was trying so hard not to show my suffering, so I was outraged by the fun they were having at my expense. My early Ms. Ratface indoctrination was working perfectly. We were from different worlds. Clearly we were from different stories. No one laughs at another’s pain, do they?

Last Sunday on CBC, Murray Sinclair was speaking to the facts. In 1907 in Dr. Bryce’s report to Parliament estimated that at residential schools up to 42% of students did not survive. They died. 42%. Can you think of any school in the world today that would be able to “absorb” this kind of atrocity and still continue? I can’t. And that was 1907. The report was put away and Bryce was fired. The Residential School System began in 1840 continued until 1996.

Cliff Cardinal in Huff

After huff opened at The National Arts Centrewe received, and continue to receive, feedback and questions from our audiences. Many people have asked us what they can do. We realized we had missed an opportunity to have a talk back on opening night. We are having them every other night. We realized that we missed an opportunity to include a member of the local aboriginal community to participate with us in out post show talkbacks. We realized that we approached huff as a show. Which it is! After all we put an advisory warning on it – the only one in our season – we set up post show talkbacks, but after all of that, we thought we were done. But we misunderstood that some shows peel back the skin with such ferocity that a prayer is wished for.

Of course we are only just beginning. Since opening, we have been grappling with how to both prepare and help our audiences deal with the issues raised in the show. It is a staggering and deeply disturbing and truly fantastic piece of theatre. I have often heard playwright and director Yvette Nolan refer to “powerful medicine” when referring to theatrical events. I believe there is tremendous power in this work and I also believe there is tremendous medicine, but our own personal paths will dictate whether it is the medicine or the power that speaks louder in our ears.

As Murray Sinclair said last Sunday: this is not an Aboriginal Problem this is a Canadian Problem.

huff shines light on all manner of suffering and gives me the opportunity to reflect on how I can change what I do and how I think. I can make a new story or I can acknowledge that that there exists, already, a rich and difficult tale that needs to be known. It is called OurStory: A story of Canada. To quote actor and playwright Jani Lauzon, OurStory is: “so inclusive so as not to exclude anybody”.

OurStory has horrible parts. But it also has triumphant ones. In OurStory we all failed to kill the Indian in the child. But there is so much story-telling work to do. OurStory is the place where kids laughing at me on the reserve can be filled with joy  – so long as I understand that I am on a reserve in the first place because my forebears refused to share a story, refused to transform History, into OurStory.

Why the Canadian Arts Coalition doesn’t speak for me

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One of many groups that would find artist support for The Harper Government deplorable..

Earlier this year, on February 11th, the Harper Government released its latest budget. That same day, the Canadian Arts Coalition, a “united national movement of artists, cultural workers, business leaders and volunteers” released a statement applauding the Harper Government for “renewing key programs” within the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Who is this “Canadian Arts Coalition?” A number of people asked that very question when their statement was published in part in the Ottawa Citizen’s arts blog.

The CAC was initially formed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council for the Arts, and is made up of mainly umbrella and service organizations like the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, The Canadian Network of Dance Presenters, The Association of Canadian Publishers, and several others. Their stated short-term, non-partisan goals are very simple:

1)    To ask the government to renew investments that were announced in 2009;

2)    and to ask the government to maintain Canada Council funding levels.

They go on to say that they also hope consideration will be given to increase those funding levels should “circumstances permit”.

Some people in the arts community rightly pointed out that, if these are the goals of this organization, then perhaps the organization is right to applaud a budget that does indeed maintain those levels of funding.

However, it prompted me to ask: are these worthy goals for an arts service organization? And, more generally, are these worthy goals within a national picture that includes some of the worst attacks on democracy we’ve seen in recent decades, a horrendous environmental record, a “tough on crime” agenda that has even the southern United States balking, and let’s not forget the legacy of the G20, which resulted in what the Ontario Ombudsman called “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history”? No inquiry to follow.

It also made some of us in the community wonder about another arts advocacy organization that had recently closed its doors after funding was cut by Heritage Canada. The Canada Conference of the Arts (CCA) had been warned by the department that the federal government should not be funding a lobbying organization. In agreement, CCA requested 2 years of bridge funding during which they would transition to a self-sustaining funding model. This bridge funding did not come through, and after more than 65 years of service to its members, including research, creation and dissemination of important and influential reports and publications, CCA was forced to shut down operations.

It is difficult not to notice a key difference between these two advocacy organizations: one which applauds the government for simply maintaining funding levels, and another that, while known for being non-partisan, is also willing to take the government to task for what they considered to be bad policies, like the proposed copyright legislation in 2011.

While the funding for the Canadian Arts Coalition isn’t clear, their website points visitors to “Magazines Canada”, one of their member organizations, for donations. A visit to Magazines Canada’s website tells me that they consider themselves to be “the country’s most powerful industry association, working closely with all levels of government to ensure the interests of Canada’s magazines are supported and protected”. Worth noting is that they currently receive funding from Heritage Canada.

I’m sure that advocacy is only one element of Magazines Canada’s activities, but I believe the same could also be said for the Canadian Conference of the Arts. The CCA, however, according to National director Alain Pineau, believes in “evidence-based decision making” and they “try to contribute to public debate”. They no longer exist.

There is much to debate.

g20-kettle
Random citizens kettled at the G20 Summit in Toronto. “Our police services did a magnificent job to ensure that these thugs don’t rampage around the city wreaking more havoc,” – Dimitri Soudas, Harper’s director of communications

The Fair Elections Act is only the most recent in a long list of major issues (electoral fraud, cuts to CBC, loss of the long-form census, treatment of First Nations, F-35 jets, Senate scandals, muzzling of Canadian artists and scientists, the end of the Canada Health Accord etc.) that have come up over the years – issues that deserve our attention, and issues that make any kind of applause for this government laughable, and incredibly distasteful.

I remember a conversation I had 10 years ago, with an older family friend who I considered to be progressive in most respects. He told me he was planning to vote Conservative in an upcoming provincial election. I was surprised, given what I knew of his political beliefs. He was voting Conservative because of one element of their electoral platform that would be of financial benefit to his business.

My priorities as a citizen in a society far outweigh my priorities as a cultural worker. I cannot simply support a government for maintaining funding to programs I might access, while that government simultaneously dismantles major institutions, policies and programs that are vital to this country’s democratic, financial, environmental and cultural well-being.

This government doesn’t represent me, and the Canadian Arts Coalition certainly doesn’t applaud this government on my behalf.

Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

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Obsidian Theatre’s production of “Shakespeare’s Nigga” by Joseph Jomo Pierre Actor: Joseph Pierre, Hands: Ulla Laidlaw Photographer: Adam Rankin 2013

It seems a bit strange to write about how our artistic institutions have failed us  since it was that very fact that led to the founding of theatres like Obsidian and fu-Gen. It was precisely because of the lack of representation that culturally diverse artists had no other choice but to come together to tell our own stories. I think that we naively thought that this would somehow spark the rest of the theatres into changing their practice and delving deeper into the non-white stories. Well we know how that turned out.

In the 2002-2003 Toronto Season I was a Dora juror for the General Division and as such I took it upon myself to keep race stats on the 80 odd shows that I saw. Non-white performers came in at the 12-13% range. I suspect that if you did the same study today you would find just about the same percentage and only that high because of the culturally diverse theatres that sprang up and are still producing. So in effect the burden for non-white creation and production has stayed within our own respective communities and not moved the bar forward by very much. Of course there are outliers. Kim’s Convenience has been shipped all around the country and pretty much most of the regional theatres get a great two-fer for their next grants. Asian and Canadian and after that box is checked I suspect that their playwrights units still won’t have a high non-white component.

Each year I go to the Theatre Ontario Showcase where graduating acting students all arrive to do their two pieces and a song (if they sing) for an odd collection of artistic directors, agents and frankly some people that I don’t even know who they are or why they are there. Other than the Humber Theatre School (full disclosure: I am the Chair of the Humber Theatre Advisory Board), there is minimal to no culturally diverse component to those graduating classes. The average class size has grown to around 20 and in at least 3 schools I didn’t even bother to go in and watch because there was no one of interest there for me. By interest I mean that they had no black actors in their graduating classes. In fact on that Sunday there were approximately 150 graduates and of that number there were only 5 black actors. Lest you think that these schools were from the far flung reaches of Ontario I must assure you that they were not. A fair number were all from Toronto, and downtown Toronto at that, and even at the Distillery you could find more diversity at Balzac’s than in that theatre.

I was able to meet those 5 artists, introduce them to each other, and arrange for them to come and meet with me after graduation for a get to know each other lunch. So where are all the non-white actors? I don’t know but I suspect that the conservatory based model comprised of an European aesthetic coupled with a universally white teaching staff might have something to do with it. The reason that Humber is able to be so successful (usually but not always) is that they are working more from a devised theatre model and they actively seek out culturally diverse students as an essential part of their program. Apart from Humber those schools who do somehow manage to graduate one or two non-white students you will find that those students are not actually given the essential tools for success once they graduate. Received Pronunciation is fine but where is the Received Street or the Received Caribbean dialect work that they will need to get those first jobs?

Obsidian Theatre's production of "Black Medea" by Wesley Enoch Actor: Tiffany Martin Photographer: David Hou 2008
Obsidian Theatre’s production of “Black Medea” by Wesley Enoch. Actor: Tiffany Martin. Photographer: David Hou 2008

Obsidian is a member for both PACT and TAPA. They are both good organizations that strive to do their best to reflect the plurality of their membership. In that context it is no wonder that the minority companies are indeed in the minority and thus those issues are always sidebar ones. If it is only now in 2014 that a comprehensive survey on the racial makeup of the PACT member theatres is being created, we have to admit that there has been no baseline ever for this information. In spite of numerous requests for this information to the Canada Council for the Arts, no one seems that interested in anything other than gender statistics – and then only if they are in aggregate and not broken down by race. Thus you may be able to say that the hiring of female directors is up or down by 5% in any given year but you cannot find out what the race percentages are. Without facts we have nothing but anecdotal evidence. But we do know that the service organizations have lost a good number of Indigenous and culturally diverse members over the last few years. Thus those organizations have become increasingly white.

So where in fact does that leave us? Well for myself I have begun to absent myself from the ongoing “nowheresville” of panel discussions, advocacy groups, and endless complaint sessions. I have a severe case of explanation fatigue and it became apparent that if I wanted to avoid rampant bitterness distorting my work I had to step back and stop explaining all the time. The organizations that seemingly cannot make the jump to any kind of real understanding need to change their organizations in a way that will gain them insight. A hint: hire more non-white people and you will really learn a lot.

Obsidian cannot afford to wait for other organizations to find their way. We have to focus on the work at hand and continue to strive towards excellence. Yes I know that the word excellence is a contentious one but really I think that I know it when I see it.

We all started in this business to create art. We yearn for great art, for art that finds an audience and touches them deeply. If the organizations around us cannot aid in that endeavour then I challenge us to live the adage: Lead, follow, or get out the way.

#CdnCult Times; Volume 3, Edition 2

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Welcome to an Edition of #CdnCult Times dedicated to changes required to move Canadian Theatre forwards. For all of the accomplishments we celebrate, there is much more to achieve.

Obsidian Theatre Artistic Director expands upon the diversity gap between what we see on our stages and who lives in our communities, Praxis Theatre Artistic Producer Aislinn Rose elaborates on an unethical approach to engaging in advocacy with The Harper Government, and National Arts Centre Associate Artistic Director Sarah Garton Stanley relates how our theatre must include Indigenous stories to be a truly Canadian theatre.

None of these challenges have simple answers, which is why they persist. Acknowledgement is the first step to taking action, and I urge you to read and consider each with a mind towards what needs to happen next.

Michael Wheeler
Editor-in-Chief: #CdnCult Times

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Kicking and Screaming: Dragging criticism into the 21st Century

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 MUPPET-CRITICS

 

“Theatre criticism is a calling, not a career.”

Mark Brown, a critic for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow, said this to me and 11 others from around the world at The International Association of Theatre Critics’s seminar for critics aged 35 and under last fall. He actually said it several times, lest we finish the four days of play-going and discussion thinking our current passion projects would lead to fame and fortune. It wasn’t an incendiary statement for me then, and it likely doesn’t sound so to you now— like all of the arts, a path in criticism is chosen out of enthusiasm for the form, and rarely anything else.

Like in the performing arts industry, there is a hierarchal structure in theatre criticism. But there’s a twist: only a handful of full-time, “legitimate” jobs exist across the country, and with journalism in the state it’s in, it’s unclear whether those positions will exist when their current fillers depart. Nobody, nobody, is in school today with plans on becoming a professional full-time theatre critic—especially not anyone with student debts to pay off or plans on having a family (Brown also pointed out that in the UK, there are currently no full-time female critics with children).

Arts journalism has an interesting parallel to the theatre industry itself: both are supposedly “dying” (whatever that means) industries, suffering from a shrinking audience with shrinking budgets and shrinking attention spans. With the rise of online publications, every click a review gets is as precious as a ticket sold. In theatre, this has translated into various initiatives to target new (possibly younger) audiences: site-specific or immersive theatre (pioneered by Outside the March and Convergence Theatre), pieces that find inventive uses for the online space (Suburban Beast’s rihannaboi95, and this year’s HATCH series at World Stage), or showcase stories that fall outside of Toronto’s typical realm of the older white male (two heroes so far being Theatre Why Not’s A Brimful of Asha and Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience). Clearly, there are a few happy stories emerging from this “dying” field, stemming from the innovation of a new generation of theatrical leaders.

The way we cover theatre has not seen a similar sense of innovation: reviews, interviews, and previews sound and look the same as they have for years. Meanwhile, readers have moved online and, like Canadian theatergoers, are searching for new experiences that suit their lifestyles. More than ever, readers are as selective with the pieces they spend precious time reading as they are with dollars they spend on entertainment. And most importantly, they’re looking to see themselves reflected in the pieces they choose to read.

In the latest SWS podcast with Jacob Zimmer and Adrienne Wong Babies Are Racist, Nightswimming Theatre producer Rupal Shah went so far as to claim that white critics are unqualified to review productions made for non-white audiences, and that she won’t read a review if that is the case. First of all, segregating reviews does nothing to help the conversation happening beyond those directly involved in the theatre industry, online or in print.  Second, if you don’t regularly read reviews, you don’t have the right to complain. But, also, she may have a point. Diversifying critics will of course encourage a livelier, more inclusive discussion—like in music criticism, which features a healthy mix of cultures and experiences, no doubt because of the wealth of music blogs that have gained professional reputations, discussion of race and culture in an artistic context is usually front and centre. Unfortunately, for the reasons outlined above, theatre criticism isn’t showing any signs of diversifying anytime soon.

This isn’t to discount the number of theatre blogs that have sprouted in Canada, and Toronto especially. They certainly contribute to the much-need diversification of theatre critics working in this country.  What they don’t really do is change up the form: everyone follows more or less the same structure, which is an essay-like exploration of the themes, choices, and performances of a production (at least, the good ones are). The kind, say, a Mirvish subscriber would read. Blogs, or other online publications, are the perfect opportunity to find new readers through unconventional methods.

Of course, this would be another task to take on for these already time-crunched volunteer writers, balancing full-time jobs with an industry full of professional and indie companies begging for their time. It seems that the way we cover and discuss the arts isn’t as worthy as making art, at least to the public purse. With no grants, mentorships, or training opportunities available to emerging critics like there are for young artists, it’s highly unlikely that a volunteer (or, something close enough to that) critic will have the time, money, and energy to find a successful alternative for covering and reviewing productions. That’s especially true if we want to maintain the professional reputations that theatre critics (online and in print) have built, and to make sure arts coverage avoids headlines like The First Half Dragged On, But This One Lighting Cue Will Change Your Life or constructing reviews entirely in GIFs (though, cat photos works pretty well). After all, up until relatively recently, no one has really been complaining.

The good news is that, following the trend of theatre criticism so far, there’s little threat of it devolving into pure lifestyle journalism—like Ted Gioia recently argued about music journalism in The Daily Beast. I believe a reason for the stagnation of theatre criticism is simply because there hasn’t been a need, or want, to do so. It just hasn’t been a conversation with deeply invested participants. I believe it’s an important one to have, so it’s encouraging to see an issue of #CdnCult Times devoted specifically to this issue. Jacob Zimmer said himself in the SWS podcast, “I believe the French New Wave happened because they were talking about themselves.” So far, critics have been involved in the conversation around the art happening in Canada, and not about who’s been leading that conversation, and how they’re doing it.

Let’s get critical

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Lets Get Critical

The first time I fancied myself an arts critic was in 1998. I was a ’tween in the GTA and learned that the Toronto Sun held a regular contest in which readers could submit a movie review for consideration. I typed up my thoughts on Armageddon, taking care to balance my skepticism of the plot’s believability with honest praise for the mix of action, science fiction, and romance that enabled the film to truly offer something for everybody. I mailed it in, and to my delight, they ran it. I received two passes to Cineplex Odeon as payment and used them the following year to see The Matrix, my review for which was again champion of the Sun’s weekly prize. That second foray was, incidentally, the last time I ever considered myself an arts critic.

What I am trying to say here – other than that the Sun quite literally publishes work written by twelve-year-olds – is that I do not conceive of the theatre writing I produce and curate to be the work of “critics”. In truth, I never really thought much about theatre criticism as a practice before I was invited to discuss the topic for #CdnCult Times. As Editor-in-Chief of alt.theatre, Canada’s only professional journal dedicated to the intersections between politics, cultural plurality, social activism, and the stage, I have the fortune of constant exposure to thoughtful, reflective and reflexive writing about contemporary performing arts. While this writing is certainly critical, I had yet to conceive of it as criticism per se, and I imagine this is because I’ve come to understand “theatre criticism” to belong to the world of “theatre reviews”, an entirely different beast.

As a theatre maker, when I’m in the middle of a project, reviews are, of course, an important source of promotion – marketing soundbites, reassurance that audiences might steer their attention toward this work. But when I am the theatre-goer myself I rarely seek reviews for guidance, nor do I necessarily give them credence when they fall into my inbox or newsfeed. Why am I often indifferent to or even circumspect about theatre reviews, when off-stage critical discourse is one of the aspects I value most about the industry and the craft? Perhaps it’s because I’m wary of the relationship between reviews and the (in)accessibility of theatre in this land called Canada. Our professional theatre landscape has in many ways evolved to be inaccessible to audiences and artists alike. My question is: does theatre criticism – reviews and otherwise – help to enable or disable this inaccessibility? What is the utility of theatre reviewing, a task inherently about judgment, in a country where theatre institutions still favour the stories, bodies, practices and world views of the those who are privileged (by class, race, gender, ability, etc)?

Our taste palettes are constructed, and well beyond the polite divergences of “you like coffee, I like tea”.  The way we experience art is shaped by what we are taught in our childhoods, in our communities of origin, and through our embodied experiences. What songs are memorable? What images are nostalgic? Who is allowed to have a voice? Who is supposed to be powerful? What should or should not be discussed in mixed company? What is beautiful? What is ugly?

In an alt.theatre editorial entitled “When Politics Gets Personal”, Rahul Varma contests theatre reviewers who begin their critiques with a belief that art can and should be ideology-free. He argues that in Montreal’s theatre landscape some critics “[create] boundaries between political and personal when there is none” and in doing so “apply the yardstick of conventional family drama to a genre of political theatre that is hugely complex” (6). Elsewhere, Yvette Nolan expresses frustration at reviewers who assess theatre exclusively through Western artistic conventions and their own assumptions of what “Aboriginal issues” should be: “I am frustrated by the refusal to see… what it is we are doing. I am frustrated by the refusal of the reviewers to try to know, to educate themselves. I have learned the iconography, I have learned the tropes of Western theatre. I have learned to recognize a metaphor when I see one… I know that white represents good and pure, black is bad, and purple royal” (33). If the most-read reviewers are serving to maintain the status quo of theatre, then they are serving its inaccessibility.

I still believe the task of the theatre reviewer can be valuable. An arts critic friend recently summed up for me that when he sees theatre for purposes of review, his task boils down to three questions: a) what did the creators set out to do? b) did they succeed in their task? c) in doing so, did they offer anything new? This explanation of the craft interests me. If theatre communities (creators, audiences, those in between) are to support a practice that is inherently about judgment, then how can or should those reviewing locate themselves (their contexts, biases, experiences) within the critique? The task of the reviewer can offer so much for those looking for windows into new work in their communities. May those who take up the task do so with care, rigor, and reflexivity.

Let us encourage critical discourse about theatre in writing, in person and all sorts of contexts. Let’s include audiences in these discussions. Let’s create more spaces to challenge and inspire each other, to investigate methodology, to celebrate innovation, and to cultivate an artistic ecology that is diverse, fertile, and abundant.

Works Cited

Nolan, Yvette. “Dispatch”. alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage 6.1 (2008): 33.

Varma, Rahul. “When Politics Gets Personal”. alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage 7.3 (2010): 4-6.

The increasingly permeable divide between artists and critics

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aroundblogosphere600
We’re all connected and most of us have something to say.

When we started the Praxis blog in 2006 it had one golden rule: No reviews.

We felt as artists we wanted to communicate with and about other artists. If the site passed judgment on artistic merit of our colleagues’ work, we would always be outsiders. This seemed antithetical to our aims.

I still think this was a wise decision and allowed the site to grow and become accepted quite quickly. Looking around at what is going on in the theatrosphere these days, the notion seems antiquated. The lines are blurring. Johnnie Walker has reviewed for Torontoist, as well as being a theatre artist on the front of NOW who gets top marks from The Grid, virtually all of the other blogs that have achieved longevity have some ‘review-based’ content, and most importantly, the most rigorous discussion that I can find on theatre these days is the one taking place between artists, critics, and bloggers on social media.

The notion that the artist/critic/blogger divide has become quite permeable became most obvious when World Stage brought controversial Conte d’amour to Harbourfront Centre. Touring the world for the past four years, this is a production that has oozed controversy as a three-hour piece dealing with the real-life story of Josef Fritzl who secretly kept his daughter prisoner for twenty-four years, raising incestuous children with her. Even champions of the show have described it as a difficult, durational work, and it has been both lauded and lamented by critics and audiences alike.

I first became aware of this controversy when the day after opening night, colleagues who had been at the performance related Globe and Mail Theatre Critic Kelly Nestruck had stood up and booed at the end. A 0 star review followed quickly thereafter.  This was reported to me by two different artists whom I respect and work with who found the production both successful and important. A number of other reviews came out, most negative. What happened next I found fascinating: Artists, bloggers and mainstream critics began to debate the work further through social media.

There were several posts in my various newsfeeds encouraging me to ignore the critics and see a truly challenging international work. Matters escalated when online review site Charlebois Post elected to post a review of the show even though their critic had left halfway through the performance. Theatre artist Frank Cox O’Connell was the first to respond in the comments:

“ hated it for two hours and then something shifted for me. (That was my experience, it might have not been yours, we won’t know.) You can certainly walk out, but then don’t write about the work… You didn’t see the work.”

At this point, having not seen the show, but being supremely annoyed by the lack of professionalism in my beloved theatrosphere, I felt compelled to engage @CharPoCanada on the topic of reviewing what you have not seen:

After this first wave of pushback from artists like about the behaviour that should be expected from those that self-identify as critics, the critics themselves began to weigh in:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After this, things got nasty and personal in a way that only the internet can empower. I haven’t included it, because I don’t find those conversations useful. What is also not included are comments and RTs by CIUT’s @Slotkinletter and NOW Magazine’s @GlennSumi, who also condemned the practice of publishing a review of a show that the critic only saw half of. One can assume The Toronto Star didn’t get in on the action only because none of their critics have elected to join the 21st Century and the rest of their colleagues for these important conversations on Twitter.

Regardless, critics from traditional media seemed to have achieved quorum in this exchange – and at this moment the theatrosphere self-corrected.  This gives me hope for the future of criticism online. There is no escaping the exchange of ideas in this community, and while I am reticent to use meritocracy in any late-capitalist context, it does seem like the best analysis can rise to the top, the worst can be shunned; and that this can all exist in a rigorous discussion with diverse perspectives that includes theatre-makers, theatre-writers, and those of us who do some of both.

I still don’t think PraxisTheatre.com will begin running reviews any time soon, but that may not be the point of how these discussions take place anymore. Some of the most compelling conversations about theatre right now are happening in a micro-blogging context, like Facebook and Twitter, and these are forums where everyone can participate.

#CdnCult Times; Volume 3, Edition 1

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Welcome back for our 3rd Volume of #CdnCult Times, which will feature a new edition every second Tuesday from now until the end of the summer.

This Edition explores the changing nature of theatre criticism, which is getting some mainstream attention these days as Ben Brantley and his review in The New York Times is attacked by James Franco on social media, while The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner questions if critics are even reviewing the right plays.

The self-publishing revolution is having a profound impact on the small number of critics that once were the sole arbiters of artistic merit, and pushback is coming from many different directions.

Michael Wheeler
Editor-in-Chief: #CdnCult Times

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