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Theatre Companies Tear Down Gender and Race Exclusion
My feminist theatre education started by accident. In 2013, I was attracted to a show at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre because of its title: Dirty Plotz: Witness the Hidden Vagenda. I brought an equally green friend along to indulge my curiosity. The cabaret, curated by Alex Tigchelaar, figuratively and literally examined "The Sacred and Profane Hole." Brand new to the world of feminist, queer or alternative theatre, we both found the experience overwhelming, hilarious, intriguing and confusing.
One thing that has stuck with me about my first feminist theatre experience was the howling laughter when the performers joked about sexism in the theatre community. It's a chord that has struck many, especially in light of the recent sexual harassment allegations against Toronto theatre director Albert Schultz of Soulpepper Theatre Company.
Not coincidentally, it was women's treatment in mainstream theatre that jump-started the feminist theatre movement. Among the first feminist theatre companies in Canada were the Nellie McClung Theatre, founded in Winnipeg in 1968, the Redlight Theatre, founded in Toronto in 1974, and Theatre Experimental des Femmes (now Espace Go), founded in Quebec in 1979.
Leading up to the birth of the Theatre Experimental des Femmes, co-founder Pol Pelletier was part of an experimental theatre in Montreal. Even in this "radical" group, women were sidelined.
"I [became] more and more aware that women could not work with men and be free and equal," says Pelletier. "I kept saying, 'We need a women's theatre.'"
These early feminist theatre groups were an antidote to a startling reality. In 1982, Rina Fraticelli penned a report titled "The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre." She surveyed 1,156 productions staged in 104 Canadian theatres between 1978 and 1981, and found that women accounted for only 10 percent of playwrights, 13 percent of directors, and 11 percent of artistic directors.
These statistics have improved, but women are still far from achieving parity. According to the Canadian initiative Equity in Theatre, despite constituting more than half of theatre audiences and half of theatre school students, women still fill fewer than 35 percent of leadership roles in Canadian theatres. In addition, a survey of 812 productions in the 2013-2014 season showed that only...