Introduction: Performing Intercultural Canada
Theatre and performance in the land that is now called Canada, apart fromsacred and still private rituals unique to specific First Nations,has always been intercultural.Even among pre-contact First Nations, ceremonies such as the potlatch among the nations of the west coast were designed to negotiat...
| Published in: | Theatre Research in Canada |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
2009
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/tric.30.1_2.v https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/tric.30.1_2.v |
| Summary: | Theatre and performance in the land that is now called Canada, apart fromsacred and still private rituals unique to specific First Nations,has always been intercultural.Even among pre-contact First Nations, ceremonies such as the potlatch among the nations of the west coast were designed to negotiate difference and facilitate trade. Contact itself is easily imagined as performative, as European “explorers” and “discoverers” encountered the (to them) inconvenient existing inhabitants of Turtle Island (a space they preferred to construe as empty) through mutually misunderstood ritual exchange and enacted devastatingly imbalanced, ultimately genocidal versions of one-sided, appropriative interculturalism. Since contact, all public performance in Canada has involved performatively constituting and negotiating subjectivities that have inevitably been displaced, hybrid, or diasporic: between settler/invader cultures and First Nations, among subsequent waves and generations of immigration from increasingly diverse locations—even within and between the dominant, settler/invader cultures themselves. |
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