The February Issue: Fireworks at Teesri Duniya (Font)
From Rachel McCrum (editor of Font)
In February, Font is bringing you to the theatre!
This issue features seven emerging playwrights and their mentors from Teesri Duniya’s Fireworks Playwrights Program. The program works with emerging writers, particularly artists of colour and Indigenous peoples, to develop their written voice and professional profile in theatre. We asked this year’s cohort to write new pieces expanding on their existing dramatic writings, creating a series of metatexts in various forms.
Teesri Duniya was founded in 1981. Forty years on, Alessandra Tom interviews Artistic Director Rahul Varma on how Teesri Duniya — along with Black Theatre Workshop, Imago and others — have sought to challenge a Eurocentric national theatre, and to construct new traditions “multicultural rather than bicultural, heterogeneous rather than homogenous, diverse rather than exclusionary.” This is a must-read interview for anyone interested in theatre in Canada today.
This issue allows us to reflect on what makes theatre unique. Based on dialogue, it presents a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints, an ambiguity of meanings. Theatre is constructed in the in-between spaces; not just between characters — but between actors, writers, and audiences. It asks that we listen to a diversity of opinions, experiences, and arguments. This is its strength as an artform, and also why it is so demanding. Why we are in need of it more than ever today. The best theatre asks us to make up our own minds.
