Co-leaders: Art Babayants and Carlos Rivera Martinez
Location: Room 7-425, 7th Floor – John Molson Building, 1450 Rue Guy – Concordia University
In-Person Session
Inspired by the IFTR Embodied Knowledge Working Group, we propose a space of exchange of embodied practices, training, research and knowledge as they pertain to performing arts in what is now called Canada. Participants will be welcome to draw from their own identities, hybridities, abilities, schools of embodied training, sources of knowledge and worldviews in order to share their embodied research enquiries, paradigms, methodologies and findings.
In an attempt to reimagine and decolonize the academic conference, we will place more value on experiencing and exploring participants’ embodied research through doing/acting rather than language, especially written language. We will invite proposals in a wide range of embodied forms including but not limited to ceremony, ritual, dance, chant, contact improvisation, movement exploration, training exercises, tango, etc. One of the goals of this sharing circle (panel) will be to explore commonalities and differences in embodied knowledge and training as it is applied to general actor/dancer/circus performer education as well as advance the understanding of how embodied research, specifically artistic or pedagogical research can be conducted and shared. Another goal is the inclusion of Land-based performance and/or theatre practices by Indigenous artists, members of racialized communities and immigrants, with special focus on how those practices or methodologies. Additionally, we will encourage reflections on teaching movement techniques from a diversity of movement approaches and methodologies.
Carlos Rivera
Carlos Rivera is a director, choreographer, actor and a dancer, originally from Mexico City.
He graduated from the Indigenous Residency Program at National Theatre School in 2018 and recently graduated from the MFA in Directing for Theatre Program at the University of Ottawa. Carlos has worked and collaborated with several performing arts companies across Canada including Red Sky Performance (Toronto), Globe Theatre (Regina), Raven Spirit Dance (Vancouver), MT Space (Kitchener), Puente Theatre (Victoria), Ondinnok (Montreal) Lemon Tree Creations (Toronto) Electric Company (Vancouver) Micro-Scope Productions (Montreal); among others. He is continuously working on numerous artistic projects in dance, film, theatre and performance.
Art Babayants, Bishop’s University
Dr. Art Babayants/ Արտ Բաբայանց is a Canadian-Armenian theatre artist-scholar who has worked in Russia, Malta, Latvia, Bulgaria, the UK, the USA, and Canada. He founded his first theatre company in 2004 and almost reluctantly started a directing career, which eventually comprised musicals, such as Share and Share Alike (2007), Seussical. The Musical (2009 and 2018), Gypsy (2011), Godspell (2014 and 2021), and Spring Awakening (2019); contemporary Canadian drama, including Couldn’t We Be (2008), The…Musician: An Etude (2012 and 2014), and Wine&Halva (2020-2023). His best-known work, a devised collaborative multilingual production “In Sundry Languages” was presented at Toronto Fringe (2017) and Caminos (2017) and called by NOW ‘a compelling critique of Canadian inclusiveness’. Art teaches at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, QC.