Le théâtre de langue anglaise au Québec : de la majorité à la minorité

The author notes that English-language theatre is both the longest-lived minority-language theatre tradition in Quebec as well as its most diverse. She remarks that if Anglophones and their cultural expressions have always been demographically minoritarian, their value and priority until the mid-1970s was distinctly majoritarian. As the author demonstrates through her analysis of the produced repertoire and the structure of the sector between 1930 and 1980, English-language theatre in Quebec shifted from a colonial minority model whose centres and peripheries enact relations of economic and social power, to a model that more fully embraces the minority status of English-speaking peoples and their theatre. She explains that from 1930 to 1965, the sector operated in a “hub-and-spoke” or metropolitan organisational model. Though characterised by the tension between the centre and its peripheries, the author contends that the field’s structural organisation nonetheless makes clear its valorization of durability with respect to repertoire and of social reproduction with respect to local talent and audiences. By contrast, in the 1970s, the diminished status and reduced demography of Quebec Anglophones necessitated a new model. She points out that in a context radically transformed by state funding for the arts, the growth of theatre in English henceforth happened in imitation of the model of the Francophone scene. Since this period, the author argues that English-language theatrical activity is guided by a logic of reportorial distinctions that sets the major houses apart from each other and from the similarly internally diverse smaller companies.

Revue d'historiographie du théâtre

Vol. 6

no. 1

Mai 2021

fr