Location: Roger Bishop Theatre
Abstracts:
Kathleen Gallagher, “Theatre Workshops and Troubled Worlds”
Paper #1 will introduce our 5-year SSHRC-funded ethnographic research project, The Drama Workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises (2025-2030), sharing its conceptual and theoretical grounding, methodological approaches, research sites, driving questions, and the theatre practices to be explored. Richard Sennett invites us to pay attention anew to how the “craft” of cooperation can be nurtured in “the technician’s workshop,” a site that “has been since ancient times a model for sustained cooperation” and “the most important institution anchoring civic life” via the social rituals fostered through collectively undertaken acts of making and repairing (2012, p. 57). How does the drama workshop equip young artists for both the world we have and the better world-to-be-imagined? Here, we centre the workshop as a site to re-engage, through theatre-making practices, co-presence, and creative daring; to rehearse the relationships needed to meet the current planetary “polycrisis”, one marked by multiple and overlapping social, ecological, and economic crises, “from political economy and finance to climate, biodiversity, energy, food, disease, global security, and identity” (Albert, 2024, p. 19). Our study is creating a global, intergenerational Community of Practice—artist-teachers and artist-students — in Canada, Ireland, India, Nigeria, and Greece, leveraging the practices of solo performance, devised theatre, site-specific theatre, and ensemble-building, to receive, deliberate, experiment, and devise possible futures.
Zorana Sadiq, “Asking the Questions: Personal Urgencies in the Collective Moment”
Paper #2 will share the experiences of engaging with solo creation and performance as a means of encouraging personal, specific responses to the current moment. Solo creation is a natural first step in making theatre. As experts in their own experience, young theatre artists are often most comfortable beginning with autobiography. The solo performance contains the smallest building block of a play and is, in fact, a kind of two-hander, meant to be heard by an imagined other. However, putting personal material ‘in the air’ to be heard by others requires resources of courage as well as precision in its execution to be heard distinctly–the digital landscape that surrounds young people presents challenges to brave self-expression. Social media demands a kind of identity performance for young people and algorithms progressively narrow the diversity of perspectives that they encounter. How then, can solo creation and performance encourage authentic explorations within the reinforced habit to conform and broadcast as a means of social currency? Additionally, how can young artists be encouraged to hone their own specific powers of observation and discernment in their own work and in their responses to the work of their peers? Solo work allows theatre makers to clarify their voices so that they can strongly be a part of collective creative processes. This paper will explore the results of using prompted timed-writing, peer dramaturgy, text analysis and short solo performances to encourage personal engagement with larger questions that affect the current experience of young people.
Nancy Cardwell and Meera Kanageswaran, “On Praxis and Intentionality: Practice, Rituals, and Movement in the Drama Space”
Paper #3 looks at the daily practices that took place in the Toronto 1st year acting classroom that explored Solo Performance theatre-making detailed in Paper 2. Using specific examples from participant-observation and interview data, this paper illustrates how practices and rituals¬¬–movement warmups, check-ins, and check-outs–created conditions and context that invited trust and fostered relationships. These embodied practices often relied on stillness and quiet as much as on movement and voice as ways to generate and sustain a creative and purposeful environment. This work meant leaning into the body, “at once a representation of the self, a site of experience, sensation and affect, and a mode of creation in progress” (Perry & Medina, 2011, p. 63). Centring the body through these very intentional spoken and unspoken rites uncovered new and different ways to ‘be’ together. As articulated by many participants, these ways of being together evoked ideas about safety and security, suggesting that the drama class functioned as antidote to overwhelming feelings of fear, confusion, and loneliness “in times like these” (“Lisa”, Focus Group Interview, November 14, 2025, Toronto). Rather than “trying to a find a language that is equal to the task” (Rich, 2001, p. iv), these practices and rituals focused on movement, expression, and the body as a site and mode of exploration and encounter, a trustworthy way to make sense of a challenging present, and “to imagine and claim wider horizons” .
Panel Rationale:
This curated panel examines the role of theatre pedagogies in “times like these” based on Year 1 fieldwork in the research project, The Drama Workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises (2025-2030). This multi-sited, drama-based ethnographic project–unfolding in Canada, India, Greece, Ireland and Nigeria– investigates how the drama space functions as a relational context for collective imagining, asking what could be different, and focusing on “possible alternatives by transforming critique into a set of embodied practices” (Zembylas, 2020, p. 232). Engaging with students, teachers, researchers, and artists, the project generates critical questions about theatre pedagogies, in particular solo performance, devising, site-specific theatre, and ensemble-building, that are consequential, we argue, in an era of increasing political and social polarization, climate anxiety, and life-limiting economic realities. These panel papers illustrate creative pedagogies that invite us to ponder how we educate in and for, “times like these”, as one of our drama students put it. Paper 1 situates the grounding questions of the research and examines how the drama workshop may equip young artists for the challenging present and the better world-to-be-imagined. Paper 2 shares specific creative pedagogies used in a first year acting course at the University of Toronto, investigating the personal and the collective through Solo Performance. Paper 3 offers some theoretical extension, grounded in the classroom practice, through exploring the dynamic potential of movement and ritual as modes of discovery in the drama workshop.
Zembylas, M. (2020). Affirmative critique as a practice of responding to the impasse between post-truth and negative critique: pedagogical implications for schools. Critical Studies in Education, 63(2), 229-244.
Biographies:
Dr. Kathleen Gallagher (Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies/University of Toronto)
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, Gallagher studies theatre as a medium of expression and communication. Her current SSHRC-funded ethnographic projects explore theatre pedagogies and socio-ecological justice with young artists.
Nancy Cardwell (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto)
Nancy Cardwell is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on movement as a critical literacy. Both a Dora Mavor Moore and a Gemini award winning dancer and choreographer, Nancy is an established artist on the Canadian dance scene.
Meera Kanageswaran (Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies)
Meera Kanageswaran is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Her SSHRC-funded research project examines Bharathanatyam pedagogy across Sri Lanka, India, and Canada. She is also a Bharathanatyam artist, choreographer, and the founder of ConfiDance Bharatham, a dance school in Mississauga.
Zorana Sadiq
Zorana Sadiq is an award-winning actor, playwright, musician and arts educator whose work ranges from theatre to modern opera. She is a champion of community music education and was a cornerstone teacher at Community Music Schools of Toronto. Zorana is a published playwright and frequent collaborator with Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre.