Location: Zoom Room 1

Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/3874647177?pwd=Jw1g9axPFpvKa8qEe26DCLjGd0ACbW.1

Moderator: Clayton Jevne

Abstracts:

Virginie Magnat, “Performance as Radical Collaboration”

This paper engages with the work of several generations of Indigenous scholars foregrounding non-anthropocentric principles of respect, reciprocity, and relational accountability, and positing the non-separability of matter and spirit within the complex ecology of human and other/more-than-human-life, considered to be sacred. I argue that, in contrast with the relatively recent new materialist/posthumanist paradigm shift mobilizing affect theory, neuroscience, and quantum physics to theorize non-human agency, Indigenous conceptions of agency are grounded in land-based and culturally-specific ethico-onto-epistemologies. From this non-anthropocentric perspective, human voices, stories, and songs resonate with and through those of other/more-than-human agents in the wider community and ecosystem, including rivers, fields, hills, valleys, oceans, and mountains. This resonating relationality encompassing a vast spectrum of intra-actions may be understood as a co-constitutive collaborative process. Speaking or singing language back into land so that they may resonate with/through each other can be a powerful example of radical collaboration between a critically endangered language and land that is occupied, stolen, and exploited. How might such transformative eco-cultural performance practices enable us to cultivate and sustain mutually beneficial relationships with both human and non-human partners, beyond conventional conceptions of performance as a medium for human expressivity showcasing human presence and glorifying human creativity?

Narges Montakhabi, “Gender Diversity and Precarity in Middle Eastern-Canadian Theatre”

My research examines performances by gender-diverse theatre makers from the Middle Eastern diaspora in Canada, interrogating how their work navigates the paradox of Canadian multiculturalism’s professed inclusivity while it reinforces homonormative and homonationalist ideals that marginalize racialized, immigrant, gender-diverse identities. Focusing on works by Makram Ayache (Harun, 2018), lee williams boudakian and Kamee Abrahamian (Dear Armen, 2015), and Shaista Latif (Graceful Rebellions, 2013), I argue these performances constitute queer auto-diasporography—a self-scribing that positions non-binary subjects as both historian and history, creating anarchival (archival and anarchic) sites of the self.

I propose two interrelated frameworks: intersectional queer misalignment and residu-futurity. Intersectional queer misalignment positions the precarity of racialized, migrant, gender-diverse identities as structural rather than merely affective, wherein gender-diverse Middle Eastern diaspora are systematically denied legibility and belonging. Residu-futurity challenges Lee Edelman’s rejection of queer futurity as heteronormative, arguing that such rejection is inaccessible to precarious genderqueer immigrants and refugees whose futures remain bound by displacement, colonial violence, and legal exclusions. For nonbinary Middle Eastern artists, futurity emerges through confronting residues of the past.

These performances dismantle orientalist representations—exotic or terrorized queers requiring Western salvation—by foregrounding lived experiences that are precarious yet persistent, glocal yet ephemeral, cross-cultural yet post-nationalistic. Connecting to CATR 2026’s theme “Inheritances in Transition,” this research examines how gender-diverse Middle Eastern-Canadian artists negotiate contested inheritances—cultural, religious, colonial—while rehearsing alternative futures that refuse both white heteronormativity and neoliberal homonormativity, creating transformative sites for reimagining belonging.

Hurmat Ul Ain, “Tongue: Performance & Politics of Speech”

In my research I investigate the power struggles between dominant and minoritarian cultures through the lens of the ‘tongue’. The tongue metonymy helps establish a connection between the oral muscle and spoken language. A key aspect of negotiation in the host-guest or dominant-minoritarian relation is the encounter around language. Derrida argues that the encounter between host and guest is made possible only through the established power of a language, “He has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, […]”. He calls it the “first act of violence” (15).

My paper complicates the position of English language as a colonial legacy in South Asia, troubling ideas around troubles class and social hierarchies through power play and controlling access. I discuss the performances of two women artists from South Asia who employ oral aesthetics such as mimicry and gibberish to subvert power relations between self and Other. Mimetics of language, behaviour and violence is a common lens for postcolonial theorists in discussions around hospitality and hostility (see Bhabha; Rossello).

I negotiate binaries of hospitality/hostility between the self and Other by reading orality—the performance of language and politics of speech. The artist’s performances in my discussion question the politics of speech through the nuanced reading of accent, mimicry and parody. I ask whose language is it and who gets to speak it?

Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality : Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Biographies:

Virginie Magnat, who was born and grew up in Occitania, southern France, is a Full Professor in the UBC Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. She conducts interdisciplinary research across performance studies, cultural anthropology, qualitative research, arts-based inquiry, and Indigenous ethico-onto-epistemologies. Her Open Access publications are available on https://virginiemagnat.space/.

Narges Montakhabi is a doctoral candidate in Theatre Studies at the University of Victoria. Her current research delves into how different political inscriptions on the body, including the dichotomy between body-at-home and body-in-exile, are captured in the performances by Middle Eastern Canadian theatre makers. Specifically, this research investigates immigrant and exilic precarity, where narratives of displacement, embodiment, and ethics converge.

Hurmat Ul Ain is a Pakistani born interdisciplinary artist and scholar. She is a PhD candidate with the Dance, Theatre & Performance Studies program at York University. She holds an MFA in Performance Art from School of Art Institute Chicago where she was studying as a Fulbright Scholar.