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.