Moderator: Shelley Liebembuk
Location: Room 1175 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal
(Building 19 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Sponsored by the School of Contemporary Arts – Simon Fraser University
In Search of Justice through Ethics in Post-COVID Canadian Contemporary Dance
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic limited the ability for most artists and companies to participate in dance practices. The opportunity for rest and reflection, alongside sentiments carried over from #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, caused a reckoning over social media about in-studio conduct and compensation. In response, many Canadian dance institutions put out public statements which laid out goals for changing hiring practices, training, and day-by-day operations. This paper presentation utilizes these demands for sexual and racial justice as an entry point into choreography’s complex ethics of self and other, power and pleasure, and “conducting the conduct of others” (Foucault 1983).
To do so, I track the progression of these calls for justice, starting from social media posts in the dance community, and the public responses made by Canadian contemporary dance companies – Ballet BC, Toronto Dance Theatre, and Ballets Jazz Montréal. I then consider the ethical implications of these requests, informed by the genealogy of philosophy emerging from the late works of Michel Foucault. I argue that this moment of resistance shifts the regimens that inform the dancer as a choreographic subject, the choreographer as a conditioner of tutelage, and the dance company as a practitioner of the art of government. And finally, I employ my encounters as a Toronto-based dance critic to ponder the aesthetic outcomes of this ethical discourse. Justice may indeed be evident in the dancing that emerges as a result of such acts of resistance.
Martin Austin, University of Toronto
Martin Austin is a PhD Student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. His research analyzes ethical concerns in Euro-American dance practice. Martin is Research Assistant for the SSHRC-funded ballroom study Category Is, and is a frequent reviewer for Intermission Magazine and The Dance Current.
A horrifying dance or how a dance survives
While describing a collective process to reconstruct the memory of the all-women dance festival No Mas Luna en el Agua (Quito-Ecuador 1997-2011), the paper focuses on revisiting the dance piece La Huesudita (2001) by Carolina Vásconez, originally performed during the festival. In a brief effort to locate the cultural context in which independent dance developed in Quito, I look at how Ecuadorian dancing bodies have come to bear different markings in relation to dominant concert dance histories, from which the most relevant is perhaps that of “ugly bodies” as a result of comparing them with dominant images of ballet white dancing bodies. Later, I device a feminist reading of La Huesudita through following our meanderings at revisiting this dance. I propose that revisioning these works is vital in order to create a reflective memory of women in dance and their vicissitudes towards artistic visibility and autonomy. I address the importance of complicating linear time and the slow temporality in which a dance can become visible. La Huesudita (the one with the bones) is a dance that, dealing itself with issues of remains, brings forward questions about record-making and the survival of dances in the context of Ecuador. I move through transcripts, interviews, and diaries of our working sessions, while reviewing relevant feminist and decolonial theorizations.
Esteban Donoso, York University
Esteban Donoso is a researcher-artist from Quito, Ecuador who works in the mediums of dance, performance and film. He is interested in oral histories, re-writing and auto theory as devices that can help to re-construct our situated and interconnected histories. Esteban is currently completing his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University.
A Choreography of Foraging for Food Justice
Foraging, or harvesting wild plants and fungi for consumption, has been central to Canadian cuisine since the birth of the nation. Hunger and even starvation have oftentimes been the motivations for learning to identify, reap, and use wild plants. Importantly though, foraging requires skill and aesthetic accomplishment to hone perception. This aesthetic sometimes also involves an orientation toward food justice. “Informal practices of collecting help to understand not only survival strategy to alleviate hunger but also tactics to circumvent regulations that frame urban gathering as undesirable,” according to Flaminia Paddeu (2019: 2).
The implicit rules involved in foraging lead to a particular orientation toward place. I have noticed a certain choreography involved in foraging by paying attention to the bodily habits that it calls forth. In this paper panel presentation, I analyze foraging as a form of aesthetic training, from a performance angle. Further, walking, an act that is central to foraging, is also a well-developed methodology in artistic practice that is pertinent to this analysis.
I argue that urban foraging can be considered a kind of counter-aesthetics that asserts a “right to the city,” as David Harvey would have it, or a “right to collect,” in the words of Paddeu. The exclusive, elitist etiquette associated with high end cuisine is challenged by the counter-aesthetics of this choreography of foraging, which belongs to what De Certeau would have called a “practice of everyday life”. In the context of climate catastrophe, which involves widespread biodiversity loss and the rampant spread of “invasive weeds” on the shores of the St. Lawrence River where I walk, it can even be considered a choreography of the essential (as opposed to the aesthetics of excess expressed in fine dining).
Natalie Doonan, Université de Montréal
Natalie Doonan is interested in embodiment, food and place. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally. Her writing has appeared in professional and peer reviewed art and food culture publications. She serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Université de Montréal.