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While researching background material for Our Kind of Work (Thistledown 2011), a book about the first decade of Saskatoon's Twenty-fifth Street Theatre, I found myself re-thinking long held assumptions about the theatre company and the theatre community in Saskatchewan. My expectation was that the theatre company had an amicable relationship with the Saskatchewan Arts Board through the company's early years. Twenty-fifth Street Theatre was, after all, the only professional theatre company in the province dedicated to producing Canadian plays, and the Arts Board was there to foster the growth of Saskatchewan's artistic scene. The relationship between the theatre company and the Arts Board was less than friendly, however, as is shown in several archival documents. I also assumed that the fledgling theatre company would find an ally in the local newspaper The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, but the relationship was again unfriendly. Animosity between the theatre company and the newspaper culminated in a tense letter to a local reviewer which called for a public debate on the merits of one of the theatre company's productions. My archival research, performed in the Twenty-fifth Street Theatre Collection at the University of Saskatchewan Archives, taught me that my knowledge of the theatre's inner workings and of its relationships with other entities was far from complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance venue of Two Planks and a Passion Theatre is 178 acres of varied farmland that surrounds the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, near Canning, Nova Scotia. Forest, fields, and ponds provide creative contexts that influence the selection of works for development and production. After working as Artistic Director in this place for the last eleven years, I have a new perspective on theatre and its possibilities for immersion. Much of the work we create in Canadian theatre depends on the infrastructure we have built in order to deliver it. The theatre spaces built since 1950 have as much influence on our programming choice as personal taste, appetite for risk, or the over-arching social trends. In this paper I explore the notion that if the theatre is to be capable of bringing new perspectives and experiences to our audiences, we must attempt to strip it of the distractions and gimmicks that make the theatre a cardboard cut-out that resembles our contemporary world. When we consider immersion as our theatrical goal, we must ask ourselves: immersed into what? My central argument will be that surrounding audience members is not the same as engaging them. [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]