1 The range and diversity of artists, works, performance practices, and critical analyses in these two volumes hold in common oft-recurring themes and specific examples of purposefulness, agency and control, hybridity, the limits of representation, and the material circumstances of production. Both also exhibit attentiveness to creation processes and audience as integral to efficacy. Through these valuable collections readers will encounter multiplicities of forms, approaches, and scholarship that inherently, and often explicitly, challenge dominant, institutionalized modes of theatre production. Interestingly, a number of contributions in each collection could easily also have been considered for inclusion in the other. It is heartening to note the relative prominence of cultural diversity in theatre and performance practices, but also, increasingly, among voices and perspectives of those analyzing and theorizing.

2 Bruce Barton’s introduction to Volume 12, Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising, proposes a compelling framework for analysis, clarifying much-conflated terminologies without reducing practices to fixed ‘categories.’ An overarching “Dramaturgy of Agency”—aiming for “not merely affect but effect” (vii)—will thus be constructed differently in different circumstances, in “perpetual negotiation between and navigation of [...] distinct yet related terms” (ix). Barton emphasizes intersubjectivity and multiple perspectives over common assumptions of consensus in collective and collaborative work. He segues into the essays with an appropriately openended assertion that “the proximate positioning of concepts can be as illuminating as that of living bodies in performance” (xxii).

3 A significant number of authors in Volume 12 provide meticulous details of creative processes, demonstrating various techniques that allow meaning(s) and aesthetic choices to emerge through the making of the work. Yet what distinguishes this volume from much existent writing in the field is that a majority of contributors go beyond the mechanics of process and the aesthetics of public presentation, to engage with the questions, preoccupations, and intentions that spur the creative acts. As a result, the voices and concerns of primary creators are more readily placed “in conversation with” voices of academics (though of course there are several instances of authors who inhabit both those worlds.)

4 The importance of 1970s collective creation to the development of theatre in Canada has been well documented and theorized; it is nonetheless fascinating to consider earlier analyses of these canonical works in relationship to more recent practices and critical frames of reference. In both earlier and later essays, important considerations of context, of relationship to audience, and of reception are often central. Conversely, and as noted by Wasserman (244; 250), the cultural nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s gave way to multivalence in politics and ideology among the more current practices examined.

5 In “Ethnic,” Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre, various contributors throughout expose the normative and exclusionary aspects of Canadian and Québécois nationalisms. Later essays point to a movement among “a younger generation of culturally diverse and alternative theatre artists [...] less eager to fight for a place within a nationalist space and normative categories” (x). Coeditors Ric Knowles and Ingrid Mündel point out, in addition, that: “[A]s the generations of theatrical work issuing from minoritized communities roll on, there seems to be less and less concern about dominant culture audiences or assumptions (they are, perhaps, no longer relevant), and less and less uniformity about the kinds of issues addressed” (x). The Introduction does not put forward detailed discussion of competing positions regarding the nature(s) of interculturalism, with the effect that essays in this volume, also, can speak to diversity through diversity. The chronological order common to all volumes of the Critical Perspectives series, here serves especially well to historicize more recent practices and scholarship dealing with specific circumstances, strategies and theorizing of intercultural performance projects. Considered collectively, their specificities speak to intercultural practices as fluid cultures in themselves, and therefore to the idea that culture itself is “an ongoing process of becoming” (xi).

6 The co-editors’ contention that Canada’s official policy of Multiculturalism has attempted to “manage” diversity (viii) is borne out repeatedly in multiple critiques from the 1980s and 1990s, and notably, moving into the 2000s. As Guillermo Verdecchia writes, “Multiculturalism, or the official policy of promoting polyethnicity, remains, after thirty years, misunderstood as the promotion and celebration of folkloric, frozen-in-time, cultures of origin” (108). Essays in the latter half of Volume 14 demonstrate that disruptions to an essentializing, exoticizing reception of minoritized bodies onstage remain necessary, and that status quo barriers to equitable distribution of resources and opportunities persist.

7 Minor gaps I perceive in these volumes can be attributed to a dearth of pertinent critical writing. Given the prominence accorded to the on-the-ground effects of cultural policy in Volume 14, Quebec’s ‘distinct’ (read: assimilationist) conception of ‘interculturalism’ and its effect on the funding of non-Eurocentric performance cries out for critical attention. Absent also are initiatives such as the Canada Council’s Advisory Committee for Racial Equality (REAC) and its Equity Office. In Volume 12, while two of the essays do deal with practices “categorizable” as Canadian community-engaged performance (Salverson and Little), this field remains under-examined with respect to the nature(s) and extent of presumed-to-be “collaborative” practices.

8 I do, wholeheartedly, recommend both of these collections, to scholars and artists, and to teachers and students. Each provides unfailingly thoughtful and often provocative critical analysis of performance practices largely unconfined by institutionalized modes of production. Discussions of creative process and aesthetic communication are, for the most part, inseparable from particularities of context, artistic intention, audience relationship, and assessment of efficacy. This is purposeful scholarship, examining purposeful creative work. Introductions to both volumes are organized thematically, with individual authors’ names appearing several times.

9 In Volume 14, Maureen Moynagh writes that Walter Borden’s Tightrope Time “argues for re-imagining community”(155). Judging from the contents of Volumes 12 and 14 in the Critical Perspectives series, Canadian artists and scholars are getting on with the work of re-imagining theatre, relationship with audience, dominant structures, and sites of diverse, hybrid, and mutable Canadian-ness.