Readership Survey
Goal is to learn how people in performance arts view themselves in relation to Toronto's multicultural identity
BY RACHELLE COOPER
Toronto claims to be the world's most multicultural city and the third most active theatre centre in the English-speaking world, and Prof. Ric Knowles, English and Theatre Studies, wants to determine how these two claims might be related.
“Identities don't really exist until they're performed,” says Knowles. “The field of performance studies is useful for analyzing how individual, social, community and cultural identities are formed and shaped.”
There's no shortage of multicultural theatre companies and festivals in the greater Toronto area — African-Canadian, Asian, First Nations, Latino, Filipino and others that cross cultures. Knowles suggests that these companies not only constitute individual communities within Toronto but also contribute to the identity of the entire city.
He's driving into Toronto about three days a week to attend theatre, spoken-word, dance and other types of performance to observe the identities that are being created. He's looking at the people involved in the productions, the languages spoken in the performances and the people who make up the audiences.
“Mainstream” productions by commercial theatre companies with high ticket prices tend to attract primarily older white audience members, for whom a multicultural show “might be merely a curious piece of exotica,” says Knowles. “Grassroots intercultural productions, however, are not only developing new shows and new writers but they're also developing new audiences.”
He notes that a lot of work is being done to develop audiences among people who don't normally go to theatre. Native Earth Performing Arts, for example, “has a person working specifically to liaise with native organizations and individuals to get that audience out.”
Knowles wants to determine what audiences are identifying with when they see a show. Plays have increasingly been incorporating languages other than English in their productions, he says. This can deliberately divide an audience to make the non-native English speakers the insiders.
“It also lets you know what it's like to be a linguistic outsider,” he says. “Sometimes people get quite offended when they can't understand a speech being delivered in a language other than English.”
The point is sometimes to encourage people from different cultures to talk to each other at intermission to piece together the parts of the play they didn't understand, he says.
By conducting interviews with directors, actors, stage managers and audience members, Knowles hopes to learn how people in performance arts view themselves in relation to Toronto's multicultural identity. He's focusing his research on the period since the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was passed in 1988, but says he'll also look back to the introduction of multiculturalism as an official policy in 1971 and its entrenchment in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, and examine patterns of immigration as they pertain to Toronto.
Knowles is discovering that many people don't fit neatly into cultural categories within the city's performing arts companies. One of his former students, Nina Lee Aquino, a Filipino-Canadian, is the artistic director of the fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company, directs and writes for the Carlos Bulosan Theatre, is the marketing director for Native Earth Performing Arts and is director of the CrossCurrents Festival, which represents theatre that cuts across different cultural communities.
“There are dozens of people who work across different cultures,” he says. “This is resulting in strategic alliances across these communities that form a larger community of difference within the city.”
Another way to explain his research is to think of Toronto as a performance ecology, says Knowles.
“A healthy ecosystem has a healthy diversity of species, and that's sort of the bottom line as a way of looking at Toronto's performance ecology. Does it have a healthy diversity? What is the impact of this bit of it on that bit of it and ultimately on Toronto as a larger community?”
Intercultural performance studies is far from a new area of research for Knowles. He's currently working on the second volume of Staging Coyote's Dream, an anthology of First Nations drama that he's co-editing with First Nations playwright and actor Monique Mojica of Toronto.
He's also writing a collection of essays with African-Canadian playwright and former U of G writer-in-residence Djanet Sears. As the editor of Canadian Theatre Review, Knowles has already dedicated issues to African-Canadian theatre, First Nations theatre, Asian- and South Asian-Canadian theatre and translation, and plans to bring in someone from the community to help compile an issue on Canada's performance ecology.
This is the first year of his three-year study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Once he finishes his study of Toronto, Knowles hopes to extend his work to look at intercultural performance in Canada.
