Canadian Performance Documents and Debates provides insight into performance activities from the seventeenth century to the early 1970s, and probes important yet vexing questions about Canada as a country and a concept. The volume collects playscripts and archival material to explore what these documents tell us about the values, debates, and priorities of artists and their audiences from the past 400 years. Analyses throughout rethink the significance of theatre, dance, opera, circus, and other performance genres and events. This landmark collection challenges readers to reconsider Canadian theatre and performance history. Contributors: Clarence S. Bayne, Kym Bird, Justin A. Blum, Amy Bowring, Jill Carter, Jenn Cole, Cynthia Cooper, Heather Davis-Fisch, Moira J. Day, Ray Ellenwood, Alan Filewod, Howard Fink, Liza Giffen, J. Paul Halferty, James Hoffman, Erin Hurley, John D. Jackson, Stephen Johnson, Sasha Kovacs, Sylvain Lavoie, Louis Patrick Leroux, Allana C. Lindgren, Denyse Lynde, Erin Joelle McCurdy, Wing Chung Ng, Glen F. Nichols, M. Cody Poulton, VK Preston, Daniel J. Ruppel, Jordan Stanger-Ross, Paul J. Stoesser, Christl Verduyn, Anthony J. Vickery, Anton Wagner

In Canada, adaptation is a national mode of survival, but it is also a way to create radical change. Throughout history, Canadians have been inheritors and adaptors: of political systems, stories, and customs from the old world and the new. More than updating popular narratives, adaptation informs understandings of culture, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as individual experiences. In Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre Kailin Wright investigates adaptations that retell popular stories with a political purpose and examines how they acknowledge diverse realities and transform our past. Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre explores adaptations of Canadian history, Shakespeare, Greek mythologies, and Indigenous history by playwrights who identify as English-Canadian, African-Canadian, French-Canadian, French, Kuna Rappahannock, and Delaware from the Six Nations. Along with new considerations of the activist potential of popular Canadian theatre, this book outlines eight strategies that adaptors employ to challenge conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous, Black, queer, or female. Recent cancellations of theatre productions whose creators borrowed elements from minority cultures demonstrate the need for a distinction between political adaptation and cultural appropriation. Wright builds on Linda Hutcheon's definition of adaptation as repetition with difference and applies identification theory to illustrate how political adaptation at once underlines and undermines its canonical source. An exciting intervention in adaptation studies, Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre unsettles the dynamics of popular and political theatre and rethinks the ways performance can contribute to how one country defines itself.

An annotated world theatre bibliography documenting significant theatre materials published world wide since 1945, plus an index to key names throughout the six volumes of the series.