Mobility of Light

Louise H. Forsyth has always loved performance and theatre. As an amateur lover of the stage, she has acted, sung, danced, written, directed, produced, translated, stage managed, served as props manager, and hung out as much as she could as spectator. Woven into an amateur obsession with theatre has been her professional life, where she wrote two theses on the classic French writer of theatrical comedy, Molière, taught courses and supervised theses in theatre, drama, and dramatic literature, wrote scholarly studies about French and Québec playwrights, and theorized about acting and dramatic writing. Her areas of academic specialization are feminist performance and dramaturgy in Québec. Along with her passion for what the women of Québec have written for theatre, she has been engaged for quite some time with developing theories of dramaturgy and acting au féminin, along with revealing the sources of tenacious sexism in the practices and conventions for doing theatre, for studying and evaluating it, and for recounting its history. In short, she has been wondering for quite some time why womenâ??s roles have tended to remain stereotypical in works for stage, TV and film, why theatre done by womenâ??when its perspective is explicitly derived from a womanâ??s point of viewâ??is still easily dismissed with a summary shrug as deserving only condescending scorn, why womenâ??s theatrical experimentation is so rarely discussed by scholars as serious theoretical work or used by them in their own theoretical reflections, and why the silence of critics on women and their richly creative activities has not yet been overcome when it comes to their accounts of theatre history.

Nicole Brossard published her first collection of poetry in 1965. The national and international influence of her thirty collections of poetry, ten novels, four book-length essays, and numerous theoretical articles has been enormous. Her latest work in translation, Notebook of Roses and Civilization, was shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Louise H. Forsyth was the chair of the French department at the University of Western Ontario, dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Saskatchewan, and president of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Her academic specializations are contemporary Quebec women poets and playwrights, and she has recently edited Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works and Anthology of Qu?bec Women’s Plays in English Translation, Vol. I (1966—1986) and Vol. II (1987—2003).