Location: Zoom Room 1
Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/3874647177?pwd=Jw1g9axPFpvKa8qEe26DCLjGd0ACbW.1
Moderator: Sasha Kovacs
Abstracts:
Benedicta Akley-Quarshie, “Rehearsing Future: Performance as a Site for Introspection and Cultural Affirmation”
The sociopolitical and cultural necessity of staging Black-authored plays, as affirmed by scholars such as Elam and Krasner (2001) and advocated for by figures such as August Wilson and Vera Cudjoe, is well-established. This advocacy, alongside contemporary Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives, validates the practice of casting Black actors in culturally specific roles, which demonstrably enhances cultural specificity, affirms community identity, and fosters professional/economic development. However, research on how the introspective impact of starring in and rehearsing Black plays that feature resonant themes of othering, racial trauma, and microaggression affects the mental and emotional wellness of Black actors and informs their envisioning of alternative futures seems limited. This study addresses this gap by examining the rehearsal process of Joe de Graft’s Through a Film Darkly. A 1950s Ghanaian play that explores postcolonial immigrant identity, racism, and microaggression, staged in New Westminster, Canada. Utilizing a participant observation methodology in my artistic practice as both the dramaturg and wellness coordinator for the production, I explore how the rehearsal space functioned as a political and therapeutic site for the predominantly Black immigrant cast. Data, derived from reflective discussion notes and a post-production survey, highlights how the play’s themes, of racism and microaggression, served as material for reflective unpacking and collective sharing, enabling the actors to rehearse the “past-present” toward imagining alternative futures. The findings underscore the potential of performance processes to serve as spaces of cultural healing and political foresight that foster critical reflection and the imagining of inclusive futures.
Charlotte Gagné-Dumais, “Corps en transition: représentations scéniques d’une deuxième adolescence”
Le rapport au corps des interprètes trans est complexe : il est difficile, voire impossible, de percevoir le corps comme un outil neutre qu’on peut manipuler afin d’incarner un personnage car le corps trans, même en dehors de l’espace performatif, est signifiant malgré lui; il est l’objet d’une performance genrée qui apaise (euphorie de genre) ou qui est destructrice (dysphorie de genre). De plus, la relation au corps trans est généralement changeante au fil d’un parcours de transition : l’affirmation de soi (dans les parcours de transition légale, sociale et médicale) est souvent revendiquée comme une deuxième adolescence (dans le cas d’une thérapie hormonale, on parle même d’une deuxième puberté). L’identité trans existe en dehors des temporalités linéaires cisnormatives et affecte forcément le rapport à la performance scénique.
Je crois que ce point de tension face à la temporalité trans se reflète notamment dans les figures choisies par les artistes trans pour représenter ces enjeux. C’est pourquoi je propose d’ancrer ces réflexions dans l’analyse de deux créations mettant en scènes des figures mythiques : la marionnette Pinocchio dans The Making of Pinocchio de Rosana Cade et Ivo MacAskill (2022) et l’adolescente guerrière Jeanne d’Arc dans Moi, Jeanne de la compagnie Pleurer Dans’ Douche (2024).
Du côté théorique, je m’appuierai sur des chercheureuses phares des études queers, tel·les que Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam et McKenzie Wark.
Cette proposition de communication marque les premiers pas d’une recherche-création postdoctorale axée sur une théorie du jeu d’acteurice à partir d’une perspective trans.
Tasnime Ben Mansour, “Bearing a Burden: Linguistic Inheritance in Makram Ayache’s The Green Line”
In The Green Line: خطّ التماس (2024), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award by Lebanese Canadian playwright Makram Ayache, inheritance operates as the driving force that leads the protagonist back to Lebanon to carry on his deceased father’s legacy. The play is structured through figures of duality: the mirrored trajectories of the protagonist and his father, the divided geography of Beirut, the play’s twin timelines (1978 and 2018), and the characters’ dual personas. Ayache relates this story in both Arabic and English, reinforcing the play’s mirrored structure that transgresses time, space, and language. In Arabic, the word for burden (himl حمل) shares its root with the words carrying and conception. The Arabic thus refuses a singular meaning, gesturing instead toward a semantic doubleness where pain intertwines with endurance and possibilities. This paper considers how language in The Green Line functions as a repository of collective memory carrying the weight of historical trauma and gesturing towards new futures. The oscillation between Arabic and English reflects the fluidity of the characters and the play’s movement between remembrance and renewal, homeland and diaspora, and silence and articulation. I argue that language in the play enacts its own inheritance, bridging past and future. Ayache’s use of Arabic extends beyond narrative purpose; it becomes a performative act of passing down and preserving meaningful linguistic and cultural inheritances in spaces—both in the theatre and beyond—dominated by western ideals.
Katharine Zien, “Performance and Ecological Loss”
In this paper, I explore the question of performance’s ephemerality and/or durability as this debate has permeated the field of performance studies, and as related to the ongoing ecological crisis affecting our planet. While Peggy Phelan’s famous assertion that performance’s ontology is its ephemerality, many scholars (Richard Schechner, Rebecca Schneider, Diana Taylor, Amelia Jones, Philip Auslander) have mounted spirited critiques of the equation of performance with loss or disappearance. But I would like to revisit this debate in light of the mounting tally of ecological losses, as seen in several works of performance, photography, and culture. These will include the performance piece “How to Build a Forest,” by Pearl D’Amour, and the aerial photographs of celebrated Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky. The question I am asking, in revisiting Phelan’s Unmarked, is how performance practices can reveal the losses in our lives, on individual and planetary scales, through their combination of ephemerality and durability. I will also reconsider what it means to lose something, amid a massive digital and material archive that is beginning to resemble a garbage heap. Ultimately, I hope to chart a different course in this debate than has been done, showing how performance theory can guide us to new ways of valuing loss as our losses, and our detritus, accumulate.
Biographies:
Dr. Benedicta Akley-Quarshie is an artist-scholar, drama therapist, and applied theatre researcher. Her artistic practice and research interests include dramaturgy, wellness coordination, and applied theatre practice with/for justice-involved youth. She serves as Head, Community-Based Practice of Akofena Afro-Theatre Society, an organization she co-founded to amplify Black stories in Canada.
Charlotte Gagné-Dumais est metteur·e en scène et obtient son doctorat à l’Université de Montréal en 2024. Dans ses recherches comme dans sa pratique artistique, iel s’interroge sur la présence intermédiale des interprètes, la relation à l’autre-qu’humain et les pratiques queers. Iel assure la direction artistique de la compagnie de création féministe le Théâtre des Trompes.
Tasnime Ben Mansour is a PhD student in English Studies at Université de Montréal. Her research examines modern and contemporary theatre and performance, with a focus on human–machine relationality and its continuous redefinition of humanity across time and space. Her research is both transhistorical and transgeographical, leaving space to consider how different languages and cultural contexts shape identity and meaning in theatre.
Katherine Zien (McGill University) researches and teaches theatre and performance in the Americas. Zien’s publications include Sovereign Acts (2017); The Cultural Cold War and the Global South (2021), and Bodies on the Front Lines (2024). Zien’s current research examines counterinsurgency, performance, and military training in the Panama Canal Zone.