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Introduction.

Article Excerpt
This book offers a radical rethinking of the conceptual foundations of Canadian theatre and, by extension, the Canadian nation which that theatre performs. At the same time, it attempts to reconceive the critical norms through which the theatre has been understood. It is both an exploration of a proposition and a consideration of its implications. My argument, that Canadian nationhood is a constantly changing historical performance enacted in an imagined theatre, repudiates the popular understanding of nationhood as an evolutionary progression made evident by the "growth" of national culture and the structures of cultural production.

We speak of Canadian theatre as if by some shared agreement we all know what the term means and embraces. For a number of years I have been an editor of a journal called Canadian Theatre Review, and, despite our frequently voiced aim of interrogating "Canadian Theatre," we tend to examine not the conjunction of the two constituent terms but rather the changing spaces between them. That is, we--along with most of the participants in what can be called Canadian theatre studies--map these terms onto a changing terrain of performative forms secure in the knowledge that our mapping thus resolidifies a notion that at times seems dangerously vague. Any linking of a national and a cultural formation will soon dissolve under scrutiny, and it may only be a matter of local pride that anglophone Canadians want to think that their country is less stable than others. But at the same time, "Canadian theatre" has always been a difficult and problematic term, less a definition of a thing than a site of debate and contestation. It summons two historically unstable terms to create a third site of crisis.

The problematic relation of theatre and nation is particularly opaque because the two fields have been summoned to explain each other and have at the same time served each other as descriptive sources. The nation has been the convenient mechanism of plotting theatre history (so that we speak of "the British stage"), and it has metonymic value in the self-glorifying names of theatres, like The Canadian Stage Company or Ottawa's ironically named Great Canadian Theatre Company. But if the theatre is (self) positioned as a metonym of nation (a metonym encoded in the very phrase of "the theatre"), it has also been a rich source of metaphors for nation-builders. Historians have been very fond of the framing techniques of theatre, which have permitted them to acknowledge the constructedness of historical narrative and at the same time accept it as a positivist fact. Consider the universality of such phrases as the "pageant of history," the "tableau" of the great moment, the "tragedy" (or "comedy") of the historical event. This is not as innocent a gesture as it seems, because it is inextricably related to the deployment of theatrical vocabulary, in the military, as armies perform in "theatres of war." (I use "deployment" here somewhat disingenuously, because cultural critics have in recent years happily appropriated the vocabulary of militarism to "interrogate" texts, to "contest" mechanisms that "regulate" conceptual "borders.")

The fact that theatre and nation share a slippage of language suggests that their relationship is not a simple positivist structure but is a deeper conceptual intersection, where the national imaginary embraces the theatrical imaginary. This is the relation that leads to the argument of this book, that the nation is enacted in the imagined theatre.

I want to introduce this argument with an illustrative moment that demonstrates the notion of the imagined theatre as a defining condition in Canadian theatre history and, in its subsequent iterations, demonstrates the relationship of the imagined theatre to the narrative performance of nationhood. The historical moment is that of the first European theatrical performance in what is now Canada, which took place on the shore of the Bay of Fundy before a small audience of French explorers and aboriginal bystanders on a November day in 1606. On that day, an aristocratic Parisian lawyer staged a theatrical ceremony to welcome the Sieur de Poutrincourt, who was returning to the French outpost of Port Royal after a voyage down the eastern seaboard. Marc Lescarbot later explained his decision to...