Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Performance, Pedagogy, and the Politics of a ‘Difficult Return’ Examining the Rocky Shoals of Creative Collaboration in Times of Endemic Crisis
This curated panel grapples with the destabilizing effects of ‘endemic crisis’ – both local and global, intimate and planetary – on the creative collaborative work between researchers, artists, teachers and students in the study Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019-2024). This multi-sited, drama-based ethnographic project, unfolding in Toronto Canada, Lucknow India; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Thessaloniki, Greece; Coventry, England and Bogotá, Colombia, harnesses theatre as a methodology for understanding and enacting global climate justice. This panel charts our struggles with the (dis)connections of the past two years of the study as we navigated the COVID pandemic – among other political and ecological upheavals – to find ways to be and create together. Our necessary turn to online drama in light of COVID surfaced shared creative impulses and desires in cross-cultural creative exchange, but also digital divides, varying understandings of, and relationships to, the climate crisis, and materially varying experiences of the pandemic. In the fourth year of the study, in-person resumed, but our ‘return’ to one another proved elusive as changed by the pandemic, we found ourselves floundering in the waters of creative collaboration, struggling locally with the challenge of how to ‘be with each other’ again; it produced what we are calling ‘pedagogies of disharmony’. This panel roots itself in the concept of ‘the difficult return’ – to ourselves, to each other, and to the land, location and history – as we reckon with what Gallagher et al. (2010) see as the ‘melancholia’ that arises when the aesthetic and social goals of drama are affected by the shifting stakes of a changing world.
Site-Specific Creation and Difficult Assembly: Becoming the Bridge in Times of Loss
The primary ambition of the project, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019-2024), is to respond to the need for new ways of thinking about and responding to pressing environmental and social crises by asking if theatre can lead to alternative ways of seeing the world that can account for the ‘inextricable
entanglements’ of the environment, society, subjectivity and our own actions (Neimanis, Åsberg and Hedrén 2015, 68). This paper first provides a brief overview of the project, engaging with the drama pedagogies and theatre genres that are put to work in a far-ranging Global North-South arts-led, youth-driven performance ecology. Then, the paper turns to ‘history’ and the in-person work conducted in the fourth year of the research study in our Toronto site, which took the form of a mini-unit in land-based, site-specific performance, carried out with a class of 28 Grade 9 and 10 students in a Toronto high school drama classroom and its surrounding neighbourhood. In preparation for this unit, entitled Land, History, Presence: Performing a Land Acknowledgement for Now through Mobile Site-Specific Performance, our Toronto team and Indigenous knowledge-keeper Amanda Buffalo engaged in a long conversation about how to facilitate a land-centred drama pedagogy amid the backdrop of the historic and ongoing traumas of settler-colonial violence, pandemic, public (un)health, an Ontario education system under siege, and the failures of COP 27. The author asks what grief and trauma can teach us about how to proceed with community-based, justice-oriented work with youth and what new modes of listening and creative resistance these times of profound damage demand of us.
Kathleen Gallagher, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies/University of Toronto
Bio: A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, Dr. Kathleen Gallagher studies theatre as a powerful medium for expression by young people of their experiences and understandings. Her current SSHRC ethnographic project explores youth theatre-making and its relationship to socio-ecological justice.
Waves and Retreats: Dis/harmonies of Being and ‘Be’-ing Together in Toronto and Lucknow
Over the last two years of the pandemic, both nation-wide and the world over, school closures and attempts to return to in-person schooling have been immediately followed by renewed COVID-19 threats and fluctuating retreats to online classes. This incredible precarity has made us approach our ‘return’ to research inside drama classrooms with deep caution, finding ourselves in spaces that pose unfamiliar challenges. In this paper we explore these new ‘disharmonies’ in two of our sites – Toronto and Lucknow – but we also situate them in the broader contexts of the underlying social and political disharmonies heightened by the pandemic and by the escalating populist pressures gaining momentum ‘under the cover’ of COVID. Given this climate, this paper looks at our experiences of ‘presence’ and the shock and dissonance we encountered as we felt our way towards being together again. Using site-specific theatre-making to explore how we ‘acknowledge land’ and what that might mean for climate justice, this paper uses empirical examples from theatre-making with young people as it unfolded in Toronto and Lucknow, highlighting the complex relationships each site holds to “land” and its storied histories. We will explore how, like the pandemic itself, we experienced both waves and retreats from youth and ourselves, as we came to recognize this not as a longed-for ‘return’ but as something else. We hone in on the affective consequences of these critical and creative theatre-making encounters in a destabilized world and in the very local contexts of Toronto and Lucknow, where our land-based pedagogies could only go so far to ground us (Boler in Bozalek et al., 2014).
Nancy Cardwell, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, & Munia Debleena Tripathi, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies/University of Toronto
Bio: Nancy Cardwell is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on arts in education through the lens of critical literacy studies and feminist theory in school settings. A Dora Mavor Moore and a Gemini award-winning dancer and choreographer, Nancy is an established artist on the Canadian dance scene.
Bio: Munia Debleena Tripathi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. Her research interests include contemporary Bangla theatre, Applied theatre and audience research. She works as a playwright, theatre director, trainer and workshop facilitator and lives between Toronto and Kolkata. She is passionate about stories and loves making beautiful things together.
‘Dear Neighbours with Sharpies:’ Hidden Histories, Public Art, and the Drama Classroom”
This paper focuses on ‘the difficult return’ to creation in shared local space through our in-person land-based performance work in Toronto. In particular, the paper grapples with the ‘affects’ of our pedagogical and artistic (re)engagement with public and institutional spaces. Departing from Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (2005) suggestion that embodied knowledge is heavily shaped by the influence of the affective, somatic movements of “forces, sensations, stories, invitations, habits, media, time, space, ideas, language, objects, images, and sounds” as pedagogy, we look to the learnings that arose in our two sites of learning: Bickford Park (in Toronto’s west end) and its public murals, and a drama studio in a Toronto public high school (p. 24). We grapple with the coalescences of effect and graffiti at the Bickford site as the researchers, teacher and students learned of the defacement and subsequent restoration of one of the public murals depicting red dresses commemorating Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit peoples. We draw from Nayak’s (2010) concept of “emotional-laden landscapes” to consider what the ‘performances’ of public art and defacement brought to bear on students’ own ‘covered up’ histories with everyday places and spaces bearing the traces of misogynistic violence. We then turn to the ‘affects’ of the drama classroom, observing students’ changed relationships to institutional space after the return to in-person schooling. Problematizing assumptions of drama classrooms as ‘safe spaces’, we ask what new place-making practices artists and teachers need to employ to revivify the community among youth in drama spaces.
Celeste Kirsh, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto
Bio: Celeste Kirsh is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Curriculum and Pedagogy Program at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at The University of Toronto. She holds a BA in Drama from The University of Waterloo and a Master of Teaching Degree from OISE / U of T. Her research interests include digital multimodal writing, journalism, and teacher learning.
Dr. Christine Balt, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies/University of Toronto
Bio: Christine Balt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include applied theatre, drama education, and arts-based research. She has published articles in Theatre Research in Canada, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance and The International Journal for Qualitative Studies in Education.