ALAN FILEWOD

An analysis of the parallel development of political theatre in English and French in Canada. In both cultures, political intervention theatre appropriates the theatrical forms and the post-colonial nationalism of the alternative theatre movement. This article seeks to reconcile these points of similarity with the significant differences in ideology between the two cultures.

L'auteur de cet article cherche à analyser l'évolution d'un théâtre politiquement engagé au Canada anglais et au Québec. Dans les deux cultures ce théâtre tendrait à s'approprier les formes théâtrales aussi bien que le nationalisme postcolonial caractéristiques du mouvement 'Alternative Theatre'/Jeune Théâtre. L'auteur cherche à justifier ces ressemblances en vue des importantes différences idéologiques entre les deux cultures.

In a country that remains acutely aware of its colonized status, which hosts two parallel but separate cultures divided by language, where until recently a declared commitment to indigenous art was perceived as extreme, and where the theatre has been one of the principle arenas for the debate on cultural nationalism, the subject of political theatre is necessarily complex. The impulse behind much of contemporary theatre in Canada has been the validation of indigenous culture, and because this has involved the conscious rejection of artistic policies and assumptions rooted in colonial structures of thought, the theatre has been politicized by its context.

Within this generally politicized theatre, the past two decades have seen the development of a militant theatre which intervenes directly in the political process to promote social change. It is necessary to distinguish this political theatre from an older tradition of political drama, because the two have evolved separately, deriving from different sources.

Canadian drama has from its beginnings been intensely polemical. Usually its major political concern, in English and French alike, has been post-colonial self-definition. The tendentiousness of nineteenth century drama in Canada can be ascribed to the need to ratify a growing sense of nationalism with its most convincing evidence, an indigenous literature. In English Canada, playwrights attempted to reconcile an ideology of British imperialism with an incipient Canadian cultural nationalism. This was a colonial literature in the simplest sense of the term, the literature of a transplanted British culture that was stoutly anti-republican. But it had little to do with the actual theatre of the day, which by the end of the century was virtually owned outright by the New York theatrical monopolies.

In Quebec the language barrier preserved a sense of cultural self-sufficiency but here too colonialism was a major concern, from the opposite pole. Anglo-Canadian writers took pride in their colonial status, but Québécois writers chafed at theirs: they wrote about the complexities of a defeated francophone culture subjected to increasing colonialism - in the modem sense - from an anglophone continent.

In both cultures there developed a tradition of revisionist historical drama which for the most part remained separate from the professional stage until after the Second World War. In both cases the ideologies expressed in these plays naturally evolved to reflect the changing nature of the society. As Quebec society became more secular, culminating in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, so did its polemical drama become more radical, more inclined to analyse colonialism in terms of class as well as nationality. At the same time, the increasing Americanization of Canadian society was perceived as a compounding of the already-existing problem of anglophone encroachment in Quebec culture.

In English Canada however the problem of colonialism was more complex, because less visible and less resented. As English Canada ceased to see itself as an extension of Britain with a difficult French bulge in the middle it began to see the extent to which it was dominated by American commercial interests. The far-reaching effects of American colonialism in Canada were first perceived in the theatre around the turn of the century, when a handful of critics and playwrights argued that the monopoly control exerted by American touring syndicates on Canadian theatres must logically retard the development of Canadian drama and affect the development of artistic taste in this country. Canadian playwriting in effect developed as an alternative to the commercial theatre. Isolated from popular audiences in a country that until recently saw the arts as a private enterprise, English-Canadian playwrights have traditionally tended to be indignantly moralistic and obsessed with national themes. As one of the victims of a colonial structure that many of her compatriots could not or would not recognize, the English-Canadian playwright was alienated from society in a way that the Quebec playwright was not. Perhaps it was for this reason that English Canadian playwriting has also tended, until recently, to be conservative in form, more so than the Québécois, and partial to the presentation of documentary evidence.

In the decade between 1965 and 1975 both cultures experienced a revolution in playwriting and theatre practice, known as the jeune théâtre in Quebec and the alternative theatre in English Canada, during which time hundreds of new troupes emerged to produce the work of new playwrights. The militant theatre which emerged as one aspect of this movement shared its defining characteristics. For this reason, Canadian political theatre, like most modem Canadian theatre, came to be identified by its emphases on collective creation, populist egalitarianism, and presentational theatricality. These characteristics were not of course uniquely Canadian; but because they coincided with the revival of cultural nationalism, political theatre developed as the extreme expression of a movement that identified the characteristics of indigenous culture with the forms of the theatrical revolution that was challenging theatres across Europe and North America.

It may seem ironic that the political theatre developed first in English Canada, given that the crisis in nationalism developed earlier in Quebec than in English Canada. It may seem even more ironic when we consider that the jeune théâtre preceded the alternative theatre by several years, and that there have been as many political theatres in Quebec as in all of English Canada. Yet the Worker's Theatre Movement of the 1930s made no inroads in francophone Quebec, at that time a bastion of clerical conservatism. In English Canada however the example of British and American agitprop was promoted by a well-organized radical left.

Canadian agitprop was in general no different from that of Britain or the United States. With its stress on the international solidarity of the revolutionary socialist movement, the Worker's Theatre Movement was not interested in issues of national culture. Its most important play was Eight Men Speak, a montage of satire, mass chant and mock trial about the attempted assassination of imprisoned communist leader Tim Buck that was suppressed by the police after its first performance in 1933.

Although it is not quite correct to say that the momentum of the Worker's Theatre Movement did not carry through to the post-war decades, the political theatre that emerged in the 1960s was predicated on radically different aesthetic and ideological principles. The major connecting link was the founding in 1959 of Toronto Workshop Productions by George Luscombe, who had worked in Britain with Joan Littlewood. Since that time TWP has maintained a consistent leftist orientation, but its ideological references have normally been to the 'old left' of international socialism and trade unionism, rather than to the 'new left' of post-colonial nationalism.

This new political theatre embodied a radical challenge to post-war government arts policies, which were caught in a contradiction between the desire to promote cultural independence, and an implicit acceptance of essentially conservative, because colonially derived, assumptions of theatre praxis. Beginning in the late 1950s, the Canada Council supported the establishment of professional civic theatres across Canada. This 'regional' theatre system, as it came to be known somewhat misleadingly, was an important historical step, but it embodied aesthetic principles that would soon be challenged as colonial themselves. In English Canada especially, where a disproportionate number of artistic directors were imported from Britain, bringing with them a bias towards British repertoires and acting styles, the regional theatres were attacked for their indifference to indigenous playwriting. There were some important exceptions to this rule: Montreal's Centaur Theatre and Regina's Globe Theatre, for example, had both done - and continue to do - impressive work in developing new playwrights and voicing a strong social and political conscience in their work.

The challenge to the existing order began almost as soon as it was established, when an affluent young generation graduated from universities and colleges in the mid-1960s seeking careers in the theatre. They were encouraged in this by the efforts of young artists returning from apprenticeships outside Canada, many of whom were profoundly affected by the radicalism of 1968 and their experiences of street theatre, especially in France and the United States. In retrospect these experiences were highly significant: Québécois artists shared the intellectual marxism of the French new left, whereas English Canadians leaned towards the more romantic American style of anti-authoritarian, counter-culture socialism.

At the same time, Quebec had been experiencing a literary renaissance in the wake of the Quiet Revolution. The nouveau théâtre québécois introduced playwrights such as Michel Tremblay, Jean Barbeau and Robert Gurik, who reflected the rapid changes in Quebec society in plays written in dialect. In response to this literary movement there developed an indigenous tradition of collective creation that rejected the primacy of the author. Beginning in the écoles classiques, where students experimented with collage performances, this new movement spread rapidly, producing hundreds of collective creations by the end of the decade.

In Quebec collective creation developed as an alternative dramaturgy, parallel to an active literary drama, in contrast to English Canada where it developed as a virtual necessity because of the scarcity of playwrights. Jeune théâtre became a movement as such when it began to dominate the Association canadienne du théâtre d'amateurs, which in 1971 became AQJT: the Association québécoise du jeune théâtre. With its annual congress and festival, as well as its journal which regularly published manifestos and analyses of new work, AQJT became the focus of radical theatre in Quebec.

English-Canadian theatres had no equivalent organization, and because of the vaster distances separating these theatres, little in the way of communication or cross-fertilization between them. Moreover, English Canadians, combining a tradition of British empiricism with a North American anti-intellectualism, rarely theorized about their work, published few manifestos and regarded with suspicion any signs of elite intellectualism. This meant that in English Canada there was little true criticism, and virtually no discussion or analysis of the work being done. With a more rigorous tradition of intellectual discourse behind them, Québécois theatres on the other hand had a more active interest in the role of theory, and unlike the English Canadian alternative theatres, enjoyed strong connections with the university and college communities.

Because of different strategies required by differing conditions of colonialism, the new movements manifested an ironic reversal of the pre-war attitude towards internationalism. In the 1960s the jeune théâtre reached outwards to ratify its work in international context; for example, Théâtre EUH! took part in the Theatre of Nations and toured Algeria; Théâtre Sans Détour worked with Augusto Boal; Théâtre du Sang Neuf with the San Francisco Mime Troupe; and Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre became a familiar presence at the AQJT festivals. Eager to take its place as a distinct and viable national culture emerging from the shadows of colonialism, the jeune théâtre not surprisingly became a major vessel of separatist sentiment.

But now it was English Canada that closed its doors, with varying success. The first generation of alternative theatres turned to collective creation out of necessity as much as choice; there were too few playwrights whose work reflected the consciousness and images of the new generation, no anglophone parallel to the nouveau théâtre québécois. The regional theatre system had done virtually nothing to promote Canadian playwriting, and in some cases was overtly hostile to it. It was left to the alternatives, with their minimal budgets and young actors to develop new playwrights - a task they turned to with a vengeance. In their eclectic mix of collective creation and new drama, the alternatives differed from the general tendency of the jeune théâtre troupes, for whom collective creation was an ideological choice rather than a practical necessity.

English Canadian culture has traditionally been perceived, even by many Canadians, as a derivative hybrid of British and American cultures. In order to prove the assertion of a distinct English Canadian culture the theatres had to prove that exciting theatre could be made out of the familiar minutiae of Canadian life, and prove it to a public so conditioned by years of exposure to British plays and American films that they considered a foreign accent the sign of good acting.

It was in order to combat this fundamental sign of colonial thinking that the theatres played down their international influences. In practice this manifested itself in localism, as troupes explored Canadian history and geography for dramatic material, producing documentaries on rural communities and folklore, and touring them to rural and working class audiences. These experiences with theatrically naive audiences led to the development of dramatic forms and performance styles that combined storytelling, documentary authentication, physical metaphor and references to popular culture. The prototype was Theatre Passe Muraille's The Farm Show (1972) a theatrical report on the actors' research in a southern Ontario farming community; the most celebrated was Paper Wheat (1977) by Saskatoon's Twenty-fifth Street Theatre, a revue about the homesteading of the prairies and the founding of the grain co-ops. The performance structures of these plays were indigenous developments, utilizing a performance vocabulary that derived in equal measure from popular folk culture, with its storytelling, ballads and church-basement skits, and the actors' own formal inventions, which frequently included a rediscovery of living newspaper techniques. At the same time, these performance structures were the Canadian expression of a genealogy of documentary revue that derives from Piscator. They are the Canadian cousins to Peter Cheeseman's community documentaries in England, and indeed to the Federal Theatre's Living Newspapers of the 1930s.

In the context of this politicized theatre, the emerging militant theatre of both Quebec and English Canada shared a committed populism and a belief that performances should take place among the people, in community centres, union halls, schools and the work place. For this reason they shared numerous formal characteristics. The most important of these of course was collective creation, which enabled the troupes to implicate their target audiences in the process of making the plays. On the level of style, the political theatres of both cultures have shown a tendency to reconstruct performance itself as metaphor, although this has been developed further in Quebec than in English Canada.

in the militant plays of the 1970s especially, when the movement to reach new audiences was at its height, we find a widespread use of performance signs and quotations as metaphors of historical conditions. To give just a few examples, le Grand Cirque Ordinaire and Théâtre EUH! in Quebec brought circus and clown techniques to their marxist analyses on stage: Théâtre EUH's Histoire du Québec was the story of a group of clowns cast away on a desert island who recreate a history of exploitation and oppression. The Mummers Troupe of Newfoundland, English Canada's most radical theatre (considered in terms of political action), began as a puppet troupe, and repeatedly used hand puppets, clowns, vaudeville and minstrel show devices as techniques of political satire.

In each of these cases the foregrounding of performance techniques can be seen as a form of Brechtian estrangement which defines analytical context. The opposite is true of the complementary principle: the general inclusion of indigenous popular culture devices: songs, recitations, ballads and comic skits. These tend to serve as authentication devices that validate the troupe's right to comment on the subject at hand. In effect they demonstrate that the troupe has learned the aesthetic language of the audience.

In both cases the foregrounding of performance indicates a post-colonial consolidation in aesthetic vocabulary; it reconstitutes the relation of actor, audience and subject by demystifying the performance. This is why the most frequent performance references derive from childhood (puppets, clowns, toys and object manipulation) or sports, because these are two areas of popular culture in Canada over which people feel that they have some control.

By adopting the serniotic conventions of familiar popular culture, the troupes declared their alignment with an audience consciousness that normally would reject 'high culture' as an imposition. Hence the troupes that developed these techniques of foregrounded performance tended to be those that were most involved politically. If Québécois troupes appeared to be further advanced in the use of performance quotations - to the extent that le Grand Cirque Ordinaire and Théâtre EUH! could be described as political clown troupes - it was in part because they were more radical in their political analysis.

In Quebec, where the anglophone minority enjoyed a disproportionate share of wealth and power, the alignment of colonial oppression with class structure was more visible than in English Canada. By the early 1970s marxist rhetoric was common in Québécois theatres; AQJT in 1974 elected a radical board of directors, and when Théâtre EUH! led a walk-out of militant theatres from the association in 1975 it was not because the AQJT was anti-marxist, but because according to the more radical troupes, any compromise with the bourgeois state was unacceptable. Affiliated with the Marxist-Leninist party En Lutte!, Théâtre EUH! was merely the most extreme in a theatrical field filled with marxist troupes. The use of popular culture techniques, of clown shows, giant puppets and street parades, provided an accessible context for an essentially intellectual analysis. This was particularly true of Théâtre EUH! which, in contrast to most Québécois troupes, considered separatism to be a bourgeois question secondary to that of class struggle. The relative popularity of marxist analysis in Quebec may explain why Brecht has been significantly more influential there, as theorist and playwright, than in English Canada.

In English Canadian theatre, marxist analysis was less common for several reasons. They can be illustrated by the example of the Mummers Troupe, which in 1973 became the first company in English Canada to use theatre as a tool of political intervention and community development. The paradoxical gulf that separated the parallel developments in the two cultures can be seen in the fact that in 1973, the year after Theatre EUH! originated its Histoire du Québec, the Mummers Troupe performed its populist history play, Newfoundland Night. These two theatres, virtually at the same time, created pieces that were fundamentally similar: collectively created, using clown and puppet techniques, populist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. And yet the Mummers and Théâtre EUH! never knew of each other's existence.

For the decade of its existence, the Mummers Troupe was repeatedly criticized for putting politics before art, and if it was not censored overtly, it was in a state of perpetual financial crisis. Denounced in a report to the Canada Council as a 'subversive agitprop political warfare type theatre,' ¹ its plays focussed on the lives of the working class in Canada's poorest province. In these respects, the Mummers were not far apart from the Québécois militant troupes. But in its plays the Mummers troupe avoided an appeal to explicit left-wing solutions to the problems it described. In its most famous intervention play, Gros Mourn (1973), the Troupe supported the struggle of rural fishermen whose villages were to be relocated to make way for a national park; in What's That Got to do with the Price of Fish? (1976), the troupe argued that the Newfoundland fishing industry was Canada's Third World. The shows were normally sponsored by legitimate social groups, such as UNICEF, the United Steelworkers of America and the Community Planning Association. In fact, so moderate were the Mummers' politics (compared to the revolutionary Quebecois troupes) that the Newfoundland government happily overlooked its hostility to the troupe when their interests coincided, and commissioned it to produce its most famous work, They Club Seals, Don't They? (1977) in defence of the controversial seal hunt. In all of these plays the troupe implied that rational solutions could be supplied within the existing social context. In this sense the troupe was no more radical than the unions and community groups it supported.

The radicalism of the Mummers Troupe lay not in the expressed ideology of its work, but in its commitment to community intervention. English Canadian political theatre has in the main adhered to this condition and has tended to reflect the ideology of its target audience. This is in part because of a tendency in English Canada to perceive politics in terms of community rather than class, and in part because unlike many of the jeune théâtre troupes, English Canadian theatres had to provide a living for their members; in Quebec the members of Théâtre EUH! for example supported themselves by teaching. In English Canada theatres were too far apart and often too remote from urban centres to survive on a part-time basis, and hence could not afford to risk alienating their often conservative audiences. In many cases the troupes had to work hard to win acceptance in communities where theatre was a suspect occupation and marxist rhetoric would be greeted with hostility.

In this context, English Canadian political theatres tended to be not revolutionary but preservative. This is a state that can only be considered radical and subversive in a consciousness that is deeply colonized - that is, a consciousness which habitually defines itself in terms taken from its identification with a dominating power. This consciousness affected the actors themselves, many of whom had little political experience and less understanding of theory. In Quebec the fact of anglophone dominance radicalized a generation of theatre workers; in English Canada their counterparts had less direct experience of oppression. Consequently many English Canadian populist plays were not so much about the issues affecting a community as about the political education of the actors themselves. This was true of the Mummers Troupe as well, which never achieved the political consensus that its founders had envisioned. Instead the troupe was sharply divided by intense arguments about the nature of collectivity: typical of English Canadian theatre workers its members understood politics best in terms of individual rather than collective interaction.

A decade has passed since Théâtre EUH! and the Mummers Troupe created their most important work, and neither troupe survived the 1970s. Since that time the profile of political theatre has changed in both cultures as the issues of colonialism have receded into the background. Today political theatre is a tool used with increasing effect by activist organizations, including women's groups, Native Peoples, the handicapped, anti-nuclear campaigners, and Third World solidarity committees. The past five years have seen a widespread adoption of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, first introduced into Quebec in the late 1970s and into English Canada several years later. The popularity of Boal's forum theatre as well as parallel Canadian developments suggest that political theatre in Canada today is functionally similar to that of other Western societies. In terms of dramaturgy, performance vocabulary and political sensibility, however, it is very much an extension of the post-colonial struggles of the 1970s.

Note

Forum - THE IDEOLOGICAL FORMATION OF POLITICAL THEATRE IN CANADA

Alan Filewod

1 The phrase is found in DUDLEY COX, 'Theatre Newfoundland - The Professional Theatre in Newfoundland,' unpublished submission to the Canada Council, January 1974
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