Location: Roger Bishop Theatre
Abstracts:
Discussions on identity politics have been in the scholarly discourse since the 1960s when focus on this topic got more attention after Gordon Allport’s 1954 text “The Nature of Prejudice” became the seminal source for many social scientists to begin to understand the complexity of this topic. According to Brubaker & Cooper, publications on this topic proliferated in the 1980s when issues of race and ethnicity became part of conversations on identities. Stuart Hall understood the value of cultural identity when he defined it as “one […] shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self,” hiding inside many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves,” which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (258). In a colonized country like Canada, when racialized immigrants and refugees come together to find community, they are finding belonging and forming spaces where their histories and memories can breathe and be seen. “One true self” here is something to value and hold sacred in the face of systemic racism and the effects of colonization. But what forms one’s identity, and how can one claim this identity if one exists outside of it? Is race and heritage inherited only or do they come with the responsibility of lived experience as well? In this curated panel, Kandil, Aguirre and Alatorre explore the topic of race and identity politics from three perspectives: the classroom environment in post-secondary theatre education, the field of professional theatre industry, and in scholarly discourses around theatre creation and practice.
Yasmine Kandil, “When Identity Politics Hijack Classroom Environments: What is Lost When Woke Culture Tramples Creative Exploration?”
The classroom environment in a post-secondary theatre education in Canada has changed dramatically after the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. I witnessed the commodity of race and identity politics wielded as weapons in classroom environments. They were used by students to police, control, and shut down discourse on anything that challenged their performative values and what they have decided to be politically correct ways to exist and engage with discourse. But who decides what ‘normal’ is in these contexts? Who decides what lies beyond those parameters of ‘normal’? D’Oraxio describes university students in North America as having a “particular blend of intolerance and fragility” (756) and that what he terms as the “backlash thesis” is the result of the change of university spaces to become more diverse and more inclusive. In this paper, the author explores woke culture’s impact on students’ ability to develop an attitude of acceptance of difference. The author draws attention to the growing hysteria of claiming an identity of victimhood, used to bully other students and sometimes instructors and administrators. The author asks, where can creativity thrive in an environment of fear and doubt, and how can creative expression bring us back to a community of acceptance and a space to have dialogue about difference?
Carmen Aguirre , “How Did We End Up Commodifying Identity in the North American Theatre World?”
Independence, agency, self-determination, liberation does not mean deregulation. As much as we want to widen the circle, laissez-faire, unaccountable self-identification that evades informed community consent risks appropriation and extraction of cultural knowledge, stories, experiences, space, and resources. Economically, neoliberal free trade benefits only the extractive corporation, claiming to help the community by profits “trickling down”, usually in the form of jobs that break labour and environmental laws. What is the framework by which we self-identify? We do not serve the communities we aim to represent when we wield neoliberal identity politics, nor the theatre if we see segregation as a sustainable way to tell stories. When we self-identify, let’s state our social class to confront neoliberalism’s inherent classism because we cannot be anti-racist without being anti-classist.
Carmen Alatorre , “The Evolving Landscape of Canadian Theatre: Diversity and Latinx Representation”
The Canadian theatre industry, fundamentally rooted in a British model, has historically been dominated by Caucasian artists. While the Canada Council for the Arts had articulated their interest in diversifying the cultural landscape through investment since the early 1990s, substantial industry-wide commitment to this goal only accelerated in the early 2020s, catalyzed by a number of factors such as the global reckoning by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the particular challenges of the theatre industry created by the COVID-19 pandemic along with the decades of foundational advocacy by Indigenous artist communities. This pressure prompted arts funding bodies, major theatre companies, and academic institutions to re-evaluate their practices.
Indigenous and Afro-Canadian artist groups have since achieved a certain level of success in formalizing inclusive policies, securing increased participation and recognition within the Canadian arts ecosystem. However, Latinx theatre artists continue to face distinct challenges in establishing equitable recognition as such within the industry.
This study will adopt a mixed-method approach, utilizing both archival research and qualitative interviews to chart a timeline of inclusion to trace and analyze if racialized artists, particularly those from the Latinx community, have achieved formal consideration and integration within the Canadian theatre landscape. This analysis will focus on the role of self-identity politics in driving this transformation. While this emergence has been pivotal in shifting toward a more representative national narrative, it has simultaneously introduced complex challenges for Latinx artists, specifically due to the inherent heterogeneity and less cohesive group identity often associated with this designation. This paper seeks to articulate how these dynamics have shaped both opportunities and obstacles for Latinx practitioners in Canadian performance
Biographies:
Yasmine Kandil is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria. Her research is in the area of applied theatre with special focus on celebratory theatre. In this presentation, she is collaborating with Carmen Aguirre and Carmen Alatorre to present papers on the topic of Race and Identity Politics in the Theatre profession and academic spaces.
Carmen Aguirre is an award-winning theatre artist and author. She is an Electric Company Theatre Core Artist and has written/co-written twenty-five plays and the #1 international bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (2012 CBC Canada Reads winner), and its bestselling sequel, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution.
Originally from Mexico, Carmen Alatorre is a Latina theatre designer with a BA degree in Art History and an MFA degree in Theatre Design at the University of British Columbia (2010). Carmen is an Assistant Professor in Performance Design at the University of Victoria. With over 95 theatre design credits, she is the recipient of 5 Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards.