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Articles

Volume 34, Number 1 (2013)

Interculturalism and Theatrefront: Shifting Meanings in Canadian Collective Creation

Submitted
December 5, 2013
Published
2013-01-01

Abstract

This essay examines the process and product of a collaboration between Toronto’s Theatrefront and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre. The intercultural work Ubuntu (The Cape Town Project) expressionistically performs the stories of two generations of a South African family and a Canadian family as their complex associations are revealed against the backdrop of a Toronto university. Ubuntu, a Xhosan word, means, loosely, “a person is a person through other persons”—both community and ancestry—a philosophy that informed both process and production. Through an examination of the histories and mandates of both companies, read through Christopher Balme’s concept of theatrical syncretism, this essay argues that Theatrefront both borrows from and expands the parameters of the tradition of collective creation in Canadian theatre in this collaboration. As it explores perennial questions of self, national, and theatrical identity, Theatrefront employs indirect, globally-minded approaches to collective creation.