A Year in the Life

Canadian Theatre Review, 1988

Abstract

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