Volume 12, Number 1, 2026 Re-Assembling: CTR 199–200 Guest-edited by Selena Couture and Melissa Poll

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A response to Kailin Wright's article “(Un)Making History? Canadian Theatre History and the Canadian Theatre Review.”

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In this article, Jessica Riley offers a deconstructive reading of the founding issue of Canadian Theatre Review, demonstrating how language choices—including the celebratory invocation of “chauvinism” as the defining spirit of the era—serve as symptomatic points that expose the underlying cultural values embedded in this first issue. These values, Riley argues, establish disciplinary legacies that continue to inform the way we make, think, and write about theatre in the lands known as Canada today.

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Whose views may be right or wrong depends a lot on perspective. In his article “History’s Sides,” social anthropologist Nicholas Lackenby calls the tendency to situate oneself on the right or wrong side of history, as Alan does, “sideism.” Lackenby contrasts that perspective with the notion of “plural, local, individual histories.” To the sideist, history is a totalizing concept, a rhetorical binary that leaves little room for the local and individual. Without denying the importance of critiquing colonial history, I argue that one can do so while still allowing the virtues of those local histories that live within its shadow.

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Rebecca Burton and Annie Gibson bring together playwrights, publishers, and academics to discuss Canadian Theatre Review in relation to its role in and relationship to play publication in Canada. The abridged roundtable features Taiwo Afolabi, Marie Barlizo, Leah-Simone Bowen, Jill Carter, Annie Gibson, Alan Filewod, and Kevin Williams, moderated by Rebecca Burton and edited by Rebecca Burton and Annie Gibson.

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This article examines the first CTR volume to address sexuality and, significantly, not gender: CTR 12, titled Homosexuality and the Theatre, edited by David Watmough and published in 1976. In doing so, the author positions this issue as an important flex point in the journal’s history—what is, arguably, the first time the journal addressed an identity politics other than Canadian or Quebec nationalisms. Examining the issue and its reception in the gay press, we see the politics of theatre and performance at a moment of stress, at a time when a liberal humanist understanding of art based firmly in playwriting and a canon of ‘great’ plays—central tenets of CTR’s early mission—is both asserted and questioned. In this moment, received assumptions about theatre and performance were beginning to be challenged by new theoretical questions about representation, politics, power, and the purposes of a journal like CTR. CTR 12 represents an early sign of a still-ongoing process at the journal, which unfolded very slowly over the next few decades: a process that questioned the politics of representation, most often led by marginalized ‘others’ who took greater control over their own representation and participation within art, culture, and politics, and within the pages of CTR; a process whereby the journal would more overtly theorize its own conceptions of theatre and performance and its position vis-à-vis the construction of ‘Canadian theatre.’

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From theatre school, to emerging artist programs, to awards and prizes, to appealing to the tokenizing checkboxes of programmers, what does it do to the queer artist psyche to come of age in an environment that teaches artists to mine themselves for trauma to then turn into artistic material? What happens when you internalize the understanding that the parts of yourself that have been forged through interpersonal and intergenerational violence are the parts that will most easily endow you with professional success and notoriety? We forget to wonder if we list our social identities in our artist bios to honour our ancestors and communities, or to elbow our way to the front. How can we keep putting ourselves out there when it becomes impossible to tell if your good, hard, skilled work has earned you a spot in a given “room”, or if you are there to check a box?

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When Jenn Stephenson asked me to contribute my reading of a year’s worth of journals to this special issue, I knew right away it had to be 1988. While I was watching Liz on my parents’ TV, what were the preoccupations of the scholars, artists, critics, and others binging on CTR, paving the ground ahead of me? Do those preoccupations resemble in any way the concerns we fret over now, or are they worlds away? I was eager to find out. Issues 54 through 57 of CTR are, in order, Shakespeare in Canada (Spring 1988, edited by Ann Wilson), Collaborations: Rethinking Collective Creation (Summer 1988, edited by Alan Filewod), Theatre and Ethnicity (Fall 1988, edited by Natalie Rewa), and Critical Practice in Canada (Winter 1988, edited by Robert Wallace). Scanning the titles online, my first impression was commonalities: I could easily imagine all these themed issues transposed into our critical present. Our relationship to Shakespeare has recently re-entered the spotlight via, among other projects, York University’s Recasting Shakespeare in Canada symposium (April 2023); the offshoot Shaking Up Shakespeare podcast, hosted by Marlis Schweitzer, Liam Lockhart-Rush, and Hope Van Der Mer-we; and my own forthcoming book, Women Making Shakespeare in the 21st Century. The tradition of collective creation has shape-shifted over the years, through devising to audience participation and again to practice-as-research. Winter 2023’s issue of CTR examines casting and race in our colonial present and is edited by Mariló Núñez, Jamie Robinson, and Marlis Schweitzer, with Yasmine Amirkhani, Liam Lockhart-Rush, and Zoe Marin. And questions about the ethics of reviewing practice have only grown more complex in the decades separating 1988 and 2024, as Indigenous, global majority, disabled, trans, and non-binary artists such as Kim Senklip Harvey and Yolanda Bonnell agitate powerfully for critical sovereignty. As I read my way through CTR’s 1988, what I found overwhelmingly were the seeds of today’s conversations being sown, as our creative and critical communities began to grapple with the challenges, especially around equity and de-colonization, we still circle today.

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In this piece, Kelsey Blair responds to Kim Solga's article, "A Year in the Life: Canadian Theatre Review, 1988." Blair uses Diana Taylor's is/as distinction to think beyond performance and into the publishing process surrounding the 1988 issues.

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A discussion of the concept of interculturalism as published in CTR over 40 years and in the author's research and practical experience.

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In this response to Selena Couture’s resonant account of her engagement with Corpus CTR, I focus on the notion of careful, durational encounter and invite the reader to consider my text as a visit. I situate Selena’s interaction with Corpus at the intersection of time, the everyday, relationality and labour, viewing this as a conflux of elements that propel pressing questions concerning the unseen, in-between and intentionally (un)productive labour of relationship-building. The text touches on how these in-between spaces of earned trust can generate powerful disturbances to the assumptive value/s of settler colonial whiteness that are pervasive across western culture, including academia and creative sectors. Ultimately, I suggest that how we honour and account for these labours in our practices, and in the archives that render value and visibility within the systems in which we work matters, even if doing so in a sustainable, ethical way often poses significant challenges. In the spirit of Selena taking the time to make space for, and account for, the uncertain experimentation of non-extractive relationships, I conclude with a provocation to consider how real relationship-building might be undertaken, ac/counted and recognized in tandem with other labours in ways that preserve the features that make it so profoundly valuable.