Moderator: Natalie Alvarez
Hybrid Session
Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Performances of ‘Shoring up’: Infrastructural Imaginings of an Uncertain Future
This presentation takes the “performing shores” prompt as an opening to explore how performance represents and engages with the infrastructural forms that “shore up” or support contemporary life. Performance, as an artistic product and a social form, variously relies on, represents, interrogates, resists, and reimagines material and immaterial infrastructure. This has been demonstrated by the ways that artists have relied on performance tactics to reveal the “backstage” mechanisms that support artistic production and by scholarship, which shows how performance is a mode for revealing the structures that support social life. Building on this work, I argue that in this particular moment, there is an urgent need to attend to the performance of infrastructural forms, given that the threat of climate collapse, the implementation of extreme austerity measures, and widening social and economic inequalities have encroached upon every facet of contemporary life.
In this presentation, I bring together an assortment of artistic and social performances that reveal differing aspects of “shoring up” through their infrastructural engagements. Thinking across a range of cultural objects—including a digital opera on disability benefit schemes, Alberta’s unevenly deployed Critical Infrastructure Defence Act, and Hollywood disaster films—I show how such infrastructural performances represent the precariousness of contemporary life. Though these performances work to different political ends, I argue that they each contribute to “forg[ing] an imaginary for managing the meanwhile within damaged life’s perdurance” (Berlant 2022) and in so doing, offer different paths towards shoring up a perilously uncertain future.
Dr. Megan A. Johnson, Research Associate University of Guelph
Bio: Dr. Megan A. Johnson (she/her) is a performance scholar, singer, arts administrator, and dramaturg. She is currently a Research Associate with Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. Megan holds a Ph.D. in Theatre & Performance Studies from York University. Her research centers on disability art and performance, critical access studies, infrastructural politics, and environmental studies. Her writing has been published in Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada,
Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, and PUBLIC.
The Performativity of an Artifact: How Covid Masks Illustrated the Trajectory of Pandemic Protocol
The conference theme, Performing Shores/The Shores of Performance, aptly identifies the shifting boundaries that can be identified in the action of creating performance art and in the study of theatre, performance and culture. Due to the pandemic, this activity has seen a period of increased fluctuation. After exhausting the notion of running archival footage online, performance companies and artists began to get creative using formats and platforms, the power of interdisciplinarity and emerging technology. During this unprecedented event, the face mask emerged as a defining artifact: an artifact that illustrated the progression of the pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic, mask-wearing was a visual indication that life as we knew it had changed and that we were all doing our part to overcome the viral attack. However, as the pandemic continued, mask use became increasingly politicized and shifted from a sign of the times to a symbol of the times. Although this shift from masks as saving grace to instruments of oppression has been given substantial media coverage, this is not the masking dynamic that will be focused on in this paper.
When the Covid Pandemic has become medical history and reaches an endemic stage, the paper, cloth and plastic artifacts/face masks left behind will reveal the trajectory of human reactions to the event. How did the culture of mask-wearing evolve? What do the varying characteristics of masks worn in various pandemic stages tell us about collective general knowledge of the virus transmission? This paper is structured as a photo essay exploring the pandemic through the performative qualities of the face mask: an examination of the shifting aesthetics and mask construction as new information about Covid 19 was discovered and made public.
Dr. Claire Borody, The University of Winnipeg
The Great North Road: Boundaries and Borders in Simon Stephens’ Light Falls
In playmaking, what separates the possible from the impossible is a tenuous border that, on one side, lives the artists’ belief in the collaborative imagination and, on the other, resides their acquiescence to fear. Theatre producers in a fragile, post-Covid society are experiencing an abundance of challenges while emerging from the dark days of the pandemic, which seem insurmountable. Closed theatre spaces, the rise in producing costs, the exodus of artists, and the decline of theatre criticism in both print media and online are but a few of the obstacles facing theatre artists and organizations at this moment. Yet, it is the conviction in the power of shared mental mapping and adherence to the ideal of cooperative responsibility that can push aside the duo plagues of anxiety and doubt while embarking on the creative process. In this paper, I will discuss the process of directing Simon Stephens’ Light Falls for Chicago’s Steep Theatre, an itinerant storefront, in the summer of 2022. The play examines the lives of a family who are scattered across the north of England and the spiritual force that binds them together—a force that transcends death. Featured prominently are references to the postindustrial landscape of this island nation, its rivers, oceans, and modes of transportation—the routes, roads, and boundaries that both separate and unite this family. In a review of the production, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune states, “…there was a long break before Light Falls, the latest Steep production of a Stephens play…. Steep took a two-year pause…. It is unspeakably wonderful to experience this writer, this director and this essential Chicago theater company all back together again.”
This detailed narrative will outline the determined effort of a group of designers, technicians, and actors who persevered in their creation of Light Falls through a belief in the work, the strength of collective will, and the power of collaborative imagination.
Robin Witt, Professor of Directing UNC Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA