Canadians in Scotland: A guide to Canucks at Edinburgh's world-renowned Fringe Festival

For the past three years CanadaHub at Edinburgh Fringe has showcased some of our country's most innovative and critically acclaimed theater projects to an international audience. CanadaHub was initiated by artist/producer Michael Rubenfeld — best known as the former artistic producer of the SummerWorks Performance Festival — when he recognized the lack of opportunities for Canadian artists to present their work outside of their home country.

"The goal for CanadaHub is to bring English-language Canadian performance practices, artists, and conversations into an international psychological space so as to enable more global opportunities for Canadian artists," Rubenfeld told CBC Arts. "There is a lot of good work and artists in Canada, however very little finds opportunity outside of the country. This is more because of practical reasons and the lack of information about our artists in international contexts...unless you're [Robert] Lepage or [Crystal] Pite it's rare as a Canadian for work to be programmed sight unseen. So we have to get our artists and productions in front of international presenters, programmers, producer's eyes — and as the form is live, this has to happen live." 

The first production Rubenfeld brought to Edinburgh was Counting Sheep, an immersive folk-opera documenting the Ukrainian student revolution put together by Toronto's Klezmer-party-punks The Lemon Bucket Orkestra. The show was a runaway hit, winning numerous awards and being picked up by presenters for theatrical runs across the globe. The success of Counting Sheep lead to the birth of CanadaHub. Rubenfeld's Selfconscious Productions partnered with the Canada Council for the Arts, the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom, and the Government of Canada for support to bring a full line-up of Canadian shows to Edinburgh in 2017. 

"The support and partnership from the High Commission and in particular, the Canada Council, has been remarkable and visionary," said Rubenfeld. "Without them, none of this would be even remotely possible."

Over the course of its existence the showcase has been showered with critical praise, receiving unprecedented acclaim in a festival context. Individual productions using CanadaHub as a jumping off point for bigger success. Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story - co-created by Hannah Moscovitch, Christian Barry, and Ben Caplan - won a Herald Angel and Scotsman Fringe First in Edinburgh before moving onto an off Broadway run in New York. Quote Unquote collective's Mouthpiece won The Stage Award for Performance at the Fringe and has been adapted into a motion picture. Pandemic Theatre's controversial play Daughter drew major global interest and recently played at the Latitude Festival in the UK.

This year CanadaHub returns to the Edinburgh Fringe with six shows. They've also partnered with Indigenous Contemporary Scene (ICS), which exists as a platform for the presentation of live arts by Indigenous artists. This year's curation has focused on women and Indigenous creators. The shows are listed below:

Blind Date is a show created by and starring Rebecca Northan. In the show Northan plays a clown named Mimi whose date has not shown up. She pulls someone from the audience to perform as her date instead. This person then must create a 90 minute performance with Mimi for staggering results. 

Sea Sick is a show by Allana Mitchell based on her book of the same name. It is about her investigative journalism with scientists around the rising levels of sea temperature and how they are indicative of our impending doom. The show has been praised for presenting the realities of climate change in an accessible fashion. 

Pathetic Fallacy is a new work by Anita Rochon.  The show responds to Rochon's personal issues around the carbon footprint of her existence. In the show Rochon is present via technology while also having an actor both as her and as themselves and in relationship to her.  

Deer Woman is Tara Beagan's newest play and is presented by ARTICLE 11. ARTICLE 11 are Indigenous Arts Activists, and were CanadaHub's 2017 Artists-in-Residence. The show is a stunning work about one of 1600 officially recognised missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada. The comedic-dramatic thriller is told from the perspective of the missing girl's sister, Lila. 

Songs in the Key of Cree is a piece created and performed by Tomson Highway with Patricia Cano and Marcus Ali.  It's a song-cycle of Highway's music from a series of different contexts in which he composed music. The piece is performed in Cree, French and English form a legend of Canadian writing. 

The Kanata Cabaret Hour is four nights of Indigenous Cabaret from several different artists.

For Rubenfeld the success of the Canadian shows at the world's most famous theatre festival is indicative of a larger truth about our nation's artists: the talent in Canada is on par with any in the world; when they are afforded the opportunity and support to present their work they knock it out of the park. But more than that with CanadaHub Rubenfeld is conscious of the privilege and responsibility of making and creating art.   

"I have become very interested in the question of what our responsibility as Canadians are. There as some very key factors like class and privilege," said Rubenfeld. "I think that being an artist is a privilege, and in Canada, this is a privilege we reap within a colonial context. There has been and continues to be a lot of suffering for our privilege, and so, what then is our responsibility, nationally and internationally?  It's why I feel the work needs to be contributing. It should be complex. It should be about ideas, and asking questions and problematising. It should be active and activist. It should be aiming at bettering the world. As a Canadian, I feel strongly about these things ...we've been intensely successful at CanadaHub because the conversations we are having mean something. People respond to what we are doing because I think we want the theatre to be asking these questions. We need it to. Because if not here, then where?"

More information on Canada Hub can be found here.