Colloque de l’ACRT 2024 – Horaire

Moderator: Heather Davis-Fisch

Location: Room 4265 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant – Université de Montréal

(Building 27 on the UdM map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Fountain School of Performing Arts – Dalhousie University

Disability Theatre in Canada: Working Together and Closing the Gaps in the East

The paper that I am proposing was published in Canada Theatre Review’s special issue (Spring 2022) and is the foundational layer of my MA research. My paper, Disability Theatre in Canada: Working Together and Closing the Gaps in the East, serves to locate and map the terrain of the D/deaf and disability arts scene across Canada. While there is an abundance of scholarship, arts practices, and widely used accessibility practices in western provinces, little is known about the scene in Canada’s eastern provinces, leaving a clear gap. This work responds to the gap by examining the cultural differences in four of Canada’s cities/regions: Vancouver, BC; Toronto, ON; Montréal, QC; and the Atlantic provinces (NS, NB, PEI, NFLD). I argue that the accessibility, disability, and linguistic (anglophone v. francophone) cultural differences affect the way disabled artists create work and how diverse audiences (disabled and non-disabled) respond to their creative practices. Using ethnographic methods, I draw from my lived experiences working as a disabled artist-scholar in connection with the above-mentioned provinces. Interwoven with my experiences, I borrow from leading Canadian Disability theatre scholars, Dr. Kirsty Johnston, Dr. Ash McAskill, Dr. Kelsie Acton, and Québécoise disability studies scholar, Laurence Parent. While this paper locates and understands the gap by highlighting key cultural differences, a larger question and issue at stake that requires action arises: How do we create a bilingual network where disabled artists can create a cross-national D/deaf and disability arts community to share resources, knowledge, and practices, eliminating the gap?

Jenn Boulay, Concordia University

Jenn Boulay is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. She is pursuing her MA at Concordia University in Communication Studies. Her current research interrogates D/deaf and Disability Arts in Montréal, Québec, and Atlantic Canada, to better understand the gaps between the eastern and western provinces. Her work has been published in CTR, TRIC, and Knots: An Undergraduate Journal of Disability Studies. 

“Diversité capacitaire”, Disability Aesthetics and Pedagogical Practice: from  Inclusion to Expansion

Within the past 10 years several inclusive dance and theatre companies that promote “diversité capacitaire” have emerged in Québec, such as Corpuscule Dance or Joe Jack et John.   These companies have developed innovative productions that confront the ways that able-ism is embedded in institutions and in social orders that are “intolerant of deviations” (Garland-Thompson, 1996). As Tobin Siebers reminds us, disability “participates in a system of knowledge that provides materials for and increases critical consciousness about the way that some bodies make other bodies feel.” (2013). While critical disability aesthetics promote these values, they have yet to permeate higher education. Universities promote the values of  “EDI” or Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, yet entry into programs remains difficult for many. This paper discusses an experiment in the inclusion of neuroatypical performers into 2 courses in Concordia’s  Department of Theatre, given by professor Menka Nagrani, who brought artists from her company Les Productions des Pieds des Mains (DPDM), an integrated Theatre Company composed of performers with a range of intellectual differences, including autism and Down’s Syndrome. These  guest students were invited to participate in a university setting and to share their work experience with Concordia students: as such, they became the first in the province to be enrolled in classes for University credit. Focusing on Nagrani’s pedagogical style and specific techniques, we discuss how her challenging aesthetic vision was integrated into a pedagogical practice that benefited  all students. These principles and values were integrated into the course delivery and into the  co-creation of an original 1 hour theatre production, First Name Basis (2023). Based on interviews and participant observation, we discuss how this project was made possible and how it fostered welcoming conditions for the students.   As we argue, what is needed is for an expansion of the mandate of the University, of Theatre, and of our understanding of aesthetics from a position that promotes not only inclusion, but sets the conditions for “diversité capacitaire”.

Kim Sawchuk, Concordia University

Kim Sawchuk,  is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Concordia University Research Chair in Mobile Media Studies Director of the ACTLab and engAGE: centre for research on aging. Sawchuk is well-known for her writings on research-creation,  and her promotion of  Critical Disability Studies and Critical Age Studies.

Menka Nagrani

Menka Nagrani is an interdisciplinary artist, theatre director, and choreographer. She founded Les Productions des pieds des mains in 2004, an inclusive dance and theatre company. Her socially engaged dance and theatre productions and short films have been acclaimed worldwide. Menka Nagrani has received many awards for her work and was appointed to the Order of Canada, the Order of Montréal and L’Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Alexandre Prince, Concordia University

Alexandre Prince holds a BA in History from Université Laval and is currently working on his MA in Media Studies at Concordia University. He is a member of the ACT (Ageing + Communication + Technologies) Lab, where he conducts research on critical disability studies and inclusive pedagogies.

Moderator: Kim Solga

Location: Room 4275 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant – Université de Montréal

(Building 27 on the UdM map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of Drama – University of Saskatchewan

Enacting the Exotic: Internment Camps, Yellow Fever and the Flashpoint of Asian Canadian Theatre

In an interview published in Theatre Journal, playwright David Yee claims that the first work of Asian Canadian theatre was Rick Shiomi’s Yellow Fever (Yee E-24). Asian diasporas have been present in Canada as early as Chinese railroad workers in 1880. Shiomi’s own ancestors were active theatre makers in Vancouver as early as 1910 (Li 11n2).Why then, does Yee consider Yellow Fever the first work of Asian Canadian Theatre? What is the distinction between Asian Canadian Theatre and theatre by Asians in Canada? How do these distinctions privilege a particular performance of cultural resistance? This essay calls for a retroactive broadening of the Asian Canadian theatre corpus by highlighting the resistant potential and adaptability found in the displaced traditions of diaspora. Examining documented experiences of Japanese Canadians who lived in internment camps in New Denver, I engender the art-making practices of these detainees as a conflict between art, state and space which Ngugi wa Thiong’o refers to as “enactments of power”.

From this framework, I then investigate the 1983 production of Yellow Fever from ahistoriographical perspective, reading playbills, reviews and scholarship in the context of arising panethnic Asian Canadian movement and the state project of multiculturalism. Through cross examination of these two periods of theatre history, I highlight the event of Yellow Fever as an extension of the conflict undertaken by Asian diaspora of the earlier 20th century.

Works Cited

Yee, David. Interview by Sean Metzger. Theatre Journal, vol. 72, no. 3, September 2020, www.jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/online-content/issue/volume-72-number-3-september-2020/were-future-provocateurs. Accessed 15 October 2023.

Li, Xiaoping. “Performing Asian Canadian: The Theatrical Dimension of a Grassroots Activism.” Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, vol 1, edited by Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles, Playwrights Canada Press, 2011, pp.11-28.

Sungwon Cho, University of Toronto

Sungwon Cho is a Korean-Canadian theatre practitioner and scholar. They are currently enrolled at the Master’s program at University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Their research interests include Asian Canadian Theatre, site-specific performance and the applications of theatre technologies.

Dramatic Reflections on the War in Ukraine from the Canadian Prairies

In a recent article decrying the lack of Ukrainian plays being staged in major Canadian theatre centres in response to the 2022 invasion, Andrew Kushnir cites one notable exception to his complaint: Punctuate!Theatre’s largely Western Canadian 2023 tour of First Métis Man of Odesa [FMMO]. While Kushnir credits the Western Canadian theatre scene as being more progressive in this regard than at least some of the institutions in Central Canada, this paper argues that he does not go far enough in considering the extent to which Western theatre centres like Edmonton have generated other war plays centered on the conflict in Ukraine even prior to the 2022 invasion, and the extent which FMMO itself references and builds on them. 

This paper seeks to explore:(1) the larger currents of Ukrainian historical and cultural/lingual/artistic survivance in Alberta underlying playwright/performer Matthew MacKenzie’s playful quip that “the city that I’m from is [nick]named Edmonchuck”(6) (2) the texts and development history of the two other Edmonton-generated war plays Barvinok and Alina, indirectly referenced in FMMO and (3) the extent to which the interleaving texts and production histories of all three plays reflect a multi-textured examination of war lived, survived, and remembered that is both grounded specifically in local prairie community, and internationally in the experience of warfare in Ukraine not only between 2014 to 2022 and beyond, but even farther back to World War II.

Andrew Kushnir. “Why is Canadian Theatre So Russian Right Now?” Feb 24, 2023. Intermission

MacKenzie, Matthew and Mariya Khomutova. First Métis Man of Odesa. TS. 16 May, 2023. pp. 1- 46.

Moira Day, University of Saskatechewan

Moira Day is a professor emerita of Drama at the University of Saskatchewan. A former book editor and co-editor of Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada she has published and lectured widely on Canadian theatre, with a particular focus on women and prairie theatre prior to 1960.

Moderator: Kimberly McLeod

Location: Room 4265 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant – Université de Montréal

(Building 27 on the UdM map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of Theatre – Concordia University

She-wolf: An Irish Ghost Story

If you are seeing ghosts, eat a dish of wolf meat. And if the haunting takes to your dreams, sleep with a wolf’s head beneath your own. But what if there’s no meat, no fanged heads to sever? What if the wolves are gone? Ireland’s wolves were systematically exterminated by decree of the puritan Cromwellian government from the mid-seventeenth century. By 1800, they were extinct. They serve as an easily read metaphor for the brutal colonization of Gaelic Ireland during the same period. British playwright Helen Edmundson’s The Clearing (1993), recently directed by Jessica Carmichael at the 2023 Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, explores the nightmare of Ireland’s bloody seventeenth century through the device of an illegal mixed marriage and an archetypical “wild Irish girl.” Wolfwalkers (2020), the final instalment in the Irish folklore trilogy of acclaimed animation studio Cartoon Saloon, follows Robin Goodfellow, daughter of a professional English wolfhunter come to Ireland to make bounty. While her father is out killing, Robin is lonely in her new Irish town, until she makes a strange friend in the forest, Mebh Óg MacTíre, half-girl, half-wolf. This paper takes a storytelling approach to the intersection of the lupine and the feminine; it casts around for wolf-meat, trying to hush the voices of the colonized, of the women, of the wild creatures, who wish that history had been different, who will not stop whispering “what if?”

Emer O’Toole, Concordia

Dr. Emer O’Toole is Associate Professor of Irish Performance Studies at the School of Irish Studies, Concordia University. She is author of the books Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change (Routledge: 2023) and Girls Will Be Girls (Orion: 2015) and co-editor of the collection Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy (Rodopi: 2017).

Enslavement, Tyranny, and War in Drury Lane’s 1804 Cinderella Pantomime

This paper will address unexpected forms of conflict and injustice that underpin the earliest British stage version of the tale known as “Cinderella.” The “grand allegorical pantomimic spectacle” of Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper was an afterpiece at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and took fascinating liberties with the plot structure and characters in Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon” (1697). A combination of dumb show, dance narrative, recitative, and song, it was one part of a lengthy evening of entertainment that would seem to offer welcome diversion from the volatile political climate of 1803-04—while referencing current events in subtle but powerful ways. 

Britons had enjoyed a brief respite from war before conflicts with Napoleon had been reignited in May 1803. Days earlier, Horatio Nelson had been given command in the Mediterranean and fortification of England’s southern coastline was underway in response to threats of invasion. Nelson was England’s greatest naval hero but also known for his personal affairs, having left his wife Fanny to live with Lady Emma Hamilton—whose story of social elevation rivalled Cinderella’s. The pantomime’s debut also occurred two days after Haiti (formerly Saint Domingue) declared independence from France, the culmination of a successful uprising against the proposed reintroduction of slavery. 

I will explore information from the pantomime’s script/s, ephemera, and reviews to discuss the ways that these specific figures and political events reverberate in Cinderella. Easy to overlook, a preoccupation with various forms of tyranny emerges with particular force as we trace intertheatrical and intertextual linkages.

Jennifer Schacker, University of Guelph

Jennifer Schacker is Professor in the School of English & Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. She has published widely on the history of fairy tales in print and performance, including Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime (2018) and the Routledge Pantomime Reader, 1800-1900 (2021, with Daniel O’Quinn).

Magic, Art, and Supernatural Probability Distributions in Comedy and Tragedy: More Lysistratas and Less Lears

Art is magic. Whether painting, sculpture, music, dance, poetry, or drama, ethologists such as Ellen Dissanayake argue that art depicts a supernatural metareality, a what-if reality beyond nature. Few today, however, associate art with the supernatural. Perhaps, with a different point of view, the magic is still there. Consider whether drama is a kind of magic that, by depicting chance, tames chance. Because luck is either good or bad, two forms of drama arose: comedy to explore good luck and the sunny side of chance and tragedy to explore bad luck and the dark side of chance. By dramatizing the chiaroscuro of chance, drama tames chance because whoever controls the depiction controls the object of depiction.

Edwin Wong

Edwin Wong has been dubbed “an Aristotle for the 21st century” (David Konstan, NYU) and “independent and provocative” (Robert C. Evans, AUM) for exploring the intersection between risk and theatre. He has published two books (The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy / When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre) and over a dozen articles and book chapters on this topic. In 2022, he was one of three international academics to receive the Ben Jonson Discoveries Award for his work on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In 2018, he founded the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition, the world’s largest competition for the writing of tragedy (risktheatre.com). Wong has talked at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra to conferences hosted by the National New Play Network, Canadian Association of Theatre Research, Society of Classical Studies, and Classical Association of the Middle West and South. He was educated at Brown University and is on Academia at https://brown.academia.edu/EdwinWong

Performing Reproductive Justice, Race, and Radical Motherhood in the Television Adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale

A group of women dressed in red robes with white bonnets descend on Capitol Hill to defend abortion rights. This may seem like a scene from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or its television adaptation (2017), but it is only one of many real-world protests that have mobilized the handmaid costume from Atwood’s stories. White women have been quick to embrace the visual power of Atwood’s narrative to fight for access to abortion, but this vision of justice is incomplete and highly racialized. Reproductive justice extends a white feminist focus on abortion to fight for three basic rights: the rights to have, not have, and parent a child in a safe and healthy environment (Ross and Solinger 2017). Set in the future, The Handmaid’s Tale imagines the United States as a theocracy that enslaves women and forces them to reproduce, but it gives short shrift to the racism that would surely underpin this world. Just as The Handmaid’s Tale novel has been critiqued for appropriating a slave narrative, the television adaptation has come under scrutiny for its race-blind casting. The novel, the TV show, and the political protests all ignore racialized reproductive rights and experiences by presenting white women’s concerns as universal. 

Kailin Wright, St. Francis Xavier University

Kailin Wright is an Associate Professor, Jules Léger Research Chair, and award-winning teacher at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX). She is the author of Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2020) as well as the critical edition of Carroll Aikins’s The God of Gods: A Canadian Play and articles in Theatre Journal, Canadian Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Kailin is also Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review and Fiction Editor at The Antigonish Review.

Moderator: Marlis Schweitzer

Location: Room 4270 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant – Université de Montréal

(Building 27 on the UdM map)

In-Person Session

Risk, redress, and redistribution in Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative

This paper explores a theatrical experiment that cultivated novel approaches to creative risk and social redress. In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 spread throughout the UK, London’s Royal Court Theatre shut its doors to the public. The following winter, amid a nation-wide lockdown, the Royal Court launched an alternative to its planned programming. Drawing inspiration from the US Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and its signature “Living Newspapers,” Artistic Director Vicki Featherstone led a seven-part, hybrid series of new works titled Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative. Conceived, like its Depression-era precedents, to mitigate unemployment, Living Newspaper employed over 300 freelancers and the full complement of Royal Court staff. And like their precursors at the FTP, the company would foreground matters of justice, including public health, labor, racism, and colonialism.

Justice was not only a theme onstage; it was also catalyst for institutional change. As the Living Newspaper company navigated shifting conditions and regulations, it reconfigured the relationship between theatre-makers, audiences, and funders. Playwrights from Palestine, Ukraine, and India collaborated online via Zoom; ushers performed as audience members for recorded “captures” of editions; funds were raised in advance rather than at the box office, freeing artists to focus on their mission rather than commercial success. 

This paper engages Bonnie Honig’s feminist theory of “emergency politics” (2009) to interpret a variety of evidence, including original interviews. Engaging Bonnie Honig’s feminist theory of “emergency politics,” I consider Living Newspaper as both an historical artifact and a manifesto for equitable practices of theatrical labor.

Jordana Cox, University of Waterloo

Jordana Cox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her first book, Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers, co-launched the University of Massachusetts Press’ “Journalism and Democracy” series in winter 2023. She also serves as Curator for TheatreAgora, the online meeting place for the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the Société québecoise d’études théatrales.

Lessons to Learn from COVID-19: Looking for Resiliency, Sustainability, and Equity for Theatre Workers and Organizations

This paper examines preliminary results from the Pandemic Preparedness in the Live Performing Arts: Lessons to Learn from COVID-19 grant, funded by the British Academy, which aims to explore how governmental, charity, and informal support for organizations and arts workers in the performing arts across the G7 countries (UK, US, Germany, Canada, Japan, France, Italy) impacted the workforce, the type of outputs produced, and the resilience of the industry. 

With a specific focus on recommendations related to the workforce in Canada, we describe how the COVID-19 pandemic underscored issues of precarious employment among independent artists and freelance workers (CACCES 2021) with one in four arts workers losing their jobs in 2020 (Julien 2021; I Lost My Gig 2020). For those working in the arts in the pandemic, three times as many individuals and organizations reported very high or high levels of stress and anxiety today (76% and 79%, respectively) as compared to before COVID-19 (26% and 25%) and pervasive burnout was reported across the sector (Murphy 2023; Saskatchewan Arts Alliance 2020; Borodenko 2021). Based on a literature review of information related to policy context, industry structures, and funding models alongside consultative stakeholder meetings with federal, provincial, and municipal government officials, unions, arts service organizations, funders, and grassroots, we suggest preliminary policy recommendations for industry professionals and support structures to move from the reactive mode they adopted during the lockdown years to a proactive mode that anticipates future shocks and renders the industry more resilient (WIPO recommendation, 2022). 

Julien, Frédéric. “2020: The Year One in Four Arts Worker Lost Their Job.” Canadian Association for the Performing Arts, January 15, 2021

The Canadian Artists and Content Creators Economic Survey (CACCES), 2021. 

I Lost My Gig, COVID-19 Impact Survey Preview, https://ilostmygig.ca/2020/04/07/covid-19-impact-survey-preview/

Aisling Murphy, “Backstage burnout in Toronto Theatre was always a thing – post-pandemic it’s gotten worse,” Toronto Star, March 25, 2023, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2023/03/25/backstage-burnout-in-toronto-theatre-was-always-a-thing-post-pandemic-its-gotten-worse.html. 

Saskatchewan Arts Alliance. (2020), COVID-19 Impact Survey: Artists and Cultural Workers.  

Borodenko, N. (2021), National Arts and Culture Impact Survey. Prairie Research Associates. https://oc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NACIS_Organizations_EN.pdf

Meghan Lindsay, Queen’s University

Meghan Lindsay is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University and a Sessional Instructor at Carleton University.

Kelsey Jacobson, Queen’s University

Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University.

The New Normal: An examination of funders expectations for applied theatre during COVID-19 shutdowns in Ontario, Canada

The financial and organizational activities of applied theatre organizations can be sites of potentiality (Mullen 20). This session will examine how funders expectations of applied theatre practices changed during COVID-19 shutdowns in Ontario, Canada. The analysis will be accomplished by considering relevant literature alongside qualitative case studies. The case studies are from a focus group and several one-on-one interviews with nine applied theatre practitioners in Ontario, Canada conducted during the Summer of 2021. This was shortly after theatre and school activities had been shut down by the provincial government when funders and practitioners were considering what had happened during the shutdowns, and what was next. This research is vital to share now, as practitioners and funders are returning to their regular activities post-COVID lockdowns. 

Since at least the 1980s, how arts funding has affected applied theatre has been top of mind for practitioners (Hope 159), and the topic has been explored within the literature. Indeed, it is established that in Ontario, governments can influence the arts through arts funding (D’Andrea 255). Still, there is a lack of published data on the changes which occurred during COVID-19, which can expose new potentialities in practice. Leniency among funders allowed practitioners to experiment with new ways of working, such as 4-day work weeks. Despite this, funders were selective with their leniency. Ultimately, this session argues that an examination into how funders expectations changed during COVID-19 shutdowns grants new insights into their intent and the power they hope to exert over applied theatre practices. 

Works Cited

D’Andrea, Marisol J. “Symbolic Power: Impact of Government Priorities for Arts Funding in Canada.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, vol. 47, no. 4, 2017, pp. 245–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/10632921.2017.1340209. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.

Hope, Sophie. “We Thought We Were Going to Change the World!.” The Failures of Public Art and Participation, edited by Cameron Cartiere and Anthony Schrag, Routledge: London and New York, 2023, pp. 156-175, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003161356-12. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023

Mullen, Molly. “The ‘diverse Economies’ of Applied Theatre.” Applied Theatre Research, vol. 5, no. 1, 2017, pp. 7–22, https://doi.org/10.1386/atr.5.1.7_1. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.

Daniel McGuire, University of Toronto

Daniel McGuire is a PhD student from the University of Toronto with the CDTPS. His research interests focus on the complex, multi-directional relationship between cultural policy, arts funding, and applied theatre practices. Daniel also holds an MA in Arts, Festival, and Cultural Management from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.

Moderator: Barry Freeman

Location: Room 4275 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant – Université de Montréal

(Building 27 on the UdM map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media – University of Manitoba

Housing Justice and the Contemporary Urban Playhouse

Juliet Rufford has noted that both theatre and architecture are “practices based on a central image of the house” (55). She cites Marvin Carlson’s etymological explanation of the origins of the theatrical “house” as a contraction of the early modern “playhouse” (Carlson, “H”). The contemporary housing justice movement is based on the idea that housing is a human right and shouldn’t be narrowly defined as a commodity. However, urban playhouses are subject to the same economic and real estate forces that are increasingly making affordable housing an unreachable goal in many Canadian cities. Discussing the idea of “home” as a foundational trope of modern drama, Kim Solga and Joanne Tompkins suggest that “the more precious home becomes to us at the theatre, the further it recedes from our everyday grasp” (77). This paper explores the connections between housing justice and the contemporary urban playhouse through a case study in Vancouver’s downtown. Westbank’s Vancouver House condominium tower, designed by starchitect Bjarke Ingels to resemble a theatre curtain, is startlingly ghosted by the collapse of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company in 2012. I show how Vancouver House correctly identifies the development of Vancouver’s downtown as a theatrical spectacle that performatively impacts the citizens and is invested in framing and generating affect. The building effectively shifts the site of performance from the interior of performing arts venues to the city as a whole, the roles of author and director are usurped by developer and architect, and both performers and spectators are played by a tacit citizenry cast in a participatory happening not of their own explicit choosing.  

Works Cited

Carlson, Marvin. “H is for House.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 23.2, 2013, pp. 29-31.

Rufford, Juliet. Theatre & Architecture. Red Globe Press, 2015.

Solga, Kim and Joanne Tomkins. “The Environment of Theatre.” A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age, Edited by Kim Solga, Methuen Drama, 2019.

Katrina Dunn, University of Manitoba

Katrina Dunn is an Associate Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media where she teaches in the Theatre Program. Her scholarly work explores the spatial manifestations of theatre as well as ecocritical theatre. In 2022, she was awarded the Richard Plant Award for the best long form English-language article on a Canadian theatre or performance topic by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. She is currently adapting her dissertation, “Empty House: Real Estate and Theatricality in Vancouver’s Downtown”, into a monograph for UBC Press. Katrina’s long career as a stage director and producer has had considerable impact on the performing arts in western Canada and has been recognized with numerous awards.

Unjuried, Uncensored, Uncurated: Rethinking the Fringe Festival Mandate in the 21st Century

One of the central principles of nearly every Fringe festival is that the content is non-curated. Whether participation is decided by a random lottery, or if the festival simply allows everyone to participate, this spirit of non-censorship and openness is central to Fringe. While this creates an opportunity for radical and innovative performance works, it also comes with practical issues concerning the safety and accessibility of the festival for artists. For example, while a lack of censorship may allow artists to take more risks, this lack of censorship may also lead to things like hate speech or the platforming of artists who are known for creating hostile or abusive environments. These issues can then prevent others from participating safely. Is the festival truly “open” if the acceptance of some means that others can’t participate?

As an artist, volunteer, and staff member for the Montreal Fringe Festival, I have seen this discussion emerge almost every year. Community discussion spaces such as the Fringe Artists’ Hive Facebook group have been the sites of discourse surrounding the festival’s responsibility for keeping artists safe, even when that might conflict with their responsibility to keep the festival uncensored. Looking at incidents from the 2023 Montreal Fringe Festival and the context of the larger role of Fringe festivals in contemporary theatre, this paper hopes to spur discussion about how Fringe can maintain its independent and open spirit while still taking seriously the concerns of participants who have felt unsafe within the environment that this can create.

Steven Greenwood, Concordia University

Steven Greenwood is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Concordia University and an Adjunct Lecturer at McGill University. He is also the Artistic Director and co-founder of Home Theatre Productions, and is actively working as a playwright and director in Montreal. 

Performing (In)Justice in Cultural Policy 

One significant “P” word that is absent from the theme “Staging Justice: People, Places, Planet, and Practice” is Policy. Moves towards justice within cultural work and the creative industries—including in theatre and performance—are heavily impacted by cultural policies and the ways they allocate and distribute resources across the sector. In addition, policy frameworks are themselves informed by ideas of how cultural work is contributing to a more just world. For example, participatory art and social performance are often understood as cultural forms that can highlight injustice or articulate desires for justice, and this perspective can influence how support for these cultural forms is articulated in policy.  

As art and culture is increasingly instrumentalized within neoliberal capitalism, there is a need to understand how cultural policies are positioning the relationship between art and justice, and how this positioning is materialized into specific cultural programming and support within the sector. In this presentation, I focus on federal and sub-national cultural policies to specifically investigate the ways that art, performance, and cultural work is tasked with addressing social and economic injustices. Situating cultural policy as its own discursive performance—a performance that is highly contextual and has specific material impacts—I query how the rhetoric and effects of these discursive performances reveal ideas of cultural value that can, paradoxically, prevent movement towards true “creative justice” (Banks 2017). To counter this, I offer possibilities for more justice-centered cultural policy frameworks.

Megan Johnson, University of Guelph

Dr. Megan A. Johnson (she/her) is a performance scholar, singer, arts administrator, and dramaturg. Currently a Mitacs postdoctoral fellow at The Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph, Megan’s research centers on disability art and culture, critical access studies, infrastructural politics, public and cultural policy, and environmental studies. Megan’s writing has been published in Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, and PUBLIC. 

Moderator: Hope McIntyre

Location: Room 0028 – Pavilion de la Faculté de l’aménagement – 2940 ch. de la Côte Ste-Catherine – Université de Montréal

(Building 36 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Performing in Response to the Anthropocene

In this presentation I argue that there is an ethical imperative to re-imagine and deploy a climate-crisis response theatre—at once theory, practice and pedagogy—and acknowledge it will require dedication, courage and imagination. I believe we must engage in this work across the theatre academy, even though we have no idea of its potential efficacy in the face of an unprecedented set of global crises. 

I claim that work of this disposition, whether in practice or the pedagogy that feeds it, may acquire the following features: Such work will break the frame of realism; that is, we ought not content ourselves with staging realistic plays that depict battles against the forces of ecocide. Thus, in crossing over into realms of abstraction we will find ourselves in the zones defined as ‘physical theatre’ and ‘dance.’ As a matter of theory with praxis we ought, when and where possible, exit the buildings where we normally work, and relocate to various outdoor environments to teach, create, supervise creation, and perform. In doing so we may forgo the usual divisions between ‘performer’ and ‘spectator,’ aligning our work with late 20th Century participant performance, defined by Nicholas Bourriaud as “relational aesthetics.”  Theatre education will have to respond to the heightened emotional states and needs of its community, invoking the therapeutic potentials that have always abided in the art form. Such work will logically fuse with reflections of a spiritual nature, and may produce events that overlap with ritual observance. Artist-scholars who are committed to developing new approaches to pedagogy in the teeth of eco-crisis may need to learn new skills, or refresh existing ones. As Greta Thunberg has written, “We now need a whole new way of thinking.”

Conrad Alexandrowicz, University of Victoria

CONRAD ALEXANDROWICZ is a Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria, where he teaches movement for actors and directs department productions. He enjoyed decades-long career in as a creator of performance, migrating from dance to theatre. The co-edited collection that he instigated, and to which he contributed, entitled Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis, was published by Routledge in May 2021. He is now at work on another book for Routledge about performance training in the face of linked environmental crises, entitled Performing the Nonhuman: Towards a Theatre of Transformation.

Evaluation of the role of theatre for development in combating climate change in South Africa 

This research examines the transformative potential of Theatre for Development (TfD) in addressing climate change issues within the Mosuthu community of Reservoir Hills, Durban, South Africa. The study investigates community members’ understanding of climate change, perceptions of TfD, and the crucial role of community participation. By focusing on capturing lived experiences and perspectives, the research aims to stimulate discourse and mobilise the community for climate action with participatory theatre techniques, critical awareness, and dialogue. In response to the urgency of climate change, the study explores innovative approaches for engaging communities in sustainable practices. Utilising TfD as a theoretical framework, the research design adopts a qualitative approach, integrating interviews, focus groups, and a stage play to provide a dynamic platform for participants to share narratives. This methodology allows for the collection of data reflecting the community’s collective consciousness, surpassing traditional interview and focus group methods. The stage play, a creative performance element, facilitates a deeper exploration of community perspectives on climate change issues, enhancing the research’s richness. Sample selection involves the random sampling of community members, including residents, local leaders, and environmental activists. Data from audience and participant perceptions will be captured through one-on-one interviews, focus groups, and a theatrical workshop. Thematic analysis, including thematic content analysis (TCA), will identify recurring themes and patterns in the collected data. The inductive method serves as the primary analytical approach, eliminating biases and establishing overarching impressions of the data. This research aims to provide valuable insights into TfD’s potential to empower the Mosuthu community to combat climate change, contributing to the broader discourse on innovative and culturally embedded approaches to climate change awareness and action

Philip Isaiah Smith, University of the Free State

Moderator: Shelley Liebembuk

Location: Room  1175 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the School of Contemporary Arts – Simon Fraser University

In Search of Justice through Ethics in Post-COVID Canadian Contemporary Dance

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic limited the ability for most artists and companies to participate in dance practices. The opportunity for rest and reflection, alongside sentiments carried over from #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, caused a reckoning over social media about in-studio conduct and compensation. In response, many Canadian dance institutions put out public statements which laid out goals for changing hiring practices, training, and day-by-day operations. This paper presentation utilizes these demands for sexual and racial justice as an entry point into choreography’s complex ethics of self and other, power and pleasure, and “conducting the conduct of others” (Foucault 1983).

To do so, I track the progression of these calls for justice, starting from social media posts in the dance community, and the public responses made by Canadian contemporary dance companies – Ballet BC, Toronto Dance Theatre, and Ballets Jazz Montréal. I then consider the ethical implications of these requests, informed by the genealogy of philosophy emerging from the late works of Michel Foucault. I argue that this moment of resistance shifts the regimens that inform the dancer as a choreographic subject, the choreographer as a conditioner of tutelage, and the dance company as a practitioner of the art of government. And finally, I employ my encounters as a Toronto-based dance critic to ponder the aesthetic outcomes of this ethical discourse. Justice may indeed be evident in the dancing that emerges as a result of such acts of resistance.

Martin Austin, University of Toronto

Martin Austin is a PhD Student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. His research analyzes ethical concerns in Euro-American dance practice. Martin is Research Assistant for the SSHRC-funded ballroom study Category Is, and is a frequent reviewer for Intermission Magazine and The Dance Current.

A horrifying dance or how a dance survives

While describing a collective process to reconstruct the memory of the all-women dance festival No Mas Luna en el Agua (Quito-Ecuador 1997-2011), the paper focuses on revisiting the dance piece La Huesudita (2001) by Carolina Vásconez, originally performed during the festival. In a brief effort to locate the cultural context in which independent dance developed in Quito, I look at how Ecuadorian dancing bodies have come to bear different markings in relation to dominant concert dance histories, from which the most relevant is perhaps that of “ugly bodies” as a result of comparing them with dominant images of ballet white dancing bodies. Later, I device a feminist reading of La Huesudita through following our meanderings at revisiting this dance. I propose that revisioning these works is vital in order to create a reflective memory of women in dance and their vicissitudes towards artistic visibility and autonomy. I address the importance of complicating linear time and the slow temporality in which a dance can become visible. La Huesudita (the one with the bones) is a dance that, dealing itself with issues of remains, brings forward questions about record-making and the survival of dances in the context of Ecuador. I move through transcripts, interviews, and diaries of our working sessions, while reviewing relevant feminist and decolonial theorizations.

Esteban Donoso, York University

Esteban Donoso is a researcher-artist from Quito, Ecuador who works in the mediums of dance, performance and film. He is interested in oral histories, re-writing and auto theory as devices that can help to re-construct our situated and interconnected histories. Esteban is currently completing his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. 

A Choreography of Foraging for Food Justice

Foraging, or harvesting wild plants and fungi for consumption, has been central to Canadian cuisine since the birth of the nation. Hunger and even starvation have oftentimes been the motivations for learning to identify, reap, and use wild plants. Importantly though, foraging requires skill and aesthetic accomplishment to hone perception. This aesthetic sometimes also involves an orientation toward food justice. “Informal practices of collecting help to understand not only survival strategy to alleviate hunger but also tactics to circumvent regulations that frame urban gathering as undesirable,” according to Flaminia Paddeu (2019: 2).

The implicit rules involved in foraging lead to a particular orientation toward place. I have noticed a certain choreography involved in foraging by paying attention to the bodily habits that it calls forth. In this paper panel presentation, I analyze foraging as a form of aesthetic training, from a performance angle. Further, walking, an act that is central to foraging, is also a well-developed methodology in artistic practice that is pertinent to this analysis. 

I argue that urban foraging can be considered a kind of counter-aesthetics that asserts a “right to the city,” as David Harvey would have it, or a “right to collect,” in the words of Paddeu. The exclusive, elitist etiquette associated with high end cuisine is challenged by the counter-aesthetics of this choreography of foraging, which belongs to what De Certeau would have called a “practice of everyday life”. In the context of climate catastrophe, which involves widespread biodiversity loss and the rampant spread of “invasive weeds” on the shores of the St. Lawrence River where I walk, it can even be considered a choreography of the essential (as opposed to the aesthetics of excess expressed in fine dining).

Natalie Doonan, Université de Montréal

Natalie Doonan is interested in embodiment, food and place. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally. Her writing has appeared in professional and peer reviewed art and food culture publications. She serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Université de Montréal.

Moderator: Robin Whittaker

Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Compounding Injustice: How School Musicals Exacerbate Social Inequities

Musicals are an integral part of many drama programs in Canadian secondary schools. Lauded for the ways that they bring students and faculty together, from across disciplinary and social boundaries, musicals enable schools to showcase youth talent, connect with local communities, and often raise money for drama programs. However, in whose image are these productions made? When understood as a form of public pedagogy (Galella, 2020), what do musicals say about the ways that schools imagine their communities, and how do representational practices interact with mandates for the curriculum to be widely inclusive of diversity? This paper presents data collected during a case study on representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in secondary musical theatre productions in a prairie town. The objective was to gain insight into the factors influencing teachers’ decision-making processes. Using a lens informed by critical race studies (Dei, 2006; James, 2015; Leonardo, 2013; St. Denis, 2007) and Black feminism (hooks, 2015; Morrison, 1992), this paper analyzes how teachers’ entanglements with white supremacy, cisheteropatrichy, and colonialism enable them to justify reproducing harmful stereotypes in musical theatre productions – even though some feel trapped by the constraints imposed on them by external factors. Educators who choose not to produce musicals appear to be more directly guided by the principles of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Most participants believe that racially minoritized students do not seem themselves adequately represented in highschool musicals, suggesting that their perennial presence on drama calendars compounds the social injustice that these students confront in schools.

Sara Schroeter, University of Regina

Sara Schroeter is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Arts Education Program in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, where she teaches drama, literacy, arts and anti-racist education classes in French and English.

Courtroom Character Assassination: The unravelling of Maria Butina

This paper addresses how the dialectic of success and failure manifests in espionage during the post-modern era. The paper utilizes the trial of the Russian foreign agent, Maria Butina–and event that is rife with theatricality–to articulate this concept. As the presentation will address, central to this performative event are the efforts undertaken by the United States government that amount to an initiative of, to borrow a term from Elinor Fuchs, character killing. These instances of character assassination reveal the United States’ orientalist approach to foreigners, as well as its patriarchal framing of relationships, that are used to undermine the credibility of Butina and others on trial. The paper will then continue on to break down instances from the Butina trial to establish how both the Russian and United States governments might find success in the failure and failure in success in this performative iteration of ‘justice’. The court-room proceedings against Butina are then reframed by Sarah Jane Bailes’ research that addresses the failure of representation. This is a particularly important consideration given that the case-study is concerned with the various characters that espionage agents employ. 

Fraser Stevens, Sheffield Hallam University

Fraser Stevens is a lecturer in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University. His writing has appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and edited anthologies. He is the co-director of the experimental theatre company, Almost Human, and has produced work in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Fraser’s most recent research looks to reposition secrets as theatrical undertakings.

Cue the Wrecking Ball: Political Theatre Ripped From the Headlines

The Wrecking Ball was a unique form of political theatre produced in English Canada from 2006 -2013. Founded in Toronto by Volcano Theatre Artistic Director Ross Manson and playwright Jason Sherman, the model engaged a specific producing structure for theatre to respond to moments of political need: One week to commission volunteer playwrights to prepare works responding to a specific political event, one week to cast scripts and attach directors to them, one week to rehearse the scripts.

This format was replicated in other Canadian cities in the lead up to the 2008 and 2011 Federal elections where Wrecking Balls occurred on the same night in many large Canadian cities, with the events using onstage technology and a joint communications strategy. Canadian Actors’ Equity amended contracts to allow members to waive regular rates of compensation to participate in a “Wrecking Ball” and leadership of the Toronto Wrecking Ball passed through the hands of many prominent arts leaders including current Why Not Artistic Director Ravi Jain, Soulpepper Artistic Director Weyni Mengesha, and National Arts Centre English Theatre Artistic Director Nina Lee Aquino. 

As a previous Wrecking Ball participant, I will investigate the forces that caused Wrecking Balls to be created, gain national significance, and eventually fade away. These forces are situated within the work of Filewod, Levin and Wright; and analyses the conventions and opportunities for political theatre in English Canada during this period (2006-14) via PACT, Indie, and ad-hoc productions and the context they created for grassroots political works on a short producing timeline. Finally, the paper will reflect on the lessons that can be extrapolated for future creators of theatre striving to respond quickly to political events.

Michael Wheeler, Queen’s University

Michael Wheeler is an Assistant Professor in The DAN School of Drama and Music and Coordinator of the graduate Arts Leadership program at Queen’s University. He is a co-founder of FOLDA where he is co-curator of the Festival of Live Digital Art, and serves as the organization’s Director of Artistic Research.

Moderator: Selena Couture

Location: Room 1140 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour- Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of Drama – University of Alberta

Monique Mojica and the Mothers of our Indigenous Nations

This paper discusses Monique Mojica’s two best-known works: the radio play, Bird Woman and the Suffragettes (1991), and the playwright’s only published full-length piece, Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991). My discussion focusses on the plays’ representations of Indigenous women’s roles in resistance to imperial rule and colonialist ideology throughout history and the manner in which intergenerational connection – particularly that between mother and daughter – is of profound relevance to this resistance. Mojica’s writing traces our connections to the grandmothers of our Indigenous nations, signifying the importance of continued connection. The paper thus addresses to the importance of our continued search for our missing sisters.

The half-hour play, Birdwoman and the Suffragettes, reconfigures the well-known tale of Sacajawea (Lemhi Shoshone), the guide to the American Lewis and Clarke expedition, recuperating her from historical appropriation. Mojica represents Sacajawea as a resistant leader, countering colonialist depictions of a docile, willing guide. In Princess Pocahontas, Mojica focuses on the journey of “Contemporary Woman,” as she tries “to recover the history of her grandmothers as a tool towards her own healing” (136). The plot revolves around this mixed-blood search for identity, with the “blue spot” signifying “Indian blood” (141). The play reimagines Indigenous woman leaders from Mexico, Peru, and North America, emblematically empowering these figures, and, while Mojica devises some disconcerting representations of sexual violence, the scenes are not gratuitous, but are used to relay the playwright’s ultimate message of female reclamation by emphasizing subversion, solidarity, and global connection. Towards the play’s surreal conclusion, Matoaka – Rebecca or “Pocahontas” – reaches out and “throw[s] a lifeline across generations”; for her, it is “enough that [her] child live[s]” (31). This closing scene reflects the salience of our maternal ties, as well as our ongoing intergenerational – arguably interworldly – connection to our foremothers. So, too, does the scene speak to the importance of our continued struggle to find our missing grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters. Given lack of meaningful governmental support, this work continues to be a community endeavor imagined and reimagined through our artistic output.   

Sarah Mackenzie, University of Ottawa

SARAH MACKENZIE currently teaches Indigenous Studies at the University of Ottawa. She holds a PhD and M.A. in Feminist and Gender Studies from the University of Ottawa, as well as an undergraduate degree in Humanites from Carleton University. Her masters and doctoral work examined the ways Indigenous playwrights address the colonialist legacy of violence against women as it continues to play out in contemporary North American contexts. Her first book, Indigenous Women’s Theatre in Canada (Fernwood Publishing Company) furthers this reasearch. She has taught Indigenous Studies at the University of New Brunswick, Sheridan College, and the University of Ottawa. So, too, has she taught Gender Studies and Literature. Her academic research interests include Indigenous theatre, postcolonial feminist theory, Canadian history, and Indigenous literatures. She has also been involved in several writing projects that relate to the roles of Indigenous women activists in Canadian history and the state surveillance of racialized activists. Broadly, her writing considers the way in which people come to define themselves in a “multicultural” space like Canada, focusing particularly upon redressing colonial violence by engaging with decolonial aesthetics. Sarah’s syncretic identity as the daughter of a Métis/Anishinaabe mother and a first-generation Scottish-immigrant father is integral to her role as a feminist, antiracist, academic, researcher, and critic. Her methods of interpretive analysis are thus founded upon a strong commitment to elucidating and subverting violent colonial transgressions. Both her academic work and social activism are fundamentally concerned with the outmoding and dismantling of colonial hierarchies, the rebalancing of unequal power relations between Indigenous peoples and White settlers, and the eventual forging of alternative modes of relation.

Championing Indigenous Languages through Theatre

Tara Morris, Hul’q’umi’num’ speaker and Cowichan Tribes member, and Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta will discuss how they have used theatre to support the cross-generational transfer of Indigenous languages and culture by providing opportunities for Indigenous artists to develop new skills, engage in research, and share their talents with the academic and Indigenous community. Over the past eight years, they have worked together with Elders, performers, and language teachers of Coast Salish languages. Our drama troupe selected several stories and re-designed them as dramatic art. Stories have been interpreted through techniques of image work, sculpting, movement, improvisation, dialogue, and music. Their project has helped to bring the languages to the eyes and ears of community members, and, for the participants, it has helped unlock their ability to speak their traditional languages. Many of the younger generation desire to learn the language or to improve their fluency and to connect with their heritage. Traditional culture is centred on performance and storytelling, and applied theatre has been an excellent means for bringing forward stories and encouraging discussion on important social issues. 

This paper presentation will present the results of this project and describe how it improved the social, spiritual, and cultural well-being of the Indigenous participants by grounding them in their identity, heritage, and traditional knowledge. By making the language accessible and entertaining, we hope to galvanize a new generation of language learners. Documenting the process has allowed us to report to CATR on best practices of using theatre for language revitalization. 

Tara Morris, University of Victoria

Tara Morris is a PhD student in Theatre and Linguistics at the University of Victoria. She is a Cowichan Tribes member and Hulq’umi’num’ speaker. Tara has been teaching theatre in the Hul’q’umi’num’ language program since 2021.

Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta, University of Victoria

Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta is Associate Professor in Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria. Together with Tara Morris, she has directed shows with the Hul’q’umi’num Language Academy. At the moment Kirsten is working on her research on Coast Salish Language Reawakening through Theatre. She is also the Artistic Director of Project Limelight, a free theatre program for youth in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver.

Moderator: Wes Pearce

Location: Room 1177 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Presenté par le Département de littératures et de langues du monde – Université de Montréal

“Things Better Not Remembered”: Censoring Queer Trauma in Daniel MacIvor’s Somewhere I Have Never Travelled and Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden

Daniel MacIvor’s play Somewhere I Have Never Travelled (1988) and Thom Fitzgerald’s film The Hanging Garden (1997) explore intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse through the narrative structure of homecoming.  Each work centers on a man who has moved to Toronto and—years later—returns to his rural Nova Scotian hometown to take part in a major family event.  These men must reckon with memories of a tumultuous shared past, coloured by physical abuse, alcoholism, and, in the case of Fitzgerald’s film, homophobia.  Significantly, MacIvor’s play does not explicitly address an intersection between sexuality and childhood trauma.  Though Somewhere I Have Never Travelled is semi-autobiographical, its main character’s queerness is censored.  This artistic compromise was, for MacIvor, “another form of closeting” (Grignard 195).  While The Hanging Garden premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to great acclaim, MacIvor’s Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, first performed at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre nine years earlier, was poorly received by critics and remains unpublished.  Identifying the censorship of MacIvor’s script as a form of injustice, we ask: what does Fitzgerald realize in The Hanging Garden that MacIvor is prevented from exploring in Somewhere I Have Never Travelled?  How do trauma, queerness, and justice interact in Fitzgerald’s film, and how might these themes have served MacIvor’s play?  Through comparative analysis, and with the use of archival materials, we explore the reception of these performances and posit that censorship and the obfuscation of homophobia is an injustice which results in the loss of vital queer narratives.

Bridget Baldwin, University of Guelph

Bridget Baldwin is a PhD student at the University of Guelph. She received her BA in English and Philosophy from Cape Breton University.  She completed her MA in English at the University of Guelph with the support of SSHRC-CGSM.  Her research interrogates settler conceptions of “home” in Nova Scotian performance.  

Magdalina El-Masry

Magdalina El-Masry earned her BFA in Film Studies and her MA in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Her MA thesis is a study of dramatic film performance in American cinema through the lens of intensity. Her research interests include film historiography, performance studies, and adaptation.

Justice for Drag Queen Storytime: Considering the Legal Value of Drag for Young Audiences

In 2023, I was contacted by the law firm McCarthy Tétrault in regard to a definition involving Rainbow Alliance Dryden’s Drag Queen Story Hour and conservative blogger Brian Webster. In the week’s that followed I produced an affidavit for the case that aimed to explain “the cultural significance of drag.” While I have spent much of my career analyzing, and teaching students about the cultural significance of drag, I typically approach this task from an academic position, drawing on a blend of queer theory, theatre studies, and performance studies discourses. My experience producing a 15-page legal document that defended drag as not only a legitimate art form but an important cultural practice both drew on my existing expertise in the field while simultaneously challenging me to rethink how I understand the cultural value of drag, particularly in the context of theatre for young audiences.

For this conference paper, I will reflect on my experience writing this document and consulting with a legal team that comes at drag queen story time from a legal and justice-based framework. I will analyze how a shift towards a legal framework and legal discourse necessitated a rethinking of my own position on drag’s function, particularly as it applies to accessibility, activism, and cultural value. In doing so this paper will more broadly raise questions about theatre and performance studies’ value to legal discourse as well as how considering theatre’s function from a legal/justice-based perspective can broaden and extend our own research and teaching.

Cameron Crookston, UBC Okanagan

Cameron Crookston is a lecturer in cultural studies at UBC Okanagan. He holds a PhD in theatre and performance studies from the University of Toronto. He teaches classes on popular culture and queer performance and is the editor of the anthology The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race 

Queer Vocabularies and Solidarities in the Theatre of Fake Friends

New York theatre company Fake Friends has earned recognition in recent years for their irreverent, confrontational, multi-media work: after the success of their show Circle Jerk (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and then winner of an Obie), an earlier work, This American Wife, enjoyed a reworked digital production in 2021. The show revisits the cultural product that brought Fake Friends’ members together as collaborators in the first place: reality TV’s The Real Housewives. In the play, cameras follow three gay men through a soulless Long Island McMansion as they recite and refashion a litany of Housewives references – a litany indeed, for the source material takes on almost scriptural significance. But the structure breaks down, subject to the same ontological uncertainties that tease viewers of all reality television: surely, we know this ostentatious posturing is fabricated for the camera, and yet, just how much of it might in fact be real? By the time we reach the play’s coda – staged like a Housewives reunion – we are asked to contemplate what exactly is at stake for gay male identity (at least a narrow segment of it) in a shared vocabulary so rooted in conflict and class pretension. I argue that This American Wife, in adapting the Housewives archive, stages the affinities and antagonisms of a contemporary gay habitus replete with the sensual pleasures of class fantasy while, at once, hostile and masochistic, tracing the knife’s edge that separates vanity and cruelty from the possibility for queer connection and solidarity.

Alex Ferrone, l’Université de Montréal

Alex Ferrone is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de Littératures et de Langues du Monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature and theatre history. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021).

Moderator: Kathleen Gallagher

Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Verbatim Plays for Social Justice: Ojoniyi’s Provocative Plays on Nigerian Stage

There is a way hegemonies all over the world attempt to control, censor and/or conceal the truth of their ruthlessness from the public on highly sensitive social injustices especially in the instances of crimes which are known to assault the sensibilities of the public. In fact, in many cases, controlling and concealing such crimes lead to committing further heinous crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, several agencies and individuals are ever committed to the course of challenging, exposing and sensitizing the public by calling for redress and/or justice in cases of such injustices. In Nigeria, one of such individuals is the playwright Bode Ojoniyi, who is considered to have started the writing, the staging and the promotion of, arguable, provocative plays written in the verbatim theatre tradition. Consequently, with reference to two of his dramatic memoirs (and their performance) written on a case of result racketeering in Osun State University against the backlash being blackmailed and defamed by the hegemony of the university and some agencies of the government to cover the crimes, this paper, using Jean Paul Sartre’s existential consciousness theory, examines his theatrical ordinances and technicalities of verbatim theatre for social justice as the first of their kind on the Nigeria theatre stage. It concludes that the writing and performance of the plays are marked with strong counter intention to confront and check the hegemonies and likewise sensitize the public to stand for the course of social justice.

Atoyebi Oluwafemi Akinlawon, Centre for Performing Arts and Film Studies in Education

Atoyebi Oluwafemi read English and International Studies at Barchelors degree. He also has a Master Degree in English Literature at University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He currently works as a volunteer research assistant at Centre for Performing Arts and Film Studies in Education, Osogbo Osun State, Nigeria. His areas of research interest are; Performance Studies, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Autobiographical And Verbatim Plays… He is a New scholar Member of IFTR at Its 2023 conference in Accra Ghana. He is at the PhD application filling stage of Concordia University Montreal Canada to start his PhD research in Self Revelatory Performance with specificity in Nigerian theatre.

Applied theatre: envisioning interconnectedness in the mental health system 

Applied theatre is inherently an interconnected practice, accounting for community care, in a way that our contemporary colonial, unilateral mental health system does not. The mental health system as colonial is reflected by its scaffolding; accessibility to insurance (Nunes et.al 101), pharmaceuticals as a business (Cassels and Moynihan), and biomedical psychiatric practices (Aho 243). Individuals are patholaogized and medicated, leaving them dependent on said system, with unsustainable means for healing and coping (Watts et.al 15). Studies urge for new ways to meet students mental health needs, and for a focus to be placed on the pandemic of mental health that has emerged (Cairns et.al 47) (Parrish 185) (Watts 16). Decolonial methodology used in applied theatre practice reflects a certain interconnectedness that the mental health system lacks in that it addresses social issues with a community centred approach- by listening and responding to community needs, with a heart of care (Hobart 16)  and transformative justice in mind. Indigenous epistemology theorizes mental wellness within the medicine wheel, as an interconnected, sustainable system of the mind-body, nature, community and spirt, in contrast to that of a disconnected western mental health system (Bhattacharjee et.al 25). The mental health system depends on the mental-ill health of individuals for its survival, making it an unsustainable system (Keyes 95). This paper argues applied theatre methodology, reflected as an interconnected system, is an opportunity to engage in the pertinent topic of mental health and wellbeing, by rehearsing creative resilience, critical hope, and empathetic responsivity (Rhoades 335) (Hepplewhite 45).

Emily Clegg, University of Victoria

Emily Clegg is a full-time graduate student completing her Master of Arts in Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria. Currently, her research focus on storying experiences of mental health seeks to challenge how the university mental health system could better meet the needs of post-secondary students. Emily completed her Bachelor of Arts in 2020 at Brock University in Dramatic Arts.

Alternative to Typecasting and Colorblind Casting: V-Type Casting and the Trouble of Realism

In this presentation, I attempt to theorize and justify the dramaturgy of casting and performing the racial Other in my play “TTD” (Toronto, 2023), an adaptation of the German novel The Tin Drum combined with documentary stories about contemporary China. The production casted Asian (Canadian) actors as white European characters and white (Canadian) actors as Asian characters. I retrospectively call this strategy of casting v-type casting in a conscious attempt to distance from another practice of nontraditional casting—colorblind casting. V stands both for “versa” (“to turn around” in Latin) and Brechtian “v-effekt.” I contextualize the cast historically in the material conditions of its rehearsals and production in today’s Toronto, and theorize it through Bertolt Brecht’s verfrmdungseffekt. Looking at Brecht’s discussions on the performance of racialized body and his theatricalization of race in “Round Heads and Pointed Heads” (1936), I argue for the effectiveness of “masking” as a method to represent the Other without affirming the logic of mimetic realism, which relies on essentialism and the economy of identification. Bringing these theoretical discussions back to my production, I conclude the presentation with an evaluation of v-type casting’s radicality and limitation in a neoliberal representative democratic society.

Yizhou Zhang, University of Toronto

Yizhou Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies. She is interested in the aesthetics and politics of embodiment and movement, especially when they intersect with modernism, capitalism, and globalization. As an artist, Yizhou likes to combine puppetry, documentary theatre, and literary adaptations to examine traces of oppression in everyday life. She has presented scholarly and creative works at the International Federation for Theatre Research, the International Brecht Festival, and the Symposium of the International Brecht Society. Her current research project explores forms of theatrical gestures in modernist art. 

Moderator: Sasha Kovacs

Location: Room 1175 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

WP New Play Development: Embracing Counternarratives 

Founded in 1978 by Julia Miles, who recognized the urgent need for women artists to have a space of their own, the WP is the United States’ oldest and largest theatre company dedicated to developing, producing, and promoting the work of women+ at every stage of their careers. It’s mission is to pursue gender parity and to empower women artists, administrators, and audiences. In preparation for a book, A History of The WP Theater, this conference paper represents material from my project’s second chapter, “WP New Play Development: Embracing Counternarratives,” which addresses the significant, feminist new play development practices of the organization. In The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988), Jill Dolan argues that the feminist critic can be viewed as a “resistant reader,” who resists “manipulation.” A mode of resistant reading is one that serves as “political intervention in an effort toward cultural change” (2). WP’s writers, I assert are “resistant artists,” who create and produce work that embrace counternarratives and strive for progressive change. My analysis will headline the inception of WP’s new play development, with works that were collaboratively devised, such as A…My Name is Alice (1983) by Joan Micklin Silver & Julianne Boyd, early experimental endeavors, such as Abigdon Square (1987) by María Irene Fornés, to more contemporary, socio-political projects, such as Ironbound (2016) by Martyna Majok. Through the monograph and this paper, I will demonstrate how, by creating a platform for women+ artists, the WP has progressed and sustained its productions to intervene in and redress the gender inequalities of US theatre.

Kirsten Leahey, Boston University.

Leahey is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. Her publications include articles in Theatre Topics, Theatre History Journal, Theatre Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and New England Theatre Journal, as well as essays in the anthologies Teaching Performance Practices, Routledge Companion to Latinx Theatre, and the Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy Anthology. She is a recipient of a Fulbright, collaborating with the Ireland’s Abbey Theatre. 

The Most Consequential Scandal in Theatre History 

In 1961, a play by the historian Wu Han, about an episode in the life of the sixteenth century Ming Dynasty official Hai Rui, was produced in Beijing. The play was adjudged by some to be a thinly disguised attack on Chairman Mao Zedong. The furor ignited by those rumours led not only to the closure of the production and the punishment of the author and leading actor, but to a full decade of terror causing the deaths of an estimated 20 million people and the ruination of many millions of other lives, events from which China has yet to recover. That, at least, has been the most widely accepted account of the matter in both China and the West for over fifty years. It is rightly regarded as the most infamous episode in theatre history, and is plainly not redeemed by the way it also led to the creation of a new theatrical genre. But is it possible that the accusations against Wu Han’s play had been entirely concocted for malicious reasons? An apt story for our own age of conspiracy theories and mob retribution.

Craig Walker, Queen’s University

Craig Walker is a CATR Board Member, Professor at Queen’s University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His publications include The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition, The Broadview Anthology of Drama and the Broadview King Lear. He works in Canadian theatre as a director, playwright and actor.

Online ACTS of Justice: Reimagining Atlantic Theatre Digital Collections

How can digital archives and tools help decolonize Canadian theatre history? How might their materials and the early archival efforts that gathered them be valued without, as Roopika Risam warns, reinscribing colonial dynamics (Risam 2018)? And when these archives are held online, how do we transform their relationship to users in sustainable, flexible ways that reflect, as CATR 2024 prompts, justice as an “aspirational value for an equitable system and society”? 

ACTS (Atlantic Canadian Theatre Site) was developed in the 1990s and early 2000s by professors Ed Mullaly (UNB) and Patrick O’Neill (MSVU) before it went offline when its host, UNB’s Electronic Text Centre, reformed into the present-day Centre for Digital Scholarship. Though its early HTML coding has since been deemed a security risk, ACTS was ahead of its time in making available tens of thousands of listings, entries, articles, and plays from North America’s eastern seaboard and beyond, from the 1700s to the early 2000s, by way of selected “tags” and internal search engines. Mullaly and O’Neill’s early experiments in digital collections yield extensive performance calendars, playbills, theatre chronologies, a Canadian drama bibliography, and (curated by Anton Wagner) the collected fictional and critical works (many unpublished) of Herman Voaden and Patricia Joudry. Today, UNB has made ACTS available to a handful of scholars (including the two of us) with the aim of reforming its material for public availability within decolonial and intersectional contexts.

Robin C. Whittaker, St. Thomas University

Robin C. Whittaker is an associate professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton where he teaches dramatic literature. His current research focuses on nonprofessionalizing theatre practices, with articles in journals that include TRIC and CTR. He is editor of the play anthology Hot Thespian Action! Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse (AUP 2008), co-creator No White Picket Fence: A Verbatim Play about Young Women’s Resilience through Foster Care (Talonbooks 2019), and author of the forthcoming monograph Alumnae Theatre Company: Nonprofessionalizing Theatre in Canada (UTP 2024). He currently serves as President of CATR.

Kailin Wright, St. Francis Xavier University

Kailin Wright is an Associate Professor, Jules Léger Research Chair, and award-winning teacher at St. Francis Xavier University. She is the author of Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2020) as well as the critical edition of Carroll Aikins’s The God of Gods: A Canadian Play and articles in Theatre Journal, Canadian Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Kailin is also Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review and Fiction Editor at The Antigonish Review.

Moderator: Taiwo Afolabi

Location: Room 1177 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Building Bridges: Mestiza Methodologies in Latina Canadian Theatre

This paper presentation utilizes mixed methodologies to deconstruct how the Latina identity is conveyed in Canadian theatre. Latina identities in Canadian theatre and media are often under/misrepresented, leaving the Latina body and identity off-stage and hidden in the wings. Though Latina artists like Carmen Aguirre, Beatriz Pizano and Lina de Guevara are prime examples of bridging their Latina identities in Canadian contexts, there is still far more to showcase and more to deconstruct. Thus, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/Las Fronteras and Amanda Cordova’s “Mestiza Methodology” serve as inspired practice for this presentation in hopes of engaging in decolonized forms of dialogue around this topic through a mixed Latina and Indigenous lens. I hope to engage in the discourse of Latina bodies represented on Canadian stages using Mestiza methodologies to de/reconstruct the bridges made between Latin/South American and Canadian Theatre.

Yasmine Agocs, University of Toronto

Yasmine Agocs is a first-year PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. She earned her MA in Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph and her BA in Dramatic Arts at Brock University. In her MA, she conducted creative research on the relationship between scriptwriting, memory, and identity. Her current research interests lie in Latinx Theatre in Canada, collective memory in the community, and Latina representation on stage.

Redistributing the Sensible through Performance Art: A Rancièrian Approach to Social Justice

Jacques Rancière, a French philosopher and aesthetician, does not explicitly discuss the concept of justice in his writings. However, his interpretation of politics as the redistribution of the sensible offers a practical framework for understanding the role of performance art in promoting social justice. Due to its aesthetic nature, this research explores how performance art can serve as a form of dissensus against the established order. It gives visibility and voice to silenced and marginalized groups, ultimately leading to justice. 

By challenging dominant discourses and amplifying marginalized voices, performance art can pave the way for impeaching the holders of power and staging justice. The “woman_life_freedom” movement in Iran exemplifies this concept, where performance art has transformed public spaces into a dynamic stage for protest and resistance, challenging state control and subverting the regime’s iconography with symbols of female empowerment.

The movement’s artistic expressions, encompassing songs, installations, poems, and performances, have amplified the voices of Iranian women, articulating their demands for equality and bodily autonomy. These artistic interventions have resonated globally, giving the movement a powerful voice and fostering a sense of collective agency among Iranian women and their supporters in staging justice.

Performance art’s ability to challenge the established order lies in its capacity to redistribute the sensible, disrupting audiences’ expectations and forcing them to reconsider their assumptions about art and the world. It is accomplished through unconventional forms of expression, such as non-traditional materials and techniques. Sharing art in public spaces has empowered individuals to challenge authorities and subvert traditional artistic norms.

In conclusion, performance art, guided by Rancière’s concept of redistributing the sensible, can play a transformative role in pursuing social justice. By challenging the status quo, amplifying marginalized voices, and fostering collective agency, performance art can contribute to a more equitable and just society.

Amin Azimi, University of Toronto

Amin Azimi is a Ph.D. student at CDTPS, University of Toronto. His fields of interest include Dramaturgy in the twenty-first century, Aesthetics and Dramaturgical aspects of Post-Dramatic Theatre, and The policies of production and representation of Iranian social movements on international theatre stages. In addition to publishing academic articles in international journals such as Asian Theatre Journal, Alternatives Théâtrales, and Theater der Zeit, he has directed and created several short films.

Fringe as Performance Methodology

This paper explores the model of the Canadian Associations of Fringe Festival (CAFF) and fringe as a performance style.  

CAFF Fringes operate on a unique curation model where all festival participants are chosen via lottery. While no two fringe shows are alike, this open-access platform attracts a certain style of performance. In his book, Fringe and Fortune, Wesley Shrum describes the performance style of the fringe as a “postmodern phantasm”: “Fringe has never meant outcast or pariah. As a modifier it’s wonderfully evocative, connoting creativity, scruffiness, oddity, scandal, frivolity, youthfulness, frothiness, and frippery… But it is also a frontier, a limit, a periphery” (64-65).  Looking at the model of fringe as postmodern phantasm and reading it alongside recognized postmodern art movements (Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art), this paper positions fringe as a performance strategy and methodology. Here, opening night is not the end of the performance process, but the beginning; fringe is an art style that sees theatre as a material medium developed through performance.  

 Drawing on my experience teaching a fringe class this fall, I come to this topic as both a fringe artist and someone who is interested in the creation method of artists on the fringe (and how that method might be implemented in pedagogy). Curious to decouple fringe from words like “popular”, “non-professionalizing,” or even “amateur” this paper makes an argument for fringe as a postmodern performance methodology that can be implemented in pedagogy and community relationality. 

Shrum, Wesley. Fringe and fortune: The role of critics in high and popular art. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Thea Fitz-James, Queen’s University

Thea Fitz-James (she/her) is a theatre academic and practitioner. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from York University and is an adjunct assistant professor at Queen’s University. She’s developed two solo shows which have toured the Fringe circuit internationally. She is a white, queer, ‘Mad’, cis-gendered settler. For more: https://www.theafitzjames.com/ 

Moderator: Fraser Stevens

Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Being Underground in Public as Silent Resistance and Critique: Using “invisible site-specific immersive theatre” to reclaim space and unseal buried/forgotten histories of place

In a highly financialized capitalist city like Hong Kong, “public” spaces are largely privatized by developers/owners of shopping malls and estates. The city is built commercially according to designs that keep people moving in public areas unless they stop as a customer. 

In such a city, theoretically, site-specific art-based practices in public areas can function as affective-social interventions for criticizing the neoliberal space-politics, re-imagining city design towards spatial justice, and remembering voices/stories/life-style erased by the capitalist monologue of progressive myth. However, practically, the privatization of public space make such interventions impossible, because performance/art activity in those “open/public areas” requires application for permission, which “space-owners” mostly reject with excuses like “disturbing the public/retail business”. 

Accordingly, the author devised site-specific immersive theatre projects in different public sites, without applying for permission but performed “invisibly”—only visible to audiences with audio-tour system telling them not only the stories of the place but also where the actors/characters were among pedestrians and which actors/characters to follow for traveling through the site. 

This paper reflects upon two of them, one happened in a shopping mall, exploring capitalistic work ethics, consumerism and space-politics, while the other in a touristic site with a history of fisherman community eliminated during urban development, analyzing both the performance and methodology of the creative process that required an investigation into the concrete power operation of governance and commodification, and showing how symbolic imageries and fictional stories were used to re-open spectators’ spatial sense colonized by the capitalist monologue, somatically, affectively and conceptually. 

Larry Ng, University of Toronto

Larry Ng is a registered drama therapist and an artist, trained in physical theatre and mime. He practices also different applied theatres. He has a MPhil in Philosophy, a Master in Drama Education, and is currently a MA student in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in the University of Toronto.

Performing Social Justice on the Nigerian Stage: A Post-dramatic Theatre Approach

This paper explains how I adapted Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of Post-dramatic theatre to ‘retell’ Ola Rotimi’s play, Hopes of the Living Dead. Hans-Thies Lehmann, a German philosopher and dramatist de-emphasizes the centrality of “drama” (script) in rendering the message of a performance, thus equating its significance to other media in a performance. It is, therefore, on this premise, I reassessed my vision of staging Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead not just as a performance on social justice, but also a forum for socio-political activism. Consequently, this paper intends to provide answers to the research questions which are: how did the performance resonate with social justice? How did the staging of Hopes of the Living Dead make it a performance of socio-political activism? How did the use of Hans-Thies Lehmann Post-dramatic theatre implicate the directorial vision, approach and techniques of staging the performance as a space for initiating social change? 

Adenekan Lanre Qasim, Bayero University, Kano

Adenekan Lanre Qasim is a Scholar-Artist and a lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts department, Faculty of Communication, Bayero University Kano, and an associate researcher with Theatre Emissary. He is passionate about using drama/ theatre for social engineering and advocacy.

Spacemaking/Spacetaking: Staging Colonial Alchemy in Site-Specific Performance

The idea that space is socially produced, rather than naturally occurring, anchors the “spatial turn” and continues to serve as an animating logic for site-specific performances that attempt to stage justice. Western chronologies typically begin with Henri Lefebvre’s work to make this argument. However, by prioritizing processes of social production, processes of social destruction (like processes of colonization) remain under-acknowledged. In response, this paper moves away from white, Western spatial theories focused on spacemaking in order to probe the stakes of, and alternatives to, spacetaking.

To do so, I turn to The Industry’s site-specific opera about U.S. colonization, Sweet Land, staged in 2020 in the Los Angeles State Historic Park. The performance stages ongoing histories of colonial spacetaking by remapping the park site as an accumulation of specificities – of conflicting land claims, histories, bodies, and memories. The opera toggles between fever dreams and waking nightmares to untangle and interrogate the ongoing project of settler colonialism in the U.S. Through interdisciplinary engagement with theories of (dis)possession and (de)colonial haunting from critical Indigenous studies, I revise and complicate the spectral grammars commonly used within site-specific performance praxis – “host” and “ghost”. My revision highlights that, very materially, the sites that anchor site-specific performance in the U.S. are, among many other things, sites of dispossession.

This paper is drawn from a larger project that moves from a universal understanding of space as an essential element of all performance practice to a situated understanding of space as workable terrain for more just futures.

Rebecca Struch, University of California – Berkeley

Rebecca Struch centers social justice and community engagement as an artist, scholar, educator, and cultural organizer. Her current research reorients theories and practices of site-specific performance around racial geographies, making antiracist and decolonial politics central to its questions of space and place. She is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Moderator: Ian Garrett

Location: Room 1177 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by Department of Theatre and Film – University of Winnipeg

Shifts in Agency: The Performative Dynamics of Body-Technology Relations

Observing the proliferation of agentic technology in the theatre, in 2015, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck noted that “all technology is now always-already subject” (67). In this paper, I begin by building on Parker-Starbuck’s taxonomy of cyborg theatre, to note that in the post-pandemic context, the body is now always-already abject. That is to say, the body is now, by default, a virtual, unstable, or even absent body—something between object and subject. Using Parker-Starbuck’s vocabulary, I combine insights from Martina Leeker and Maurya Wickstrom to develop a theoretical framework that highlights the moment-to-moment interplay between bodies and technologies on stage. Agency of different types is assigned by and between human bodies and technologies, through linguistic and technological performatives, on a moment-to-moment basis, and these shifts are enmeshed in the process of commodification.

Tyler Graham, York University

Tyler Graham is a Ph. D. student and theatre artist at York University whose work occurs at the intersection of dialectical theatre and intermedial performance. Much of his artistic work has revolved around online “cyber theatre” and virtual reality performance. He presented at VRTO with VR performance artist Ari Tarr.

Redressing Inequities: Who Is Responsible?

Over the last year and a half, we have created an open-source textbook entitled “The Business of Theatre: Pathways to a Career in Theatre”. It includes interviews with theatre professionals, article contributions, and an extensive list of resources. In the final stages of editing, recent theatre graduates, who could best speak to the books efficacy for theatre students, reviewed and provided feedback. 

The response was surprising and in some cases it was a deeply emotional. Many speaking about the weight on their shoulders to fix the unjust theatre industry. Much discussion had occurred during the preparation of the book around preparing students for the current industry, as well as the changing industry, and the wished for equitable and just future industry. Developing critical thought in students so that they can assess for themselves what is or is not working, question the status quo, and be change-makers seemed like the solution. 

This paper will present information on the final book creation, which includes various perspectives around justice and how the theatre milieu is continuing to engage in injustice. In addition, we will explore the response to the question of shared responsibility for redressing inequities. How do we respond to recent shifts and overdue calls for change while working in solidarity across generations? In particular, how do we manage the mess emerging practitioners feel they now have to fix. How can the change work done to date be recognized by the next generation and built upon? How does this change what and how we teach?

Hope McIntyre & Carolin Schroeder, University of Winnipeg

Hope McIntyre is an award winning playwright/director and Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg. She has a BFA in performance and an MFA in directing. After completing an apprenticeship in England, she worked for a commercial producer and managed an arts school in Toronto. She was Artistic Director of Sarasvàti Productions for 22 years. 

Carolin Schroeder is an emerging Stage Manager and Theatre Maker. Born and raised in Germany, Carolin has been calling Canada home since 2017. After gaining work experience as arts administrator and production coordinator, she enrolled at the University of Winnipeg. Carolin is currently completing a BA Honours degree in Production & Stage Management.

Performing Cultural and Religious Justice through the Transformational Directorial Approach: Juxtaposing the Playtext and the Performance of “Attahiru”

This study examines the way justice is performed on stage using the Transformational Directorial Approach. Attahiru is a historical play which recounts the story of Attahiru, the then Caliph of the Sokoto caliphate; it tells the story of his rejection of the Whiteman’s culture and how he was eventually killed. In theatre scholarship, studies have been conducted which have given birth to the many approaches to directing  in the Nigerian theatre. However, most of these studies focus on film directors; as such, little attention is paid to the role of student directors and the influence of the environment in their directorial approach. This study examines the influence of place and environment in performing cultural and religious justice using the transformational directorial approach. It aims to explore the performance of Ahmed Yerima’s Attahiru (2023) in order to draw a comparison between the text and the performance in relation to the explication of cultural and religious justice. To achieve this aim, textual analysis is used by combining its important approaches: author-oriented approach and performance-oriented approach. The Post-dramatic theatre will be used to investigate the post-colonial resistance captured in the play, focusing on how the image of cultural and religious justice is constructed and reconstructed through performance. 

Ihouma Okorie, Bayero University Kano

Ihuoma Okorie is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. Ihuoma has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Theatre and Performing Arts. As a major in textual and performance analysis, she has published works in reputable journals and has attended several conferences which speaks to this area of interest. 

Moderator:

Location: Room 1175 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of Theatre – York University

Performative Activism and the Anti-theatrical Prejudice

The question of what constitutes legitimate expressions of progressive activism is of significant concern to those pursuing equity-seeking agendas. A key metric of legitimacy for current equity-seeking activist practice is that of authenticity – often framed in terms of whether expressions of outrage, critique, and solidarity are ‘performative’ or not, whether one is capably supporting a cause as a legitimate ally or simply increasing one’s cultural capital. This paper investigates a central tension of such considerations, namely that when ‘performative’ is used in its adjectival mode (relating to or marked by public, often artistic performance) as a derogation implying lack of authenticity, a long history of suspicion of the theatrical, of Barish’s (1980) notion of the anti-theatrical prejudice, is invoked. Using examples drawn from contemporary activist practice around decolonization and climate justice, I will explore how a reality implied by such a designation is the possibility of a diametrically opposed, essential, and unmediated expression of solidarity, resistance, and/or concern, necessarily moored in a structurally analogous essentialized subject – itself also available for capture into immaterial economies of personal cultural capital. Additionally, there is something curiously discordant about the term ‘performative activism’ for those of us in theatre and performance circles insofar as what follows from this statement is that activism employing conscious use of public, often artistic performance is necessarily relegated to a subsidiary and ontologically inferior status than other modes of activism. The paper wonders if the notion of ‘performative activism’ can be recuperated through further elaboration of the various lineages of what the term ‘performative’ can mean and do.

David Fancy, Brock University

David Fancy, PhD in Professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock University. He publishes in areas of performance and philosophy, performance and climate justice, and performance and equity.

Activating the ‘Hypersurface’: Building Community With(in) and Across Virtual Spaces

With the emergence of virtual reality (VR), the concept of ‘theatricality,’ and the potential for immersive storytelling within theatrical frameworks is being challenged, questioned, and explored anew. Among the many innovations afforded by VR, the element that I will explore in this paper is the political/dramaturgical potential of what Gabriella Giannachi calls the “hypersurface”, to establish sites of disability activism. According to Giannachi, the “hypersurface” is a liminal site of exchange produced through entanglements between the “real” and the virtual, and that enables the spectator to simultaneously be “present in the work [of art] and verfremdt estranged from it” (95). While some attention has been paid to the design and storytelling possibilities afforded in VR, few have considered how VR’s unique capacity to facilitate social exchanges across the “real” and the virtual has the potential to subvert ableist structures of power, or to produce alternate modes of participation within immersive performance. In my paper, I will examine the political possibilities, as well as limitations of VR spectatorship in Joe Jack et John’s 2018 VR installation: VIOLETTE, which engages neurodiverse, female-identifying artists to explore how VR might function, not only as a medium for immersive storytelling, but also as a powerful site of transgression and community-building. In my analysis, I will consider the following: How might spectatorial engagements with the “hypersurface” offer more inclusive modes of structuring immersion? In what ways does the “hypersurface” enhance or create other barriers? How might it offer new ways of thinking through collective/individual identity with(in)/across virtual and “real” environments?

Jayna Mees, York University

Jayna Mees (she/her) is an artist-scholar whose current doctoral research at York University examines access aesthetics, practices, and politics within digital and virtual forms of immersive performance. Some recent projects include: accessibility coordinator for the SummerWorks Performance Festival (2021 -22), and assistant dramaturg for SpiderWebShow’s VR production of You Should Have Stayed Home (2022).

Beware PERFORMANCE: Radical transparency, anti-theatricality, and the (im)possibility of staging truth

Building on recent conversations about theatricality and theatre of the real, this paper traces the long history of radical transparency as a both material practice and performance strategy that promises to make “dangerous” secrets public, without the consent of the exposed organization (government, corporation, etc.), in the interests of serving justice and the “greater good.” It begins with a series of transparency prints produced in 1760s London at the height of John Wilkes’ radical campaign to expose (what many believed to be) the corruption of then-Prime Minister Lord Bute and his romantic and political partnership with the Dowager Princess Augusta, mother to George III. In print after print, Bute and Augusta are represented as performers – puppeteers, musicians, showmen, mountebanks – hiding behind screens or curtains to conduct their manipulative acts. Attending to the scriptive materiality of these prints, specifically to the way they guide viewers to hold the print up to a light source to discover the “secrets” beneath, this paper considers the complicated links between the promise of radical transparency (as modeled by Wilkes’ campaign), the prints’ deployment of anti-theatrical tropes, and, paradoxically, their reliance on the techniques of the lantern show to achieve their magical effect. From here, the paper turns to contemporary examples of plays that likewise trade in the language of radical transparency (e.g. Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room,” based on transcripts from the FBI’s interrogation of Reality Winner) to engage with larger questions about the (im)possibility of staging truth in pursuit of justice.

Marlis Schweitzer, York University

Marlis Schweitzer is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at York University and a Tier 2 York Research Chair in Theatre and Performance History. Her 2020 book, “Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century,” received the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association.

Moderator: Ian Garrett

Location: Room 1177 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

POW-WOW AND INDIGENOUS PERCEPTION OF SPACE: DANCE AS A TOOL TO RETHINK PUBLIC SPACES

Cassandre Chatonnier

We Are Not the Rock(s): Settler hospitalities as moves to Indigeneity 

From its opening number ,“Welcome to the Rock,” the internationally successful musical Come From Away introduces its audiences to a poetics of land long established in Newfoundland’s colonial imaginary. This poetics—within which resilient settlers with a tenuous purchase on the land are galvanized into cooperation and generous hospitality as a survival tactic in a hostile environment—was already manifest in the 19th-century travel literature of the pre-confederation Colony of Newfoundland. As the musical attests, representations of the hardy-but-happy islanders of “the rock” remain popular in performances of the island’s cultural nationhood today (O’Flaherty, Overton).  

I have argued previously that Come From Away can be understood as a projection of a tragedy that America was ready to confront (2018). Expanding this argument for a long-term scholarly memoir project, I want to go further to suggest that Come From Away is as well a picture—perhaps in the negative—of a tragedy that Newfoundland is less ready to confront. I take my cue from Alan Filewod’s shrewd observation two decades ago that the genocide of the Indigenous Beothuk people of the island “was the defining condition that permitted Newfoundlanders to feel that they were truly ‘of’ the land” (2002, 71). In this paper, I will bring in Ininiw scholar Megan Scribe’s recent theorization of “settler moves to Indigeneity,” (2023) to reflect on my affective experiences with both the musical and with rocks metaphoric and not, considering not so much how we got here, but where we are to go from here.

Barry Freeman, University of Toronto Scarborough

Barry Freeman is an Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.

Dramaturgies of Generosity: Community, Truth, and Reckoning in the Shadow of Settler Colonialism

In May of 2021, a survey of the grounds at Kamloops Indian Residential School via ground penetrating radar revealed what Dr. Sarah Beaulieu argued could be the graves of roughly 200 Indigenous children who died while in the school’s custody. In the wake of Beaulieu’s discovery, media discourse tended to be preoccupied with strict definitions of “mass graves” and with comparing the mortality rates of students in these schools against the broader population, discounting or downplaying, for instance, the state-sanctioned kidnapping of children as a direct symptom of the settler colonial project that is Canada.

Jeff Gagnon, University of Toronto

Jeff Gagnon is a Doctoral Graduate of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies.

Moderator: Conrad Alexandrowicz

Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of English – McGill University

Queer characters on the Maltese stage in the 1970s and 1980s

This presentation will explore how queer characters were portrayed on the Maltese stage in theatre performances from 1973, the year in which homosexuality was decriminalised till 1989. In this study, a spectrum of performative genres will be referred to, including experimental theatre and pantomime. This analysis will be embedded within queer theory, with specific references to the seminal works of authors such as Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler and Sara Ahmed. The study will also be juxtaposed against the social and political developments that happened in the country, and how this impacted on the awareness of the LGBTI community. The sources that will be used to examine and delve deeper into the study are: newspaper reviews; previews; and interviews conducted with practitioners and performers. 

The study will be divided in three parts. The first part will focus on the 1970s, discussing whether the decriminalisation led to the featuring of more queer characters and how these were perceived. The second part will focus on the eighties, till the year 1987, a pivotal year in Maltese history, where a fundamental change was made in the Maltese constitution, preceded by various incidents of violence and civil unrest. This element of violence is also evident in the selection of plays with LGBTI characters that were staged in this period. The third part will present the dynamics between 1987-1989, and reflect on how the emergence of queer narratives in Maltese society impacted the depiction of queer characters on stage. Hence, a constant parallel will be presented between the political oppression that the country was experiencing; how the LGBT community endured this oppression; and the implications of these dynamics on the Maltese stage.

Tyrone Grima, Malta College for Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST)

Dr Tyrone Grima is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at MCAST in the department of the Performing Arts. His main areas of interest are the interface between theatre and spirituality, and queer performance. Tyrone has published numerous articles based on his research in a variety of academic journals. 

The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays: imagining a way forward through a staging of queer histories

In June 2023, as part of Toronto Pride, Gailey Road productions offered a staged reading of Tara Goldstein’s The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays, a new verbatim play that stages six stories from the last 50 years of queer liberation efforts. As Fisher argues “contemporary verbatim theatre tends to use personal narrative to authenticate a particular truth process or to validate the narrative the play seeks to establish” (2020). The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays certainly does this, as Gailey Road intentionally chose celebratory moments of community activism in order to gather and uplift contemporary queer communities. Or, as Auerswald suggested in 2019 “verbatim theatre’s prime innovation [is that] it feeds back its stories into the communities where they had come from”. This is a political action, motivated by the desires and hopes of the artist-researchers, playwrights, directors, musicians, visual artists, and performers. The performance of The Love Booth and Other Plays was a political act of queer joy, which attempted to bolster queer people and allies for the difficult political work ahead. 

Auerswald, Bettina (2019). “Feeding Back: Verbatim Theatre and/as Communal Practice”. in Marco Galea, & Szabolcs Musca. (2019) Redefining Theatre Communities: International Perspectives on Community-Conscious Theatre-Making. Intellect Books.

Fisher, Amanda Stuart (2020). Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Dramaturgies. Manchester University Press.

Jenny Salisbury, Independent Scholar

Jenny Salisbury is a theatre creator, arts-based and audience researcher. Her recent post-doctoral fellowship at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, UofT was titled 60 Years of QTBIPOC Activism: A Verbatim Theatre Project. Jenny is co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and co-artistic director of Gailey Road Productions.

Moderator: Fraser Steven

Location: Room 443 (Room C)

In-Person Session

“Twenty-two. Copypasta is meant to ruin every last bit of originality. Twenty-three. Copypasta is meant to ruin every last bit of originality”: tracing the technology of posthuman opposition through Royal Court dramaturgy

In his forward to Tim Price’s Teh Internet is Serious Business, convicted hacker, Jake Davis, says that “With this play, we can all perhaps hope to understand, at least a little bit, what the internet means” (xii). Should we take these words seriously coming from a hacker convicted of hacking major websites and defacing the websites of national governments? I argue in this paper that the internet can serve as a cypher for a technologization, that is the casting as technology, of human and non human identities. I will do this by exploring the ways in which plays at the Royal Court Theatre have staged the problem of the internet as well as the posthuman bodies who oppose their own casting as technology.

Tracing the internet on the Royal Court stage through Price’s depiction of the now nearly ancient internet of the early aughts in Teh Internet is Serious Business, Jennifer Haley’s metaverse in The Nether, and Jasmine Lee-Jones’ Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, which takes place in large part on Twitter, I will explore the way that posthuman subjects such as children, animals, and nature are rendered as technologies meant to perpetuate an extractivist capitalist state of affairs. Using Mel Y Chen’s theory of animacies I will trace the ways in which posthuman subjects are rendered as technology through the various representations of the internet and in various palimpsestuous natures on stage. I will argue that posthuman subjects nevertheless resist this state of affairs through their own mattering.

Caitlin Gowans, University of Toronto

Caitlin Gowans is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Her research is on posthuman resistance in dramaturgy at the Royal Court Theatre in London, UK. 

Shifts in Agency: The Performative Dynamics of Body-Technology Relations 

Observing the proliferation of agentic technology in the theatre, in 2015, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck noted that “all technology is now always-already subject” (67). In this paper, I begin by building on Parker-Starbuck’s taxonomy of cyborg theatre, to note that in the post-pandemic context, the body is now always-already abject. That is to say, the body is now, by default, a virtual, unstable, or even absent body—something between object and subject. Using Parker-Starbuck’s vocabulary, I combine insights from Martina Leeker and Maurya Wickstrom to develop a theoretical framework that highlights the moment-to-moment interplay between bodies and technologies on stage. Agency of different types is assigned by and between human bodies and technologies, through linguistic and technological performatives, on a moment-to-moment basis, and these shifts are enmeshed in the process of commodification.

To illustrate the dramaturgical significance of this framework, I revisit two past performances that I helped to develop: my own Discord-based cyber theatrical project Blink and Squint: The Missing Colours (2021) and Toasterlab’s hybrid VR-based Edinburgh Fringe show, Aionos (2023). Both of these projects involved the agentic interplay between on-stage bodies and technologies, and were never fully completed. I hypothesize that these projects could benefit from my framework, which would allow for a shared vocabulary that helps to direct and articulate artistic intentions in a devised theatre context.

Works Cited

Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. “Cyborg Returns: Always-Already Subject Technologies.” Performance and Media, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng et al., University of Michigan Press, 2015, p. 67, doi.org/10.3998/mpub.5582757.

Tyler Graham, York University

Tyler Graham is a Ph. D. student and theatre artist at York University whose work occurs at the intersection of dialectical theatre and intermedial performance. Much of his artistic work has revolved around online “cyber theatre” and virtual reality performance. He presented at VRTO with VR performance artist Ari Tarr.

Moderator: Kelsey Blair

Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour- Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Sponsored by the Department of Theatre – University of Ottawa

Performing in Response to the Anthropocene

In this presentation I argue that there is an ethical imperative to re-imagine and deploy a climate-crisis response theatre—at once theory, practice and pedagogy—and acknowledge it will require dedication, courage and imagination. I believe we must engage in this work across the theatre academy, even though we have no idea of its potential efficacy in the face of an unprecedented set of global crises. 

I claim that work of this disposition, whether in practice or the pedagogy that feeds it, may acquire the following features: Such work will break the frame of realism; that is, we ought not content ourselves with staging realistic plays that depict battles against the forces of ecocide. Thus, in crossing over into realms of abstraction we will find ourselves in the zones defined as ‘physical theatre’ and ‘dance.’ As a matter of theory with praxis we ought, when and where possible, exit the buildings where we normally work, and relocate to various outdoor environments to teach, create, supervise creation, and perform. In doing so we may forgo the usual divisions between ‘performer’ and ‘spectator,’ aligning our work with late 20th Century participant performance, defined by Nicholas Bourriaud as “relational aesthetics.”  Theatre education will have to respond to the heightened emotional states and needs of its community, invoking the therapeutic potentials that have always abided in the art form. Such work will logically fuse with reflections of a spiritual nature, and may produce events that overlap with ritual observance. Artist-scholars who are committed to developing new approaches to pedagogy in the teeth of eco-crisis may need to learn new skills, or refresh existing ones. As Greta Thunberg has written, “We now need a whole new way of thinking.”

Conrad Alexandrowicz, University of Victoria

CONRAD ALEXANDROWICZ is a Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria, where he teaches movement for actors and directs department productions. He enjoyed decades-long career in as a creator of performance, migrating from dance to theatre. The co-edited collection that he instigated, and to which he contributed, entitled Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis, was published by Routledge in May 2021. He is now at work on another book for Routledge about performance training in the face of linked environmental crises, entitled Performing the Nonhuman: Towards a Theatre of Transformation.

Asking Audiences: Research Methodologies for Centering Audience Expertise

What does asking audiences look like in the field of audience research? What can it achieve, and how? A commitment to ‘asking audiences’ in audience research responds to recent calls for centering audience expertise (Freshwater, Heim, Reason, Sedgman). By inviting audience members to speak for themselves, audience researchers enact a process of co-theorizing with the capacity to generate novel insights (“Recollections on Re-collecting”). This paper evaluates the ways in which audience members communicate and understand their role through a range of embodied behaviours, beyond the frame of researcher led interviews. 

Following my experience of ‘audiencing audiences’ to survey audience behaviour for my MA dissertation, I imagine diversifying this prompt of asking audiences (Modern Misbehaviour). To assess theatre etiquette in a post-pandemic period of instability, I learned with theatre audiences through this approach of audiencing, a sensory ethnography research practice of embodying the role of audience member to gain first-hand knowledge of audiences. In light of this experience, I recognize audiences as communicating their beliefs, needs and expectations about theatre in a multitude of diverse ways. 

In this paper I survey the rigour and potentiality of these research methodologies as approaches to ‘asking audiences’ and centering audience expertise in this field. While cautious to perpetuate the devaluation of non-expert voices and theorize on behalf of audiences rather than with them, this research instead seeks to recognize the agency of audiences to offer insights through behaviour independent of researcher intervention. Asking audiences remains crucial to audience research, but audience expertise can be centered in more than one way.  

Works Cited:

Freshwater, Helen. Theatre & Audience. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 

Heim, Caroline. “‘Argue with Us!’: Audience Co-Creation through Post-Performance Discussions.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2, 2012, pp. 189–97.  

Pittini, Jacob. “Audiencing Audiences: Unpacking Audience Research Methodology in the Being Together Project.” Sharing Together (Being Together team internal conference), Presentation, 6 June 2022. Queen’s University, Kingston, ON. 

Pittini, Jacob. Modern Misbehaviour: Surveying Post-Pandemic Theatre Etiquette in London, 2021-2023. 2023. Queen Mary University of London, MA dissertation. 

Reason, Matthew. “Participations on Participation: Researching the ‘Active’ Theatre Audience.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2015, pp. 271-80. 

Sedgman, Kirsty. “Audience Experience in and Anti-Expert Age: A Survey of Theatre Audience Research.” Theatre Research International, vol. 42, no. 3, 2017, pp. 307-22.

Jacob Pittini, University of Toronto

Jacob Pittini is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Jacob is invested in co-theorizing with audiences of contemporary theatre, with his recent MA dissertation surveying how theatre audiences are constructing and deconstructing notions of theatre etiquette in the post-pandemic era.

The Theatre Usher is Watching and Working

The analytical desire to untangle the complex receptive conditions of modern theatre has rendered forth analyses that variously re-configure the spectator — conventionally understood as being essentially passive in their absorption of the spectacle — as: active, emancipated performance interpreters; as ‘prosumers’ who produce in addition to consume the spectacle; as ‘outsourced’ theatre labourers involved in especially postmodern forms of meaning-making; or, as engaged in value-producing labour through the act of spectatorship itself. The spectator’s performance of attentive watching has been rightly configured as a political act, especially in relation to the political economy of theatre.

But spectators aren’t the only attentive watchers who have a presence inside the theatre. The usher, lingering unseen in the darkened corners of the auditorium, provides a useful counterpoint to studies of the spectator. Where the spectator’s leisure-time act of watching has been (re-)inscribed as a theatrical labour (with varying degrees of literalness), the usher (as a faux frais worker) performs types of attentive watching that are unambiguously related to the production processes of theatre. 

Focusing its analysis mainly on the usher – a largely undertheorised figure in analyses of theatre’s industrial operations – this paper attends to these differentiated ‘labours’ of watching. Additionally, this paper will further elucidate its claims regarding the political economy of usher ‘spectatorship’ through the comparative examination of two case studies of ‘participatory’ theatre, in which audience members and ushers were respectively invited to take centre stage alongside the performers.

Alessandro Simari, University of Ottawa

Alessandro Simari teaches theatre, early modern literature, and film, most recently at University of Ottawa. His research focuses on the cultural politics and political economy of theatre through the lens of theatre history and contemporary (Shakespeare) performance. He is a member of the Performance and Political Economy Research Collective. pperesearch.com 

Moderator: Shannon Holmes

Location: Room 0030 – – Pavilion de la Faculté de l’aménagement – 2940 ch. de la Côte Ste-Catherine – Université de Montréal

(Building 36 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Team Play: Communal Care in asses.masses and New Societies

Emerging discourses of care amidst the schisms of the pandemic have revealed how self-care continues to be co-opted by neoliberalism, alleviating communal and institutional obligation (Hobart and Kneese; Jarvis and Savage). In this paper, I explore how participatory theatre advances reciprocal and communally driven radical care by engaging with dramaturgical structures of audience teamwork. Traditionally, care in participatory performances involves the sharing of “healing gifts” from artist to audience (Stephenson 93). I offer a framework that extends this dynamic, seeing the artist not as healer or gift-giver, but as the coach of a team. This “aesthetic of care” (Thompson 46) foregrounds the action of the audience, allowing participants to negotiate their responsibilities to each other and how they might both support and be supported in a theatrical game. 

Teams materialize clearly in Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim’s durational video game epic asses.masses, and Re:Current Theatre’s board game nation-building simulation New Societies. By placing these works in conversation, I demonstrate how communal efforts towards an actionable goal – such as beating a video game or creating an ideal world- invite intimate displays of empathy and solidarity. While theatre teams are not immune to power struggles engendered by competition (Leo et al.), these performances reveal how navigating the obstacles erected by this thorny network of relationality can foster deeper cohesion when they are overcome. An effective team requires attentiveness and sensitivity, affording team dramaturgy a crucial platform for challenging a culture currently prioritizing care from and for the self.

Works Cited

Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Tamara Kneese. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text, vol. 38, no. 1 (142), Mar. 2020, pp. 1–16. 

Jarvis, Liam, and Karen Savage. Postdigital Performances of Care: Technology and Pandemic. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, (In press).

Leo, F. M., et al. “Role Ambiguity, Role Conflict, Team Conflict, Cohesion and Collective Efficacy in Sport Teams: A Multilevel Analysis.” Psychology of Sport and Exercise, vol. 20, Sept. 2015, pp. 60–66. 

Stephenson, Jenn. “‘Who Cares?’: The Neoliberal Problem of Performing Care in Immersive and Participatory Play.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 32, no. 1, Jan. 2022, pp. 91–100. 

Thompson, James. “Towards an Aesthetics of Care.” Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance, edited by Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson, Manchester University Press, 2020.

Derek Manderson, York University

Derek Manderson is an interdisciplinary scholar, performer, and PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. His research imbricates game studies and participatory theatre, revealing the affordances, boundaries, and dramaturgical structures of collaborative play. He has been published in Canadian Theatre Review and smART Magazine.

“Wheeeee!”: Emergent Social Relations in Marathon Durational Audience Participation

By hour six of the participatory video-game theatre experience asses.masses, our community of audience-players is absolutely rapt, but we are getting silly. Some people are lying on the floor with empty bags of snacks; many of us have taken off our shoes. Each time the current leader-player jumps our donkey avatar over an obstacle, we all call out “Wheeeee!” And we still have two episodes left to play. 

This paper considers how long duration affects the relational aesthetics of socially turned theatrical art works (Bourriaud, Bishop). In asses.masses, which runs typically seven-and-a-half hours, the typical focus of durational experience of marathon theatre shifts from the endurance of the actors (Kalb, Switzky) to the audience. In the absence of live actors, the audience-participants of asses.masses play the digital characters and represent the asses, but, more importantly, we are the masses. 

With very little direction about how to (make a) play, the audience must grapple with tensions between the individual and the collective, between freedom and rules to make effective decisions. Using theories of game design (Salen and Zimmerman) and political philosophy (Rousseau), I will explore how different elements of interactive play-based dramaturgy in asses.masses test us and teach us to become a herd. Through analysis of actual observed behaviours of several different herds in action, I will consider how groups of strangers are progressively, in the crucible of time, formed into a functioning society with its own set of emergent operational protocols, social mores, and even a culture. 

WORKS CITED

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012)

Blenkarn, Patrick and Milton Lim. asses.masses. Dramaturgy by Laurel Green. Composition and sound design by David Mesiha. Performed at Festival of Live Digital Art (Kingston, Ontario) June 2023 and Theatre Centre (Toronto, Ontario) September 2023.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, (Presses du réel, 2002)

Kalb, Jonathan. Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater, (U Michigan P, 2013)

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch, (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, (MIT Press, 2005) 

Stephenson, Jenn and Mariah Horner. PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation (Playwrights Canada, 2024).

Switzky, Lawrence. “Marathon Theatre as Affective Labour: Productive Exhaustion in The Godot Cycle and Life and Times.” Canadian Theatre Review 162 (Spring 2015): 26-30.

Jenn Stephenson, Queen’s University

Jenn Stephenson is Professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. She is the author of three books: Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Theatre (UTP, 2013), Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real (UTP, 2019) and PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation co-authored with Mariah Horner (Playwrights Canada, 2024).

Moderator: Barry Freeman

Location: Room 3110 – Pavilion de la Faculté de l’aménagement – 2940 ch. de la Côte Ste-Catherine – Université de Montréal

(Building 36 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

Collaborating Together, Apart: Teaching Devised Puppetry Online

This past summer, I was lucky enough to be able to teach a course related to my dissertation on devised puppetry. I began to draft my syllabus in a flurry of excited keystrokes: “In this course, we will seek to answer one deceptively simple question: Does the focus on the object in puppet theatre restrict the spontaneity and physical freedom that are so central to theatrical devising?” We did indeed begin to come to grips with this question, but there was a new dimension that I had considered only in passing before. No matter how physically close a student might be to their puppet, no matter how rich the semiotic interchange between them might be, this was an online course. Consequently, these students bravely grappled with not only how to channel their creative impulses through an outside object but also how to communicate their ideas through a screen.

Thankfully, everyone was familiar with Zoom by then, so, much as performers must learn to do with puppets more generally, we were able to learn to take advantage of the flexibilities offered by the medium. A greater challenge was to develop devising strategies that left room for potentially constructive conflict (Barton 2008) and did so in a just manner, given that not everyone had the same depth of training and experience or access to the most recent technology. This paper will examine some of these successes and hurdles and outline how they could become increasingly relevant in our new reality.

James Beauregard Ashby

James Beauregard Ashby is a relatively recent PhD graduate from the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, a puppet artist, a union activist, and a sometime sessional lecturer. Ashby is also the co-founder of Bricoteer Experiments Theatre and a past president of the Ontario Puppetry Association.

Puppet Ecology: Playing With Plastics

Amid the growing (and interconnected) collection of environmental concerns facing humanity, our penchant for overconsumption and excess looms large. Far from an invisible harm, this excess is marked by landfills overflowing with fast-fashion textiles, rapidly-obsolete electronics, and of course, non-biodegradable plastic. The sheer volume of the “stuff” we consume is overwhelming us.

Puppetry is in a unique position vis a vis this proliferation of “stuff.” On one hand, it is an art form that relies on materiality, often making use of the same materials that show up in our landfills. On the other hand, the way in which puppeteers foreground and enliven these materials encourage audiences to look at them differently, perhaps undercutting or interrupting what Jane Bennett calls “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter [which] feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (ix). How might puppetry unsettle our relationship to the junk that surrounds us, and to what end?

To tackle this question, I will consider two performances that engage directly with the nonbiodegradable supervillain, plastic. In Compagnie Non Nova’s L’après-midi d’un foehn, disposable plastic bags become air dancers, carried on the wind created by multiple fans to the music of Debussy. In Robin Frohardt’s The Plastic Bag Store, puppet characters playfully reflect on the story our indestructible plastic waste will tell future generations about us, replete with misinterpretations. 

In both of these productions, the relationship to plastic is not one of interdiction, but of transformation. Whether the plastic is presented beautifully or comically, the message of these performances does not seem to be a simple command to “use less plastic,” but a more complicated – and perhaps more ecologically hopeful – reorientation of our relationship to stuff. 

Dawn Tracey Brandes, Dalhousie University

Dr. Dawn Tracey Brandes is an Instructor in the Fountain School of Performing Arts and an Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her scholarly work considers the theoretical implications of contemporary puppet performance, particularly in relation to phenomenological concerns. Her work has appeared in publications like The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance and Puppetry International.

Revisiting the White Terror: The White Storyteller and Taiwanese Glove Puppetry

How can modern theater engage in the process of retelling difficult knowledge and if possible, in the process of any form of healing? This paper examines how Taiwanese colonial and postcolonial memory is presented in The White Storyteller (2019) by means of traditional glove puppetry. It first traces the history of Taiwanese glove puppetry under colonial rule and explores the ways The White Storyteller represents colonial and postcolonial trauma as well as how such trauma shaped Taiwanese identification. This paper argues that by means of a double theatrical mediation through its collaboration with traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry, the play presents the incommensurability of traumatic past and the incompleteness of historical representation. It explores the theatrical potentials of puppets onstage to portray the paradoxical condition of the White Terror as an open problem.

Tzu-Yu Hung, University of Toronto

Tzu-Yu Hung is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Tzu-Yu’s interests revolve around how the concept of dramatic illusion is explored classical Greek tragedy in its language and themes as well as how this concept affects tragedy’s expected spectatorship.