NEW PLAY DEVELOPMENT AT THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE
SAMANTHA E. SERLES
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN THEATRE
YORK UNIVERSITY
TORONTO, ONTARIO
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1*1 Canada ABSTRACT
The following thesis process paper, entitled New Play Development at Theatre
Passe Muraille is submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. This thesis process paper discusses the author's dramaturgy internship at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto from December
2009 to March 2011. The paper includes an overview of Theatre Passe Muraille's history and current mandate, analysis of the author's dramaturgy internship duties and the company's new play development initiative the Buzz Festival. The paper also considers how the traditional role of a company dramaturg or literary manager could be adapted to work within alternative models of developing and producing theatre.
IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Thank you to Andy McKim and the staff at Theatre Passe Muraille for all of the support, encouragement and opportunities they have given me over the last two years.
Thank you to Judith Rudakoff for her guidance throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies. Thank you to Lisa Wolford Wylam for her valuable insight and encouragement. Thank you to Mel Hague and my parents, Kathy English and Gregg
Series, for their endless love and support throughout this process.
v Table of Contents
Abstract iv
Acknowledgement v
Table of Contents vi
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE: Theatre Passe MuraiUe's Past, Present and Future 3
CHAPTER TWO: The Company Dramaturg 17
CHAPTER THREE:
The Buzz Festival 31
CONCLUSION 45
Work Cited 49
vi INTRODUCTION
From December 2009 to March 2011 I completed a dramaturgy internship at
Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto to fulfill the practical component of my studies for the
Master of Fine Arts in Theatre at York University under the supervision of Professor
Judith Rudakoff. This internship provided me with the opportunity to develop my dramaturgy skills by fulfilling some of the duties of a company dramaturg or literary manager, primarily reading script submissions and communicating my assessments to the artistic director, Andy McKim.
A dramaturg working within a theatre institution often helps to shape the evolution of the company by seeking out new artists and plays that the company may present in future seasons. As I developed an understanding of McKim's vision for the future of the Theatre Passe Muraille I recognized that my script reading duties were often separate from the process in which McKim selected the plays that Theatre Passe Muraille produced. Since McKim became artistic director in 2007, Theatre Passe Muraille has been in a state of transition as McKim brings his mandate for the company to fruition.
McKim has a vision for Theatre Passe Muraille to be a home for independent companies and collectives and multidisciplinary performance, a cultural institution that breaks down the wall between artists and audience. In this process paper I hypothesise how a dramaturg could ideally serve that vision.
Chapter one of this process paper discusses Theatre Passe Muraille's place in
Canadian theatre history and McKim's vision for the company's future. Chapter two details how my internship duties, which followed a traditional literary management 1 process of reading and assessing new scripts, deviated from McKim's methods of selecting new work for Theatre Passe Muraille. I also consider what the role of the company dramaturg at Theatre Passe Muraille might be by discussing how the skills that
I developed during my internship could be applied to McKim's vision for the company.
Chapter three theorizes how the position of the company dramaturg could be further integrated at Theatre Passe Muraille through involvement with the Buzz Festival.
As my position at Theatre Passe Muraille was a temporary internship, the tasks I completed were fashioned with the primary intention of developing my dramaturgical skills, not fulfilling a vital role within the company, as a staff dramaturg. Through this internship I had the opportunity to observe an established theatre company while it was in a state of transition, amidst a larger transition occurring in the way theatre is developed and produced in Canada. Collaborations between theatre companies are becoming increasingly common for both artistic and financial reasons, and new theatrical works are increasingly "creator-driven" rather than "playwright-driven". Through this experience I was provoked to consider how the traditional role of a company dramaturg or literary manager could be adapted to work within alternative models of developing and producing theatre.
2 CHAPTER ONE
THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE'S PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
My internship at Theatre Passe Muraille was my first experience working as a dramaturg within a theatre institution. Prior to this internship I had little experience in reading completed drafts of plays that had not been published or produced. As a student dramaturg I had worked mostly with playwrights who were in the process of completing a first draft. My central role had been to assist them in generating more material. My focus had always been on furthering the development of a script, not assessing a completed draft. In addition, whenever I had read a play previously, I had formed impressions about the script that were primarily based on my own artistic values and biases. In my internship position I was asked to read plays as a representative of Theatre
Passe Muraille in order to assess whether the script could possibly be produced in a future season.
In the early months of my internship I turned to Theatre Passe Muraille's mandate for a concrete explanation of the type of theatre the company intended to produce, aiming to assess how each script submission I read 'fit' within the mandate. A mandate, also referred to as a mission statement, delineates a theatre company's artistic objectives. A theatre company's mandate may refer to the form or content of plays that it produces, the support that it provides for professional or aspiring artists or the community that it strives to represent. A dramaturg working within a theatre institution needs to have a thorough understanding of the company's mandate in order to seek out and identify new works of theatre and artists. Michael Mark Chemers discusses this aspect of a dramaturg's role within a theatre company in his book Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for
Dramaturgy:
Different theatres have different identities and different contexts, and the dramaturg must take these issues into account...A dramaturg ought to have a detailed understanding of the theatre's mission and how it was executed in past seasons... the dramaturg helps to contextualize the work in productions and with audiences within that larger view... But the dramaturg needs to work within the company, always striving to improve the mission and to refine and clarify its goals and practices. (Chemers: page 145-146)
In order to understand Theatre Passe Muraille's current mandate I needed to be familiar with the work the company had been producing in recent seasons under the artistic directorship of Andy McKim. I also needed a clear sense of Theatre Passe Muraille's place within Canadian theatre history.
Theatre Passe Muraille was founded at Toronto's Rochdale College in 1968 by playwright and director Jim Garrard based on principals of experimentation and inclusivity:
There should be no walls of pre-conception about what theatre should and could comprise; traditional mores and methods are not necessarily the greatest; producing plays that are new and different and thought-provoking is more important than trying to increase the size and prestige of the organization; it is important to explore new models. (McKim and Neilson: 2007)
Garrard directed Theatre Passe Muraille's first production, Tom Paine, by playwright
Paul Foster, in the basement of Rochdale College using ensemble and improvisational techniques influenced by Ellen Stewart's Off-Off Broadway theatre company, Cafe La
Mama.
4 In 1972, Paul Thompson became the artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille.
Thompson had studied with director Robert Planchon in France and brought his distinctive methods of collective creation to Theatre Passe Muraille. Collective creation is a form of theatre in which a group of artists collaboratively devise and perform a new theatre piece. Members of the collective may take on multiple creative roles. Generally, there is not an individual credited as the "playwright," but rather the entire collective is credited as "creators." Theatre Passe Muraille gained national notoriety in 1972 after developing and producing The Farm Show under Thompson's direction. The Farm Show was a collective creation about farmers in rural Ontario. Members of the Theatre Passe
Muraille collective lived with residents of Clinton, a small town in south western Ontario, and observed their daily life. They then devised a play based on their experiences and the stories they had gathered from the individuals they met:
The Farm Show is arguably the most significant collective creation in TPM's history. In 1972, Thompson and a group of actors went out into farming country around Clinton in south-western Ontario. They lived with the farmers, worked with them, watched them and learned their stories. Then Thompson got his actors to create a play, each being responsible for his or her own part. It was part of an idea that became a theme for later work to help Canadians find new terms for heroes; to move away from the Davy Crockett types. The impact of The Farm Show was guaranteed by the fact that the community the show was built around saw it first and went crazy about it. The show premiered in the very barn the actors used for rehearsals. It was a terrific success and was taken on the road. (Taylor: page 11)
Another notable production from Thompson's tenure as artistic director was I Love You,
Baby Blue, a collective creation about "soft core porn" on a Toronto television station.
This 1974 production was seen by over 26,000 people before the Toronto Police shut it down and charged Theatre Passe Muraille with indecency for having nude actors on 5 stage. The profits generated from I Love You, Baby Blue funded Theatre Passe Muraille's purchase of a new venue at 16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto, in 1975, where the company has resided since.
In the 1980s and 1990s Theatre Passe Muraille's mandate shifted from collective creation toward playwright-driven work and traditional dramaturgy under the artistic directorship of Clark Rogers from 1982 to 1988, Brian Richmond from 1988 to 1991, and
Susan Serran, who was Artistic Producer from 1992 to 1997:
Clarke Rogers and Brian Richmond were gifted dramaturges and directors who shifted the artistic vision in favour of playwright-driven work, producing and supporting the work of now seminal Canadian artists such as Judith Thompson, Linda Griffiths, Tomson Highway and Michel Marc Bouchard. Under Susan Serran's artistic directorship TPM premiered the works of a new generation of playwrights such as Daniel Brooks, Daniel Maclvor, John Mighton, Jim Millan, Andrew Moodie, Alisa Palmer, James O'Reilly, Nadia Ross, Banuta Rubess and Mary Vingoe. (McKim and Neilson: 2007)
Layne Coleman was artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille from 1998 to
1996. A major achievement for the company during this time was the award winning production of Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy.
The play's success story is widely known by now. An award winning debut at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1999 (four Doras, including Best New Play) is followed by a remount of that production for an extended run in the fall at the same theatre. Mirvish Productions buys the show and presents it as a co-production at the Manitoba Theatre Centre and then at the opulent Winter Garden in Toronto. Meanwhile, Passe Muraille mounts a multi-city Canadian tour of a second production, and several other productions occur, including one at Blyth Summer Festival (the theatre which originally commissioned the play but then declined to produce it) and a prestigious American production at the famed Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Along the way, Healey wins the Governor General's Award for the published version of the script, while both the play and the productions receive almost universally rave reviews. (Burgess: page 24)
6 Despite this wide success, when Layne Colman resigned as artistic director in 2006,
Theatre Passe Muraille was in danger of closing due to "a crippling $500,000 deficit on an annual operating budget of roughly $1.2 million" (Ouzounian). Shortly after Andy
McKim was appointed artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille, the company's board decided to sell the performance venue, a historical building, to the City of Toronto in order to absolve the debt. The City of Toronto then: "leased the building to Toronto
Artscape Inc., a non-profit arts management organization, for $1 a year" (Spears) and
Theatre Passe Muraille became Artscape's tenant.
Andy McKim has been the artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille since 2007.
Early in his career he worked in Halifax at the Neptune Theatre and in London, England.
From 1985 to 2007 he was the associate artistic director at Tarragon Theatre. During his time at Tarragon Theatre, McKim directed new Canadian plays and ran new play development activities, such as Tarragon's Playwrights Unit, alongside the late artistic director Urjo Kareda. He also produced Tarragon's Spring Art Fair.
Faced with the task of leading a theatre company out of near financial ruin,
McKim came to Theatre Passe Muraille with the desire to reconnect the company to its historical roots as a home for collaboratively driven methods of play creation, and to distinguish it from other mid-sized Toronto companies, such as Factory Theatre and
Tarragon Theatre:
I was attracted to working at Theatre Passe Muraille because of its historical practices and I believe that the vision I have for the theatre is consistent with its history. I needed to bring a determination to distinguish it, as much as possible, from Factory Theatre and Tarragon Theatre, and maybe, to some extent, Buddies in Bad Times. [Theatre Passe Muraille] has a long history of supporting 7 collaboratively created work. In Paul Thompson's time it was called collective creation, but collectively created work is an inclusive term for a wide variety of developmental models. This is in contrast to Tarragon, which has been a very strong home for the playwright-driven project, as has Factory. (McKim and Roy: page 26)
This is being realized in programming choices such as Future Folk, a collective creation developed by Sulong Theatre Collective about the experience of Filipino women hired as nannies in Canada, produced by Theatre Passe Muraille in the 2009/2010 season, and
Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show, a collective creation developed by Architect Theatre about the oil crisis in Fort McMurry, Alberta that was produced by Theatre Passe
Muraille in the 2010/2011 season.
Just as Theatre Passe Muraille was once known for telling the stories of farmers in rural Ontario, McKim envisioned Theatre Passe Muraille as home for the many diverse stories and marginalized voices that now exist in Toronto and across Canada: "I aspire to represent the community of Toronto. My interest is in advocating choices that are inclusive while not being strictly ethno-specific at any given moment...I want our work to be accessible and inclusive of a broad audience." (McKim and Roy, page 26) This objective can be seen in recent Theatre Passe Muraille seasons through the work of artists such as Anusree Roy, whose plays have appeared in the last three seasons at Theatre
Passe Muraille: Pyaasa (2008/2009), Letters to my Grandma (2009/2010), and Roshni
(2010/2011). Roy writes from a South-Asian perspective as all three of her produced plays are set in India and speak from the point of view of South Asian protagonists.
However, her work has wide appeal that touches on many universal themes, such as family, identity and hope. Similarly Yichud: Seclusion by Julie Tepperman (2009/2010) 8 centres on the experiences of a Jewish Orthodox family, but is in fact a story about love, intimacy and gender roles, as well a finding a place in society despite differences.
Theatre Passe Muraille's current mandate to produce intercultural theatre is indicative of current trends in theatre creation in Toronto and across Canada. In "Cultural
Diversity at Play", an article for Canadian Theatre Review, playwright and dramaturg
Marie-Leo feli R. Barlizo writes about the development and production of new work by artists of diverse backgrounds in Toronto theatres:
Once upon a time, it was almost impossible for a person of colour to get produced on Canada's main stage. After all, it was only a few years ago (2006) when Djanet Sears made history at the Stratford Festival.... It has been a long road for playwrights of diversity, but the landscape of Canadian theatre is beginning to change and openness to producing culturally diverse work is growing, especially in Toronto. Companies like fu-Gen Asian Canadian Theatre Company, Native Earth Performing Arts, Cahoots Theatre Projects and Obsidian Theatre and festivals like CrossCurrents and Weesageechak that showcase works of diversity, have helped make the invisible visible and the unheard heard. Instead of waiting years to get produced and fizzling out after one professional production, playwrights of diversity are receiving support, and making a mark much earlier in their careers and have staying power. (Barlizo: page 139)
In the forward to "Ethnic ", Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre, Editor Ric
Knowles cites changes to government funding structures that allow "ethnic" groups access to arts funding rather than to multicultural funding as a factor in the upsurge of culturally specific and intercultural work being created and produced in Canada:
Prior to the late 1980s, as a result of both immigration and multicultural policies and practices, most theatre emerging from outside of the "charter" cultures of French and English - that is, the groups within Canada privileged in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedom as institutionally recognized cultures, as opposed to those identified as static, folkloric "ethnicities" - was systematically regulated to amateur status. Such theatre... was funded directly through the Multiculturalism Directorate of the Secretary of State rather than through the arms-length arts councils... From 1991 onwards all arts organizations- including Native groups 9 excluded from the Multiculturalism act- were eligible for a slice of the shrinking arms-length funding pie from the arts councils. This structural change in the administration of official multiculturalism, then, roughly coincides with the increased presence of minoritized cultures in Canada's professional theatre that continues to be evident. (Knowles and Mundel: page viii)
Knowles also attributes the amount of culturally specific and intercuhural performance that is being developed and produced in professional theatres across the country to an evolution in the focus and subject matter of the work being created by these artists:
[...] the Immigration Act of 1967, led to a first generation of so called "visible minority" immigrants to Canada whose theatrical activity was... often characterized by a compensatory nostalgia for a "home" culture and language that it attempted to preserve... the evolution of [Rahul] Varma's Montreal company, Teesri Duniya, from amateur theatre producing Indian plays in Hindi to a professional theatre that addresses complex intercuhural encounters, or the evolution of Toronto's Carlos Bulosan [Filipino] Theatre from an amateur "cultural workshop" under its founder, the late Feli Villasin, is representative of a broader cultural pattern. (Knowles and Mundel: page ix)
Companies mentioned by Barlizo and Knowles in the quotation above, such as
Obsidian, fu-Gen, Native Earth Performing Arts, and Carlos Bulosan are independent, not-for-profit companies that do not have their own performance space and therefore must rent space or co-produce with other theatre companies. Theatre Passe Muraille,
Factory Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, and Buddies and Bad Times Theatre, companies that were once regarded as "alternative" to the established system of regional theatres now regularly co-produce and present the work of other alternative and independent theatre companies and artists. A 2001 report on the state of theatre in Toronto states that there are "ninety-three companies listed by the Toronto Arts Council as grant recipients that generally produce work in spaces owned by others, or in collaboration with various
10 partners." (Breon: page 91) A 2007 survey from the Toronto Alliance for the Performing
Arts reports that 69 percent of performing arts companies in Toronto do not own their own venue. As Knowles discusses in an issue of Canadian Theatre Review dedicated to exploring the dynamics between companies and artists who engage in tours, remounts, and co-productions, these relationship often serve companies both artistically and financially:
Co-productions constitute an increasing percentage of theatrical activity in Canada, cutting across traditional distinctions between commercial and not-for- profit theatre, professional, educational and "community theatre", even regional, Regional, national and international theatrical production. At one end of the scale, large-scale commercial producers such as David Mirvish are remounting, co- producing and touring such successful shows as The Drawer Boy, Two Pianos, Four Hands, and Zaidie 's Shoes, shows that have emerged from small, not-for- profit play-development houses such as Theatre Passe Muraille and Tarragon... From another angle, independent not-for-profit production companies such as Autumn Leaf Performance, da da kamera and Ex Machina are funding their work in advance by soliciting co-productions with companies, conglomerates and festivals across the country and overseas...There are sound economic reasons for this, as theatres across the country reel from cutbacks that began as far back as the early 1970s and have increased exponentially since. (Knowles and Shad: page 3)
Part of the culture of collaboration that McKim is seeking to foster at Theatre
Passe Muraille includes developing and co-producing new works with independent theatre companies and collectives. In recent seasons, Theatre Passe Muraille has produced the work of many independent companies including: Theatre Jones Roy,
Convergence Theatre, Groundwater Productions, Contrary Company, and Project
Humanity. Most of these companies are comprised primarily of artists in the early stages of their career who have previously self-produced or presented work in theatre festivals.
McKim relayed to me in an interview his impression of the shift that is occurring in the
11 way theatre is developed and produced and how working with a new generation of artists at Theatre Passe Muraille differs from his experience as the Associate Artistic director at
Tarragon Theatre from 1985-2007:
In the last 10 years there has been an explosion of artists who are multifaceted. When I first started in the business, performing artists tended to consider themselves just actors who auditioned and were cast in plays. Whereas, I venture to say, that is less true of the large proportion of performers now. The new generation of theatre creators are forming their own companies and collectives and many write, direct, act, produce and so on. There is this huge generation and a half worth of people who have just arrived in the business who are developing work in a different way. There should be a way for these artists to get produced while being independent and self determining; allowing them to make the kind of choices an institution would traditionally make, like who their collaborators are going to be. When I was at Tarragon that is what I did— I figured out who the director was going to be, who the designer was going to be. And now, quite often they come as a group with the playwright. So I want to facilitate the power and strength of that dynamic, rather than get in the way of it by saying that the institution has to have its say. (McKim: Jan. 14, 2011)
McKim explained that he envisions Theatre Passe Muraille as a home for artists and companies that have their own methods and means of creation but require the support of a theatre infrastructure and venue: "We are an active midwife to the many wonderful projects that are being developed outside our walls but require support within our walls in order to achieve the bold visions that might languish underdeveloped." (McKim: Jan. 14,
2011). In "Cultural Diversity in Play" Barlizo describes the development process of Fish
Eyes and The Misfit by Anita Majumdar, who self-produced various incarnations of her work before it was programmed by Theatre Passe Muraille. This is one example of the type of relationship that Theatre Passe Muraille develops with self-producing artists and independent companies:
12 Writing is hard, but getting produced is even harder... since [Anita] graduated from NTS, she has had at least one of her plays produced at a major Canadian Theatre Festival each year. It all began when she took Chris Abraham's advice and produced and performed her sole show Fish Eyes at the 2004 Summerworks Festival in Toronto. In 2008, she toured The Misfit to the Push Festival in Vancouver, The Canoe Theatre Festival in Edmonton and Hatch at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre; she then was given the opportunity of a major production at Theatre Passe Muraille. Her success is largely due to the fact that she herself does the first productions of her plays. She has taken a proactive approach to her career as a playwright, as well as seeking out theatre companies to help support her development. Currently, she is looking into founding her own theatre company, which would support future generations of South Asian writers. (Barlizo: page 54)
Theatre Passe Muraille is not alone in this endeavour to support and develop working relationships with emerging and independent theatre companies. The Theatre
Centre in Toronto is mandated to support independent companies and "provides artists with infrastructure and resources to make their art- from the idea to production." The
Theatre Centre supports up to five companies over a two year period through its
Residency Program which provides space, funding, and mentorship as the companies develop new work. Jennifer Tarver, associate director of the Residency Program commented on the goals of the program in an article by Bruce Barton for Canadian
Theatre Review: "Our goal was to provide structure, relevant support, guidance and consistency to a specific sector of new work creation that has often struggled with erratic and haphazard working conditions. We want to give left-field, cutting-edge ideas mainstream support." Indeed, McKim's intention to give independent companies and collectives a home at Theatre Passe Muraille represents a broader trend in the Canadian theatre community.
13 The Buzz Festival is an initiative that McKim created in part to support independent companies as they develop new work. The Buzz Festival occurs over a week with different works in development presented each night. Companies and artists are invited to perform their work and receive feedback from the audience. Since the festival has occurred three times each season since April 2009, artists are able to participate in multiple festivals and to use the experience of performing their work for an audience as part of their development process. The festival is intended to serve the needs of artists who may not be developing strictly text-driven work:
Many theatre companies in Toronto have playwriting units, so I felt that playwrights were already being served in that way. I wanted to create an initiative that would represent Theatre Passe Muraille's mandate, but also create a development experience for artists and collectives that don't fit in the playwriting unit model. I wanted to create something different, a developmental tool for artists to use in their process prior to having a production. What could Theatre Passe Muraille as an institution bring to the artists' process? The answer was giving them an audience and presenting the work in an environment that is supportive of development rather than product-driven interactions with the work. (Gilodo, McKim, and Wilkinson: page 15)
The Buzz Festival has supported artists who write and perform their own work, those who devise and collectively create theatre and those who incorporate music or movement into their work. The festival has already proven to be a fruitful initiative for Theatre
Passe Muraille. It has become the breeding ground for the work that the company intends on producing. I discuss The Buzz Festival and how it functions as an initiative for the development of new work in Chapter Three of this paper.
Another initiative that will bring many of McKim's aspirations for Theatre Passe
Muraille to fruition is the Theatre Beyond Walls season. Theatre Passe Muraille received
14 a grant from the George Cedric Metcalf Foundation to commission artists and independent companies to create new work about the diverse communities of Toronto.
This work will be presented in the fall of 2012:
Beyond Our Walls is attempting to create the tools needed for future artists to develop a new kind of relationship with our audiences that could be a paradigm shift for theatre creation in Toronto. Our aspiration is to explore ways that our art can better reflect the narratives of our communities, with sensitivity and with artistry, and to show that art can be a part of society and not just for an elitist few. (McKim: June 23, 2011)
Many of the projects that have been commissioned have a development process that will include gathering stories through speaking with different community groups or engaging audiences in the process of creating theatre. The goal of this project is to turn Theatre
Passe Muraille into a cultural hub for the city of Toronto:
The legacy of this project for the city of Toronto will be a theatrical institution that is better equipped to meet people, to tell stories about them, to make culture relevant for them and to develop stories that speak to them. We are striving to become a more relevant cultural institution through the support, participation and engagement of our community. There is a big job ahead for us as cultural leaders. Namely, how can we be the purveyors of the public's ability to be engaged with art? As a major Toronto arts institution we have the opportunity to make a huge impact on our city, our arts sector and our community. That, or we will disappear due to our lack of relevance and community support. But as we look back to marvel at the bridge we are building at TPM we are inspired to move even further into the fresh uncharted territory of our vision. (McKim: June 23, 2011)
The Theatre Beyond Wall's season of activity will affirm Theatre Passe Muraille's values of supporting independent companies, representing marginalized voices and communities on stage and producing diverse and multidisciplinary work.
15 Throughout my dramaturgy internship at Theatre Passe Muraille, I was included in many discussions about the Theatre Beyond Walls project, the Buzz Festival, and other programming decisions. All of this deepened my comprehension of the company's current mandate. As these discussions transpired, it became increasingly apparent to me that there was a disconnect between how my dramaturgy internship duties were initially conceived and McKim's larger vision as expressed through the actual work Theatre Passe
Muraille was developing in the Buzz Festival and producing in recent seasons. The following chapter details how the dramaturgy and literary management tasks that were the focus of my internship differed from McKim's methods of selecting new work for
Theatre Passe Muraille and considers how the skills I developed in my internship could have been better applied to forward McKim's vision for the company.
16 CHAPTER TWO
THE COMPANY DRAMATURG
During Andy McKim's tenure as artistic director, there had not been a dramaturg or literary manager on staff at Theatre Passe Muraille. Therefore, the script reading duties that a company dramaturg or literary manager may typically fulfill were not a primary part of the process in which McKim chose new work for the Buzz Festival and productions at Theatre Passe Muraille. The following is a list of the plays in the
2010/2011 season. Each one was selected after McKim had seen an early version of the piece or as a result of a pre-existing relationship with the artist. Also, with the exception of Oh My Irma, each one was associated with an emerging or independent company or collective:
- The Middle Place by Andrew Kushnir was a collaboration between Theatre
Passe Muraille, Canadian Stage, and Project Humanity. McKim became interested in this play after seeing it in Toronto's Summerworks Festival in August 2009.
- The Cure for Everything by Maja Ardal was developed by Contrary Company.
This play is the sequel to Ardal's play You Fancy Me which was produced at Theatre
Passe Muraille in 2009.
- Roshni by Anusree Roy. Roy wrote this play during her term as playwright in residence at Theatre Passe Muraille and it was developed in collaboration with Roy's company Theatre Jones Roy.
- Oh My Irma by Haley McGee. McKim first saw McGee perform this one- woman show at Crapshoot, an emerging artists showcase event that is held at Theatre 17 Passe Muraille. McKim worked with McGee as a dramaturg and accompanied her to the
Banff Playwrights Unit in 2009 to develop Oh My Irma for Theatre Passe Muraille's
2010/2011 season.
- Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show was a collective creation developed by
Architect Theatre that toured across Canada before appearing in Theatre Passe Muraille's season. McKim became interested in the play after seeing one of its performances.
While the possibility exists that an unsolicited script could prove to be a perfect fit for Theatre Passe Muraille, none of the plays I saw produced at Theatre Passe Muraille during my internship were received as script submissions. McKim has maintained a policy of accepting unsolicited scripts from playwrights, despite the fact that producing playwright-driven work is not the focus of Theatre Passe Muraille's mandate. It is my belief that McKim's decision to continue accepting script submissions can be partly attributed to his past working experience at Tarragon Theatre.
Tarragon has a reputation for being a "playwright's-theatre," meaning that the focus of its mandate is supporting, developing and producing new work by Canadian playwrights. Part of Tarragon's current mandate states that the company: "presents new plays from all parts of the country, revives significant Canadian plays" and "Long-term dramaturgy, tailored to the play and playwright, is a priority at Tarragon." McKim was the associate artistic director at Tarragon Theatre from 1985 to 2007 and worked alongside the late artistic director Urjo Kareda. Kareda was a seminal dramaturg in
Canadian theatre history who was famous or personally reading and responding to the approximately three hundred to five hundred script submissions that Tarragon received 18 yearly, as he relayed to Judith Rudakoff in an interview in Between the Lines: The
Process of Dramaturgy
I honour playwrights by reading and responding to their play... I get back to them within a month. I read every play and I do try to take everyone seriously as a writer...Tarragon is a playwrights' theatre and it should be the responsibility of the person who runs it to keep in contact with playwrights across the country, to keep that door open, to have them know that their play will go directly to me. (Rudakoff: page 24-25)
McKim worked with Kareda on many dramaturgical and new play development tasks, including assessing scripts and running Tarragon's playwright's unit. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, McKim has sought to distinguish Theatre Passe
Muraille from companies such as Tarragon by reinvigorating it as a home for collaborative and alternative methods of creation.
McKim has been implementing his vision for Theatre Passe Muraille through his producing and programming choices. However, I believe that the company's script submission policy and the dramaturgy intern duties I was assigned reflect a model of working that is reminiscent of McKim's time at Tarragon. As it was conceived throughout my internship, the role of the company dramaturg at Theatre Passe Muraille has not caught up with the evolution of McKim's vision of the company.
Prior to the start of my internship, McKim had other volunteer dramaturgy interns who had read scripts for him. As these interns had worked on a sporadic and short-term basis, no system of reading and responding to scripts existed at the outset of my internship. With the understanding that my internship would be a longer-term commitment, my first undertaking was to establish a protocol for the script reading duties
19 that I would follow for the duration of my time with the company. McKim and I decided that I would be the first person to read all unsolicited scripts that Theatre Passe Muraille received. After I read a new script, I would write a script report. McKim and I would meet bi-weekly to discuss the scripts I had read and decide on an appropriate response for the playwright. Over the course of my internship, from December 2009 to March 2011,1 read approximately two hundred scripts.
McKim gave me a script report template at the beginning of my internship and asked me to use it as a way of recording and communicating my impressions of the scripts that I was reading. The first section in the script report template is themes. In commenting on the themes of a play I identified the major ideas I perceived in the script and acknowledged which theme I found the strongest. My challenge in this section of the script report was to relay what thematic aspect of the script had the most impact on me while I was reading the play, as well as to look at the play objectively in terms of what other themes developed in the script that could resonate with a wide audience. I think that as a dramaturg it is important for me to acknowledge how my own personal experiences and artistic preferences affect the way I interpret a script.
The second section of the script report is synopsis. In writing a synopsis I would not attempt to relay every detail of the script. Instead, I focused on identifying the main action of the play and describing the journey or story arc of the main character. I often started with a brief description of the background information I thought necessary to understand the action of the play. Then I summarized how the action of the play developed and the major conflict that needed to be resolved. In writing a synopsis of the 20 script, I aimed to relay key aspects of the play to McKim so that he would be aware of the content of the piece. In this section I also often indicated the structure of the piece, such as whether the action of the play developed in a linear manner, as the structure of the play may impact how the story is understood by an audience.
The final section of the script report is the appraisal. Here I summarized my dramaturgical impressions of the play. I tried to communicate the aspects of the play that had an impact on me and convey my dramaturgical impressions of what elements of the play were working well and what elements could be developed further. If I had questions about the script I recorded them here. Finally, the script report template asked for a rating of the script ranging from excellent to poor in the following categories: character, dialogue, structure, plot, and setting.
After I discussed my script reports and impressions of the plays with McKim, we would decide how to respond to the playwright. Sometimes McKim would consider the script for the Buzz Festival. This was a rare occurrence, since most of the submissions that we received were completed drafts of plays and the Buzz Festival is primarily for artists who are still in the process of generating material. When McKim was interested in a script submission for Buzz, he would contact the playwright himself. McKim would also often respond personally if the submission was from an established playwright or someone whose work he was already familiar with. For most other playwrights who submitted unsolicited scripts, the task of informing them that Theatre Passe Muraille was not interested in producing their script fell to me as part of my internship duties. If
McKim and I thought the playwright had a unique voice and we wanted to read more of 21 his or her writing, I invited the playwright to submit further drafts of the play. In these circumstances, I would indicate what aspect of the script McKim and I had found interesting and endeavour to include at least one comment to promote the development of the play. The following is an excerpt of a letter I wrote to a playwright in response to a script submission. Identifying details about the play have been altered to protect the playwright's privacy:
Thank you for submitting your play JQX to Theatre Passe Muraille for consideration. Andy McKim and I have read and discussed your piece and unfortunately, at this time it does not fit within the repertoire of work that we are considering. However, we think that your work shows promise. We are particularly intrigued by your script's potential to illuminate the diversity and unique culture of St. Lawrence Market. The market vendors whom XXX encounters are an interesting group of characters with compelling personal histories. In further drafts, you might consider expanding on their stories. The themes and ideas that you are exploring in this piece are quite complex. We are interested in learning more about your vision for this play and your plans for its further development. Although we are not interested in pursuing this piece for production at the moment, Andy and I would like to invite you to send us further drafts of this play and keep us aware of how it is developing. (Personal Letter: October 14, 2010)
Although I encouraged several playwrights to continue sending their work to
Theatre Passe Muraille, I was aware of the reality that the company could not provide these artists with development support in the form of a playwright's unit or workshop, as
McKim had established the Buzz Festival as an alternative to the playwright's unit model. Playwrights who submitted work to Theatre Passe Muraille rarely inquired about being considered for Buzz, possibility because there was little information about the festival or how to become involved on the company's website. The Buzz Festival
22 requires participants to have a moderate degree of production value and staging and the artists are responsible for assembling actors and possibility a director. This makes Buzz a compelling initiative for the independent companies Theatre Passe Muraille is mandated to support. But it became clear to me that the playwrights from whom I was receiving submissions may not have had the contacts or resources required to self-produce their work for the festival.
The tasks I was asked to complete at the outset of my internship were those that might be expected of a dramaturg or literary manager at a theatre with a playwright- centred mandate that is actively seeking new playwrights to develop and produce, a process Tim Sanford describes in an article called "The Dramaturgy of Reading":
A reader must produce a play inwardly and assume the roles of director, designer, and actors to active it. Plays usually start with a writer alone in a room, following an impulse, shaping an internal vision, listening to voices, and formulating questions. A literary manager's first responsibility is to that writer. In fact, few of the scripts that literary managers read actually get produced. The real job of a literary manager is not to find production-ready scripts but to discover writers with distinct voices. Literary managers read work by writers who are still developing. Playwrights never spring up ready made without flaws. Some writers develop slowly, some make quantum leaps, some write the same play over and over again. The literary manager is bound to read an entire spectrum of writers....Artists toil alone but receive inspiration from and react against the artistic climate. The broad spectrum of writers that submit scripts to a theatre is a necessary part of this artistic climate. (Sanford: page 439)
Sanford positions the work of the literary manager as the playwright's first collaborator, someone who functions as a "gate-keeper" to the theatre's institution. I was fulfilling these tasks at Theatre Passe Muraille despite the fact that the plays that Theatre Passe
Muraille produces often had multiple artistic collaborators before being associated with 23 Theatre Passe Muraille. Conversely, while some scripts I read may have previously received a workshop or reading, most had never been produced and did not have a director or creative team attached to the project. In fact, many playwrights stated in their submission letter that their play had never before been read by someone in a professional theatre capacity. I believe these playwrights viewed submitting their script as a means to gain entry to the theatre company, and were not necessarily aware that playwright-driven work was not the primarily focus of the company's producing objectives. Although there is a condensed version of the mandate available on the Theatre Passe Muraille's website, the company's artistic objectives are not clearly communicated. As my internship progressed, I came to believe that it was unproductive for Theatre Passe Muraille to accept unsolicited scripts unless changes were made to the script submission protocol and the way that the company communicates with artists.
Theatre Passe Muraille does not have a clear script submission policy. Having worked closely with so many unsolicited scripts, I now believe this is a central reason for the discrepancy between the work the company produces and the type of scripts it receives. On the website there is a section entitled "Script Submissions" that includes a form for playwrights to submit along with their script. The form asks for the playwright's writing resume, a synopsis of the play and whether the script has been produced. I would receive these forms with each new submission. Nothing else is communicated about script submissions on the company's website. Those who submit scripts do not learn what type of plays and artists the company is seeking and whether Theatre Passe Muraille is looking for plays that are ready to be produced or plays to be developed. 24 It would be more beneficial to clearly delineate on the website that Theatre Passe
Muraille is interested in receiving submissions and project proposals from independent and emerging companies and collectives, as well as work that is multidisciplinary or collectively devised. This information should encourage artists whose work does not take the form of a script to submit photo and video footage, a performance score, or any type of documentation that represents their piece. It should be clear that completed projects will be considered for production and developing work will be considered for the Buzz
Festival. In my view, communicating this vital information could result in the company receiving submissions that are more suited to McKim's vision and intentions, and would provide much needed clarity for the artists who are submitting work to Theatre Passe
Muraille.
I also believe that the script report template that I was asked to use at the beginning of my internship further illustrates the disconnect between the values of the company and the script submission protocol. The categories in the script report template such as "synopsis", "character", "dialogue", and "setting", are consistent with the manner
I had learned to break down the world of a play in my undergraduate theatre studies courses. As David Lane describes in an article entitled "A Dramaturg's Perspective on the Future of Script Development," similar terms are commonly used in play development and suggest a prejudice for plays that portray recognizable characters and locations and stories told through a linear narrative structure:
The common terminology on offer when developing a play text takes its lead from the realm of psychological realism, where phrases such as character,
25 narrative, language, location and plot carry particular associations. They are part of a broader understanding of theatre where stories are linear, characters are three- dimensional; dramatic action, and therefore plot structure, has a basis in causality, spoken text takes the form of conversations between characters; and locations are identifiable as part of the material world we recognize in everyday life. This extends also into associations regarding the style of performance: acting embedded in naturalism, a compliant audience that receives rather than constructs meanings;...a text that has been rehearsed rather than one that has been improvised; and a theatre experience that is live only because it occurs in a shared space and time, rather than one that fully exploits, within its composition, the risk and tension of live performance. (Lane: page 128)
I was able to use these terms to analyze scripts for Theatre Passe Muraille since the majority of them were text-based and narrative-driven rather than the collaborative and multidisciplinary work represented in the company's mandate. Perhaps if the submission policy was adjusted to more fully reflect this mandate, the company might receive different types of submissions: scripts that are the product of a collaborative devising process, performances scores for movement-based theatre or transcripts for a verbatim play. If that were to transpire, then the script report template I had worked with may not be an effective way to disseminate information about these forms of theatre.
Certainly however the skills I developed throughout my internship in reading and assessing text-based plays can be applied to other forms of theatre. In "A Dramaturg's
Perspective on the Future of Script Development," Lane discusses how an understanding of classical dramatic structure can be applied to work that does not fit a traditional mold:
In the practice of script development, dramaturgs can use their existing knowledge of the recognizable ordering principals of drama even when they are absent in the play by design- but only as long as they are applied as a tool of translation, revealing the work rather than smothering its unique
26 qualities...discovering what is present through identifying what is absent...There is no overarching system that will solve all play texts. (Lane: page 130)
In this sense, I would be able to use the analytical skills I was developing by writing script reports for McKim to assess submissions that could be considered "performance scores" or did not have a traditional narrative structure. For example, The Middle Place by Andrew Kushnir is verbatim theatre piece that was comprised of edited interviews that
Kushnir conducted with youth in a Toronto homeless shelter. The verbatim text of the play is taken from the interviews and five actors portray multiple characters. As Lane describes above, examining how a play differs from a classical dramatic structure can be one way to identify how the parts of the play work together to create meaning. The
Middle Place has no "plot" in the sense of a story line told with rising and falling action; rather, the culmination of each youth's story creates the overall message of the piece. If I were asked to assess The Middle Place dramaturgically I would consider how the interview questions and answers are juxtaposed, what themes are carried through each of the youth's personal stories, and how to effectively structure and frame the piece.
A similar process of dramaturgical analysis is described by Cathy Turner and
Synne K. Berhrndt in Dramaturgy and Performance:
The complex inter-and cross-disciplinary dramaturgies that have emerged in the twentieth century have also led to an emphasis on the live performance text, as opposed to the written play....Contemporary views of dramaturgical analysis tend to stress the consideration of the performance as a whole and emphasize that, in looking at the work's dramaturgy, we need to consider how all elements interact... Unlike forms of performance analysis that make use of particular theoretical framework (for example, semiotics), focusing on specific elements of the work, dramaturgical analysis regards the performance as a complex web of elements and
27 aims to identify the ways the which these connect (or fail to connect). (Berhrndt and Turner: page 30)
As Turner and Behrndt describe, dramaturgical analysis often involves a consideration of how the culmination of all aspects of a performance piece creates meaning. This may have been an effective way for me to form my dramaturgical assessments had I been asked to review submissions of multidisciplinary performance or devised plays.
However, Turner and Behrndt warn: "Some plays are fundamentally 'open' compositions and are not complete until they are given performance... A dramaturgical analysis of a written text is therefore somewhat provisional, since it must be acknowledged that any discussion that confines itself to the script on the page has certain limitations." (Berhrndt and Turner: page 35) I believe this statement is true of all dramaturgy work as plays are written to be performed for an audience, not read in a script form. However this consideration is particularly important for performance pieces such as The Middle Place.
While it may be possible by reading The Middle Place to discern how some of its individual elements will weave together to create a whole, other aspects may only be communicated in its performance. Therefore, I think that in order for a dramaturg's work to be more relevant at Theatre Passe Muraille, the ability to assess new work in rehearsal or during performance would be imperative.
Ideally, Theatre Passe Muraille's company dramaturg would not primarily spend their time reading scripts of plays that are likely to never be produced. Rather, it would seem to be more productive to make the dramaturg's role more outwardly focussed, working within the theatre's community to actively seek new artists, collectives and
28 independent companies. To best serve Theatre Passe Muraille, a company dramaturg should be familiar with the multitude of emerging companies and collectives in Toronto.
The company dramaturg should be able see new work in development at festivals where independent companies often self-produce their shows, such as the Toronto Fringe
Festival and Summerworks, as well as workshops presented by other theatre companies.
This would require the ability to make dramaturgical assessments of work that is being staged with various levels of production values and assess how the play would fit Theatre
Passe Muraille's mandate. Michael Mark Chemers offers some insight into how to view a performance from a dramaturgical perspective in Ghost Light: A Handbook for
Dramaturgy:
When you are witnessing any kind of production, it is very helpful to habitually employ what is known as "Goethe's 3" Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a mightily prolific German author, scientist, humanist, and dramaturg of the Weimer classical period... A dedicated empiricist, he developed these three questions to ask of any production as prelude to developing a critical review: What were they trying to do? Did they do it? Was it worth doing?" (Chemers: page 115)
Although Goethe's three questions are simple, they are an effective and timeless way of approaching various forms of performance as they could be applied to multidisciplinary, movement-based and collectedly created work. However, I think an understanding of how these forms of theatre are developed would greatly inform the work of a company dramaturg at Theatre Passe Muraille.
A proficiency in assessing new work in performance would also be an asset for
Theatre Passe Muraille's company dramaturg in relation to the Buzz Festival. I believe there is an opportunity to incorporate a dramaturg into the Buzz Festival process and that doing so would further integrate the position of company dramaturg into Theatre Passe
Muraille's producing and development activities. In the following chapter I will discuss how a dramaturg could be incorporated into the Buzz Festival based on my observations of the festivals that occurred during my internship and interviews I conducted with artists.
30 CHAPTER THREE
THE BUZZ FESTIVAL
In 2008, Theatre Passe Muraille received a Strategic Initiative Grant from the
George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation to fund the development of the Buzz
Festival and the first three years of the festival's operation. The inaugural festival took place in April 2009 and has been produced three times in each of the following seasons
(2009/2010 and 2010/2011). Each festival occurs over a week with different new works in development presented each night. The pieces that are presented are at varying stages of development, from the first draft of a scene, to an excerpt of a completed play. The
Buzz Festival is currently produced by Aviva Armour-Ostroff. Armour-Ostroff worked with McKim as an artistic direction intern at Theatre Passe Muraille during the
2009/2010 theatre season and remained on staff as producer of the Buzz Festival.
The Buzz Festival is achieving one of McKim's primary goals of supporting not just playwrights but artists who create in a variety of methods. For example, the Buzz
Festival has presented work devised by collectives such as Sulong Theatre's Future Folk and puppet pieces by groups such as Everyboy by Dutch Uncle Puppetry. Dance and movement-based companies, such as Dancemakers and Theatre Rusticle, have presented work in the Buzz Festival, as well as artists who are developing new musicals. The work being supported by the Buzz Festival may be produced in future seasons at Theatre Passe
Muraille, which will forward McKim's vision of reinstating Theatre Passe Muraille as a home for collective creation, multidisciplinary theatre, and alternative modes of development. 31 Since I read so many new scripts and corresponded with playwrights throughout my internship, one might assume I would be in a position to connect artists who were interested in developing their work at Theatre Passe Muraille with the Buzz Festival.
However the Buzz Festival further exemplifies the disconnect I perceived between my internship duties and McKim's vision for the company. I attended four Buzz Festival weeks during my internship in December 2009, April 2010, October 2010, and December
2010. McKim expressed to me that he had a vested interest in many of the pieces presented in the festival and these pieces could one day be produced at Theatre Passe
Muraille. However, often the opportunity to perform in Buzz and receive audience feedback seemed to be the only form of dramaturgical support these artists received from the company. I think that including a dramaturg in each step of the Buzz Festival process could serve the needs of the artists involved in the festival and also serve the needs of
Theatre Passe Muraille by supporting and tracking the development of the pieces that the company may one day produce.
The Buzz Festival is programmed by McKim and Aviva Armour-Ostroff who invite artists to participate. There is no application process. Occasionally McKim or
Armour-Ostroff would ask me to read something that they were considering for the festival and share my opinions with them but this was separate from the unsolicited script submissions that were my primary responsibility as a student dramaturgy intern. In
September 2010,1 was asked me to review a submission from a playwright whose work was under consideration for the October 2010 Buzz Festival. This playwright had submitted a great deal of material, including a full script and a letter explaining that she 32 was interested in exploring the structure of her piece. First-time participants of the Buzz
Festival typically receive a twenty-minute time slot. However, this playwright had already completed a script that was about eighty minutes in length. McKim, Armour-
Ostroff and I decided that since she was mainly interested in exploring the structure of her play, presenting only twenty minutes would not give her the information that she was seeking in order to continue developing her work. Based on what she conveyed in her letter of intent, it seemed that she was seeking a more traditional workshop experience, in which she could have her whole script read by actors and examine whether the structure of the piece was serving her artistic goals.
In this example, it was decided that the piece of writing would not sufficiently benefit from being presented in the Buzz Festival without discussing with the playwright what she hoped to gain from the process. We assumed that she was looking for a traditional workshop experience based on her statement that she wanted to explore the structure of the piece. But she was not given the opportunity to explain how presenting her work in the Buzz Festival would aid her exploration of the play's structure or how she would benefit from receiving audience feedback. If a dramaturg was associated with the festival, ideally there could be far more conversation with potential Buzz Festival participants about why they want to be in the festival and how they expect their work will benefit from their participation. Formalizing the application process could result in more informed programming choices. This could be achieved by creating an application form that would ask the artists to articulate what elements of their piece they are interested in developing in the Buzz Festival and how they would benefit from presenting their work 33 and receiving audience feedback. Answering these questions would also inform interested applicants about the festival's objectives. In order for the Buzz Festival to be further established as a dramaturgical initiative, it needs to more clearly emphasize that the focus of the festival is nurturing the development of new theatre pieces, rather than simply showcasing new work.
As the Buzz Festival is aimed at fostering a discourse between an audience and artists who are developing new works, a key aspect of the festival is the audience feedback component. McKim was interested in incorporating audience feedback into the
Buzz festival as "an opportunity for artists to engage meaningfully with an audience, which will also give an audience a greater appreciation for what a [play development] process is." (Gilodo and Wilkinsen: page 15) The audience members who attend the Buzz
Festival are asked to answer questions that the artists provide about their work. The goal of this process is to provide the artists who participate in the Buzz Festival with written feedback from the audience that communicates what they have achieved so far with the piece that they are developing, and indicate what aspects of the piece are unclear.
Currently, artists who participate in the Buzz Festival are responsible for developing their own questions to ask the audience. I find this aspect of the Buzz Festival to be problematic. Dramaturgs often ask playwrights questions that draw their attention to aspects of their script that they may not have considered. I would not want a playwright to control a dramaturgy meeting by presenting me with the questions and issues that they believe should be addressed in their script because this could limit the potential for the playwright to discover something new about the work. Similarly, one of 34 the goals of the Buzz Festival is to facilitate an experience where artists can make discoveries about their work. However, they will not necessary see their work from a new perspective if they have complete control over the selection of questions posed to the audience.
Ideally, part of the role of Theatre Passe Muraille's company dramaturg would be to meet with all participants after they are accepted into the festival. This would provide the opportunity to have a dramaturgical discussion about the work and allow the dramaturg to suggest questions that the artist might want to explore. This is an element that has not existed in previous Buzz Festivals. As result, I think there has been an assumption that each artist is able to competently identify what aspects of their script need to be further developed. I believe there should be a conversation with each artist about their play's development trajectory and what they are hoping to accomplish by presenting their work in the Buzz Festival. I would discuss with each artist whether there is any additional dramaturgical support that they are seeking as they make preparations for the festival. This could include the company dramaturg providing notes on the artist's work, suggesting questions that they may want to consider posing to the audience or aiding them to refine the questions that they are intending to ask. Furthermore, I would meet with each participant after the festival to discuss their experience, whether they made any discoveries about their work, and how they intend on incorporating those discoveries as they continue to develop the piece. Currently, McKim and Armour-Ostroff do hold meetings with many of the artists following each festival. However, discussions I have witnessed have often seemed superficial, covering basic information about the 35 artist's intentions for the piece, because the groundwork of a dramaturgical relationship between Theatre Passe Muraille and the artist was not established prior to the festival.
While some artists in the Buzz Festival may neither want nor need additional support from Theatre Passe Muraille, considering that the Buzz Festival is a play development initiative, dramaturgical support is a resource that should be provided for those whom it would benefit.
I decided to interview artists who had presented work in the Buzz Festival in order to gain a better understanding of how the festival furthers the development of the work it presents, as well as how a dramaturgy position could be incorporated into the process. I conducted interviews with three artists: Natasha Greenblatt, Haley McGee, and
Thomas Morgan Jones. Speaking with these artists gave me insight into how the Buzz
Festival functions as play development initiative, but it also made me realize the value and importance of conversation in a dramaturgical process. I sensed that the artists benefited from reflecting on their experience in the Buzz Festival and that they had not previously put into words how presenting their work in the festival had furthered the development of their piece. This is the type of dialogue that I think is currently missing from the Buzz Festival.
My first interview was with Natasha Greenblatt, an early career actor and playwright who graduated from The National Theatre School's Acting Program in 2007.
Greenblatt was a member of Theatre Passe Muraille's Upstarts Creator's Unit1 in 2008
1 The Upstarts Creator's Unit was a group of emerging artists who worked on collaborative creative projects during the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 theatre season at Theatre Passe Muraille. 36 and 2009. McKim first asked her to be in the December 2009 Buzz Festival with her piece The Peace Maker, which she was also developing as part of Nightwood Theatre's new play development festival, Groundswell in 2010. The Peace Maker was described in the program for the October 2010 Buzz Festival as "a young woman's journey from a tour of Israel to a Palestinian refugee camp as a music teacher and leader of a youth band,
Horns of Freedom."
I have seen Greenblatt's play in each of its Buzz Festival incarnations. I first saw it in December 2009. At this point it was just fifteen minutes long and the narrative focused on a young Canadian woman's experience teaching music to children in
Palestine. When I saw it in April 2010, Greenblatt presented half an hour of material and had added music played by live musicians at certain moments in the script. At the
October 2010 Buzz Festival, Greenblatt presented forty-five minutes of the piece. The narrative had evolved significantly to include the young woman's affair with a soldier, and live music was incorporated throughout the play.
When Greenblatt participated in the October 2010 Buzz Festival, she worked with different actors than she had in her first two experiences in the Buzz Festival. One actor in particular, Razi Shawahdeh, had interpreted his character differently than the actor who had played the part previously. This resulted in Greenblatt seeing the character in a different light as well, and as a result, influenced how she chose to continue writing the character:
Casting Razi [Shawahdeh] for this last Buzz definitely changed my perception of the character of Saif; he was a lot goofier before and Razi played him, he was
37 kind of a clown, but Razi brought a lot of sincerity and depth to the character and I started writing differently because of that. (Greenblatt: Dec. 1, 2010)
While casting for a workshop or script reading can also impact a play's development and the playwright's perception of the characters, Greenblatt was able to see different interpretations of her characters at an early stage in her development process and consider whether she wanted to let that interpretation influence the way she wrote the character. In addition, participating in the Buzz Festival has given Greenblatt the opportunity to experiment with the elements of music in her piece. Typically, music may not be incorporated into a play until its final stages of development or until it is being rehearsed for production. However Greenblatt has been able to collaborate with musicians from a very early stage in her writing process:
Being able to work with music at such an early stage has been really helpful... for instance people really respond to the way the musicians play really badly and then gradually get better, that tells so much of the story. And I wouldn't have had the opportunity to realize that without putting it in front if an audience, and again with the deadline of Buzz you just have to make strong decisions fast and go with it, and sometimes those decisions will influence the rest of the writing. (Greenblatt: Dec. 1,2010)
Experimenting with music in the Buzz Festival gave Greenblatt a degree of creative control over how music is incorporated into her script. Rather than relying on a director to interpret her intentions for the musical elements of the script after completing a final draft, Greenblatt was able to experiment with how the music can serve her creative vision for the play throughout the process of writing it. This interview showed me that an important aspect of the Buzz Festival is experimenting with various elements of production while the artists are still in the process of writing their play. Greenblatt was
38 inspired by the actors and musicians that she worked with in the Buzz Festival and this furthered her writing and the development of her play.
I asked Greenblatt about her experience receiving feedback and whether this had affected the way she had continued to write her play:
Sometimes facing the feedback is scary because you don't know who these people are; they come in with all of their own biases. However, I do like getting a sense of, in general most people thought this, but then a few think this. If you can have the self restraint not to get caught up in the one comment and take things as a whole, then it is very useful. (Greenblatt: Dec. 1, 2010)
As Greenblatt highlights, one of the dangers of receiving audience feedback is that the playwright does not know who the audience members are or how their personal experiences influence their perception of the work. This quote from Greenblatt demonstrated for me one of the key ways that a playwright can approach feedback from the audience from a positive point of view. By considering the feedback as a whole rather than focusing on individual comments, she could compare these reactions to her own intentions for the work and assess whether the message that she wanted to communicate was being received by the audience.
My second interview was with Haley McGee, an early career actress and playwright. She is a graduate of Ryerson Theatre School's acting program and Oh My
Irma is her first play. Oh My Irma, a one-woman show which McGee also performs, follows the journey of a poet named Mission Bird as she struggles to find out how her mother, Irma, has died. The clues lead her to the apartment of a man named P.P who has a dog, also named Irma. The play unfolds as Mission Bird tries to find out what really happened to her mother, what role she played in her mother's death, and what P.P's 39 connection is to her mother and to her. I chose McGee to interview because I wanted to ask her about her experience in the Buzz Festival as a playwright and a performer. I wanted to know how her writing process was different from that of someone like
Greenblatt, who did not perform their own work and how these two elements of her craft were related during the development phase of her play.
Oh My Irma has been developing in front of an audience since its inception, as
McGee first performed five- and fifteen-minute versions of the piece at Crapshoot, a
Theatre Passe Muraille showcase for emerging artists in May 2009. McGee has actually made choices about the play in the midst of performing it "While performing [in
Crapshoot] I realized that she was going to kill the dog. I had this epiphany right in front of the audience." (McGee: Dec. 1, 2010) As the writer and performer of Oh My Irma,
McGee was able to improvise and edit her writing while performing. She uses the audience reactions to inform and shape her play:
Because I wrote it, I can edit on the fly. Having the freedom to do that when it is your own work and you have an audience is great. Getting to change it while I do it, and figuring out 'okay people really responded to that part so maybe I should explore it more' or 'this isn't really working so maybe I should cut it, that was what was really important about the experience for me. (McGee: Dec. 1, 2010)
Since she had been performing this piece for an audience from very early in its development process, when McGee participated in the Buzz Festival, she was very open to the audience's impressions about her work. McGee left aspects of her work open to interpretation so that she could discover what her material was communicating. In Oh My
Irma, Mission Bird realizes the man she finds when trying to figure out why her mother
40 died is her father. However, this was not the conceit that McGee intended to write. As a playwright, she was inspired to write the characters but did not know how they connected to one another. One of the questions that she asked the audience was: "What do you think the characters' relationship to one another is?":
I hadn't actually decided [before performing in The Buzz Festival] what the relationships between the characters' were, Irma and Mission Bird and Irma and the man, I think I had always suspected that they were her parents, but I hadn't really committed to that in the writing. So one of the questions that I asked people was "what do you think the relationships are?" and it was really interesting to see what people thought. A lot of people said they thought that Irma and the man were Mission Bird's parents, but other people didn't really get it. Part of me really wanted to resist the idea of P.P being Mission Bird's father, but the more I performed it, I realized that's who he was, and that was the story I was telling. (McGee: Dec. 1,2010)
In this situation, the feedback from the audience was able to confirm McGee's intuitions about her play. The experiences she described as having influenced her writing happened as she performed her own work-in-progress for an audience. In this case, the element of the Buzz Festival that most influenced McGee's creative process was not the written feedback from the audience, but the act of performing and gauging the reception of her work. My interview with McGee illustrated for me that the Buzz Festival can significantly benefit an artist who is open to letting the audience into their development process. As with Greenblatt, I got the impression that McGee wasn't looking for specific answers from the audience; rather, she was surveying the audience in order to determine what her piece was communicating.
For Greenblatt and McGee the primary dramaturgical experience of the Buzz
Festival was the process of making critical choices about the work in preparation for the
41 festival and the opportunity to make discoveries through performing or seeing their work performed. Both of these artists indicated that participating in the Buzz Festival had been beneficial and that they were able to use the information they received to continue writing their scripts. However, I think there is a possibility that presenting work in development for an audience may not result in such a positive experience for all artists. A dramaturg could discuss with each artist the discoveries that they make about their work through preparing for the festival. A dramaturg could ask questions about the choices the artist makes as a result of seeing their work performed to ensure that they are not straying too far from their original artistic intent for the piece, and assist with processing the feedback they receive from the audience in a manner that will be productive to continue writing.
By interviewing Thorn Morgan Jones, an experienced dramaturg, I truly saw the benefit of having a dramaturg work with artists throughout the Buzz Festival process.
Jones is the co-artistic director of Theatre Jones Roy and a past associate artistic director and dramaturg for Theatre Direct Canada. For Theatre Passe Muraille he has directed and dramaturged three plays by Anusree Roy: Pyaasa, Letters to My Grandma, and Roshni.
He directed Roshni in the December 2009 Buzz Festival, and a piece called Untitled
Amsterdam Story that he co-wrote with Michelle Pollack in the April 2010 Buzz Festival.
When I spoke with Jones about his experience in the Buzz Festival, he told me that he had encouraged the artists he was working with to approach the festival as an opportunity to take risks and experiment:
Buzz gives artist the opportunity to really tests drive some material... it's like being in a laboratory, I made sure that Anusree knew there was no pressure, so she wasn't worried about whether it was terrible writing, it was just great to be 42 able to try it out. And for a playwright not to have any hesitations is very unusual, but I think it is entirely because of the way that Buzz is structured (Jones: Jan. 11, 2011)
The Buzz Festival is a place where artists can take risks and what they learn can subsequently influence the creation of their work. The artist does not have to worry about receiving negative reviews in the media or not selling tickets if the audience doesn't understand their work. This attitude reinforces the idea that Buzz is about development rather than showcasing a performance. It is vital that artists understand this in order to get the most of the Buzz experience.
Jones also told me he carefully considered the questions he posed to the audience each time he had participated in the Buzz Festival:
You need to know what you want to take from the festival and what questions that you need to ask in order to get the information that you need. The more open- ended you make the question, the more freedom you give the audience to say anything that they want. The more specific you are with the question, the more you are going to get a really definite answer, which could be even more painful... I think artist should be aware of what their objectives are going into the festival, understanding that it is a development opportunity. If you go into without really thinking critically about why you want to do it, then you might not get feedback that is useful. (Jones: Jan. 11, 2011)
In my view, Theatre Passe Muraille has a responsibility to ensure that artists approach the
Buzz Festival with clear objectives. A dramaturg associated with the Buzz Festival could aid the artists in determining what their objectives are and what questions they could ask the audience to get the information they need to continue writing just as Jones did for the artist he worked with in the festival. I have often thought of the position of a dramaturg as someone who can reflect a playwright's work back to them in order to show where their artistic intentions for the piece are being communicated and where they are not. I think 43 this is currently how the audience feedback component of the Buzz Festival is serving many of artists, by providing a range of reactions and questions for the playwright to consider. However, audience feedback cannot replace a personal working relationship between a playwright and dramaturg, nor should the playwright be expected to dramaturg their own work by highlighting the aspects of their script that need further development.
I am not proposing that Theatre Passe Muraille's company dramaturg should directly influence or control the development of pieces in the Buzz Festival. That would not be in line with McKim's intention to support the work of independent companies and artists while allowing them to maintain their creative autonomy. However, just as the
Buzz Festival seeks to open lines of communication between artists and audiences, there is a need for stronger communication between the theatre company and the festival's participants. Theatre Passe Muraille's company dramaturg could fill this missing link in the Buzz Festival process and consequently this would give the dramaturg's work more significance at Theatre Passe Muraille.
44 CONCLUSION
This growing discrepancy I experienced in my internship position between the traditional work of the company dramaturg/literary manager and the new models of creation that the company was exploring is not unique to Theatre Passe Muraille. A conversation is occurring internationally among theatre scholars and practitioners about the changing landscapes of theatre and performance in which the boundaries between artistic genres are blurred and new models of creation, collaboration, and production are being developed. In Dramaturgy and Performance, Behrndt and Tuner quote Ruth
Litter, the literary manager at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England:
We are now regularly making work that takes the dramatic script as a 'theatrical score'; where the playwright participates alongside the director, designer, composer, choreographer, puppeteer, performer, drawing on live resources in action to produce a text... This 'convergent' theatre-making... is shifting dramaturgical practice away from linear, strictly casual models toward a recognition of the play as a living system, subject to complex and subtle environmental forces and feedback from within the play and beyond it (in its relationship with its audiences). The implications of this for writers, dramaturgs, and theatre maker are, I think, profound. (Behrndt and Turner: page 194)
As new forms of theatre and new methods of creating emerge, the responsibilities and job descriptions of those working in the theatre industry must be adapted. Performance theorists Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi address how the work of the dramaturg must adapt to new ways of working in contemporary theatre in their article
"Dramaturgy on Shifting Ground":
Hybrids of theatre, performance, installation, exhibition, film and media art are gaining importance, often based on new production methods and institutions...Thus contemporary dramaturgy is facing a challenge: to develop
45 creative ideas in the cooperation with authors and directors; to ensure the quality of theatrical work based on fruitful communication process within the production team; to invent helpful concepts for season schedules and for cultural institutions in general; to enhance unconventional modes of exchange and discourse. (Lehmann and Primavesi: page 3)
Lehmann and Primavesi discuss the need for a broader view of the role of the company dramaturg. They call for dramaturgs who are competent in many artistic disciplines, able to work with a high degree of flexibility not reliant on traditional models of play development:
Successful dramaturgy practice within theatre institutions today demands a productive flexibly, a capacity to shift grounds oneself and to switch from an argument based in literary knowledge to an argument based in visual arts or in music, from choreography to document, from a strategy of presenting something in front of an audience to a strategy of communication. (Lehmann and Primavesi: page 5)
I find the wide scope in which Lehmann and Primavesi discuss the role of the dramaturg to be inspiring. Despite the ambitious reach of McKim's vision, my experience as a dramaturgy intern for Theatre Passe Muraille was confined to the somewhat limited activity of reading script submissions. To better serve the company and the artists, there should be a breadth to the dramaturg's position at Theatre Passe Muraille, encompassing the company's present activities while keeping the artistic director's objectives for the future in focus. Turner and Behrndt refer to this as "keeping the whole in mind" in
Dramaturgy and Performance:
The dramaturg is someone who "keeps the whole in mind." There are aspects of the institutional dramaturg's role that often extend beyond the "whole" of a specific production or script to encompass the "whole" that is the theatre organization itself, its contexts, its repertoire and its artistic policy." (Turner and Behrndt: page 167)
46 At Theatre Passe Muraille, a dramaturg's consideration of the "whole" of the institution could include assessing how the Buzz Festival is serving the needs of artists as well as the company, tracking the development of pieces presented in the Buzz Festival and providing dramaturgical support before and after each festival week, considering programming for future seasons and assessing how pieces presented in the Buzz Festival would represent Theatre Passe Muraille's mandate if produced. It could include developing a submission policy that invites the type of artists Theatre Passe Muraille is interested in producing, becoming familiar with emerging companies and collectives in the city by attending festivals, workshops and independently produced shows. The dramaturg at Theatre Passe Muraille should be a liaison between the theatre company, artists who are developing work through the Buzz Festival and independent companies and collectives who may be able to collaborate with Theatre Passe Muraille in the future.
This idea that the dramaturg can function as an artistic liaison, a bridge between artists, the theatre institution and the general public was the focus of the Literary Managers and
Dramaturg's of America 2011 conference:
The conference theme—The Dramaturg as Public Artist—will challenge us to use the skills we already have to imagine a truly "public" role for ourselves. How can we connect our work to the broader public discourse? How can we act as liaisons between theatre and the culture at large? How can we position our work within the larger marketplace of ideas? (LMDA website: http://www.lmda.org/)
This conceit of the role of the dramaturg as a sort of ombudsman for the theatre institution seems particularly relevant to Theatre Passe Muraille, a company that is
"devoted to encouraging, enhancing and increasing meaningful interactions between its
47 communities - artists, staff, audience, neighbourhoods and supporters." (McKim and
Neilson: 2007)
As an intern, I was not in a position to implement changes to the dramaturg's responsibilities at Theatre Passe Muraille. However, through this valuable internship position I learned that in my work as a dramaturg in the future, I must always examine how I am serving the companies and artists that I engage with. As Michael Mark
Chemers states in Ghost Light: A Handbook for Dramaturg; "The dramaturg is the one who questions" (Chemers: page 146). I take away from my internship an understanding that a dramaturg's questioning is not limited to a script or a production; rather, the theatre institution and the dramaturg's place within it may also be a subject of questioning.
48 WORK CITED
Books:
Chemers, Michael M. Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy. Carbondale [111.:Southern Illinois UP, 2010. Print.
Johnston, Denis. Up the Mainstream: the Rise of Toronto's Alternative Theatres, 1968- 1975. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1991. Print.
Knowles, Ric, and Ingrid Mundel. "Introduction." "Ethnic," Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre. Vol. 14. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2010. Vii-Xvii. Print. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English.
Rudakoff, Judith, and Lynn M. Thomson. Between the Lines: The Process of Dramaturgy. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2002. Print.
Sanford, Tim. "The Dramaturgy of Reading: Literary Management Theory." Ed. Susan Jonas, Geoff Proehl, and Michael Lupo. Dramaturgy in American Theatre. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1997. 431-40. Print.
Taylor, Bill. Theatre Passe Muraille: A Short History. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1982. Print.
Turner, Cathy, and Synne K. Behrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008. Print. Theatre and Performance Practices.
Journals:
Barlizo, Marie-Leofeli R. "Cultural Diversity in Play." Canadian Theatre Review 139 (2009): 50-55. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO.Web. 15 Aug. 2011
Barton, Bruce. "Forwards: The Theatre Centre's Residence Program." Canadian Theatre Review 135 (2008): 109-112. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.
Breon, Robin. "Noises Off-Right: Theatre in the Toronto Region." Canadian Theatre Review 93 (1997): 16. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.
49 Gilodo, Karen, and Lydia Wilkinson. "Creating a Buzz: Connecting Artist and Audience Development." Ed. Rick Knowles. Canadian Theatre Review 2009th ser. 140: 14- 19. Print.
Knowles, Ric, and Skip Shand. "Editorial." Canadian Theatre Review 108 (Fall 2001): 3. Print.
Lane, David. "A Dramaturg's perspective: Looking to the future of script development." Studies in Theatre & Performance 30.1 (2010): 127- 142. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 30 May 2011.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, and Patrick Primavesi. "Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds." Performance Research 14.3 (2009): 3-6. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 30 May 2011.
McKinnie, Michael. "Space Administration: Rereading the Material History of Theatre Passe Muraille." Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (1999). Print.
Roy, Anusree, and Andy McKim. "Building a Theatre without Walls." Alt. Theatre 7.1 (2009): 26-32. Print
Interviews:
Greenblatt, Natasha. "The Buzz Festival." Personal interview. 1 Dec. 2010
Jones, Thomas M. "The Buzz Festival." Personal interview. 11 Jan. 2011
McGee, Haley. "The Buzz Festival." Personal interview. 1 Dec. 2010
McKim, Andy. "Theatre Passe Muraille." Personal interview. 14 Jan. 2011
Pavlinek, Teresa. "The Buzz Festival." Personal interview. 14 Jan. 2011
Other:
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America. Web. 12 July 2011. http://www.lmda.org/
McKim, Andy. "Theatre Beyond Walls Project." Message to the author. 23 June 2011. E-mail.McKim, Andy, and Hugh Neilson. Theatre Passe Muraille Mandate and History. 2008. Web.
Spears, John. "Rescuing Passe Muraille Would Cost City $1.2M; Economic Development Committee Recommends Buying Building from Theatre Company." Toronto Star 6 July 2007. Print.
Theatre Passe Muraille February 22, 2010. Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts Members Survey. Rep. Toronto Arts Council, Dec. 2007. Web. 17 Aug. 2011. 51