Location: Zoom Room 2
Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/6087153816?pwd=ppMzS6CF8VMyDMKcF9DX0BiTTC3Exf.1
Moderator: Tarn Mokara and Sasha Kovacs
Abstracts:
Robert Allan, “Cross disciplinary applications of creativity development in post-secondary non-vocational musical theatre education”
Musical theatre education in the post-secondary sector is heavily weighted towards vocational training, aiming to produce (or reproduce) performers capable of fitting into the moulds required by commercial theatres. This paper does not denigrate this form of education, but seeks to propel pedagogical change towards a more inclusive future for musical theatre training and study. It also aims to situate musical theatre education as a valid form of interdisciplinary creativity development with application in wide-range of post-secondary studies. I investigate students’ perception and experience of creative acts made during the rehearsals and performance of a musical. Creativity is practised intensely in musical theatre production rehearsals. There are multiple constraints to assimilate such as vocals, choreography, direction, and technical elements. The creative act occurs in the spaces left over, and is highly individualized while simultaneously being responsive to the creative acts of others in rehearsal. Using timed surveys of students enrolled in an audition-free and “open to all majors” musical theatre production course at the University of Guelph, I apply the Kaufman and Beghetto’s 4-C model of creativity to students’ self-perceptions of creativity practised in the rehearsal hall, as well as other arenas of academic study. My thematic analysis of respondent’s reflections points towards opportunities to deepen the effectiveness of production rehearsals as a tool for creativity development. It also highlights moments of transferability in the creative skills practiced to other areas of study outside of performance.
David Fancy, “Disfelanous Ethics, Resonant Inheritances, and Indigenous Performance Futures”
This paper introduces disfelanous ethics as a framework for rethinking theatrical inheritances and decolonial relationality in the Canadian context. Drawing on the etymology of feeling (from felan, to strike, grasp, or touch), the dis-felanous names an ethics of not touching: a refusal of liberal-humanist demands for connection, fusion, or sympathetic incorporation. Rather than advocating distance, disfelanous ethics emphasizes phase-relational resonance: a mode of co-presence that upholds spacing, difference, and non-enmeshment. It enables relation without capture, attunement without appropriation, and ethical encounter without the possessive touch that has long shaped settler-colonial performance cultures.
Engaging the CATR 2026 theme Inheritances in Transition, the paper critiques dominant notions of inheritance as “transferable belongingness” (Miller et al.), which presume transmission through contact, property and identitarian recognition. Within settler institutions, this often results in felanous capture: appropriating Indigenous lands, knowledges, and cultural forms into settler genealogies. By contrast, Indigenous performance practices—articulated by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Lindsay Lachance, and Métis and Coast Salish artists—model disfelanous relationality: sovereign, land-based, proximate, and vibratory without enmeshment.
As a descendant of settlers, I write with the requisite disfelanous restraint, maintaining ethical spacing and refusing incorporative claims. Drawing on Fanon’s “ethical transit,” I frame rehearsal as a metaxic modality through which colonial inheritances may be unfelt and reconfigured. Case studies of contemporary Indigenous performance illustrate how the resonant acommons offers a decolonial alternative to inherited structures, opening theatre to futures grounded in refusal, resurgence, and non-proprietary relation.
Jessica Somersall, “Theatre as Healing: Storytelling to Reimagine Fragmented and Ambiguous Colonial Histories in St. Kitts and Nevis”
This paper argues that theatrical storytelling can serve as a method of decolonial practice and ancestral reclamation for Afro-Caribbean communities whose genealogies were fragmented by colonial disruption. As a Black Caribbean Canadian woman, I carry both the privilege and the pain of knowing my lineage only partially: my father was born in St. Kitts and Nevis under British colonial rule, and my mother was born in Canada to Jamaican parents. The question “Where do you come from?” exposes how colonial systems deliberately erased connections to ancestry, leaving memory and imagination as tools of reconstruction and healing.
Drawing on oral histories from St. Kitts and Nevis, this research reconstructs my family’s history and traces my earliest known ancestor through performance and creative storytelling. The project merges scholarly research with creative practice, producing a narrative that transforms fragmented genealogical traces into acts of remembrance and cultural restoration.
Methodologically, this paper employs Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s decolonizing frameworks, imaginative ethnography, research creation, and storytelling ethnography, alongside Black performance theory and Black fugitivity. Performance is treated as both a site of resistance and a medium for knowledge-making, allowing the histories of erased or marginalized Afro-Caribbean ancestors to be retrieved, reframed, and made visible.
This study contributes to theatre scholarship and community practice by demonstrating how performance can actively intervene in historical erasure, fostering spaces of connection, care, and collective restoration. It positions storytelling not only as research, but as restorative practice turning fragments of ancestry into living, shared narratives.
Biographies:
Robert Allan is an educator and artist. He has developed innovative musical theatre coursework in multiple subjects: swinging and understudying; performing as an ensemble member; choreography; and direction. He also teaches various histories, techniques and performance classes. His research includes anti-oppression in musical theatre pedagogy and creativity studies.
Dr. David Fancy is Professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock.
Jessica Somersall (she/her) is a Toronto-based emerging writer, performer, and theatre-maker whose work explores social justice, intergenerational memory, and the lives of Black Caribbean women. Her writing appears in Intermission Magazine and Consensual Humans, reflecting on identity, lineage, vulnerability, and love through personal storytelling and cultural inquiry.