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The Living Histories Theatre Ensemble (LHTE) is a socially-engaged improvisational theatre collective exploring the intersections of oral history and performance within a community-university research alliance entitled, 'Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by Genocide, War, and other Human Rights Violations.' This paper explores the LHTE's adaptations of Playback Theatre, and specifically the evolution of a technique called the 'Bridge', towards more fully reflecting values espoused within the Montreal Life Stories project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a documentary play in which actors represent living or historical people, textual artefact is replaced by creatively embodied document. Every stage of the construction of that document, from a subject's recall of events, to a researcher's transcription of the subject's testimony, to performance, is an act of improvisation. Reflecting on Nanay: a testimonial play, this paper examines the document as a necessarily creative construction. It describes improvisative decisions made at every stage of the rehearsal process, how they resulted in naturalistic or non-naturalistic staging, and how spectators and researchers correlated truth claims to the various theatrical genres employed. Referencing cognitive and event theories, Ferguson argues that the spectator engages with embodied performance somatically, and that “identification” based on mutual embodied encounter becomes critical to the spectator's acceptance or rejection of a documentary play's truth claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ligue Nationale d'Improvisation (LNI), an improvisational theatre group that came into being in the late 1970s in Montreal and whose popularity spread quickly, mainly in the francophone world, has imported the structure and rules of hockey and adapted them to a format in which teams of actor-improvisers compete. This paper examines the ways in which the game of hockey has infused theatre improvisation with energy and vitality and why, in a Canadian and more particularly Québécois setting, the transposition of a sport like hockey is particularly loaded with cultural resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]