Moderator / Animé par: Hope McIntyre
Location: Silver Room, Atlas Hotel

• Colleen Renihan and Mariah Horner, “Liminal Legacies: Temporality and Relationality in Transitional Care”

Creative arts-based practices have been recognized as having the potential to help people facing life-threatening medical issues cope with sudden and often long-term hospitalization, a changing sense of self, changing relationships, and for some, impending death (see Coyle, 2006; McCormick, 2017; Organ, 2016). Arts-based interventions in these liminal contexts have tended to be reminiscence-based, an approach that has been widely used in end-of-life legacy work in medicine (see Allen, 2009; Pasupathi & Carstensen, 2003; Affleck & Tennen, 1996; Hilgeman, Allen, DeCoster & Burgio, 2007), particularly with patients living with dementia. Reminisicence often forms the basis of legacy-based work; work that is designed to out-live a person and provide a definitive set of values, based on past life events, that will stand in for a person in the years to come. 

This paper explores the fascinating temporal tensions inherent in theatre, music, and movement-based legacy projects with older adults in the liminal context of transitional care. Our discussion focuses on several case studies that center on music, theatre, and movement-based creative sessions with older adult artist-participants and their caregivers in a transitional care facility in Ontario, describing in particular the theoretical need for a relational and present-based arts practice in this context (see Nicholson, 2012). Extending the work of Abbate (1991), Rabey (2016), Wagner (2018), and Wittman (2017), we describe the ways music, theatre, and movement can be used to engage artist-participants in an orientation to legacy that transforms its typically retrospective nature into one that is rooted in present-based relationality.

• Jenny Salisbury, “Building Trust with Audiences: The Interiority and Humour of Baram and Snieckus’ Big Stuff”

In their 2024 play Big Stuff, Matt Baram, Naomi Snieckus, and Kat Sandler encourage audiences to share stories of interiority. Or as their press release quipped, they invite us to “participate in the unpacking of some big stuff” (Crows 2024). Through their training in improvisation and sketch comedy (The National Theatre of The World, Second City Toronto), Baram and Snieckus create a blended dramaturgy of scripted poignancy and audience participation. The play hinges on audience members sharing stories of their own unexpected items at home that are connected to people, childhood, and often death. Between audience stories and actor confessions, Big Stuff weaves a complicated fabric of affective trust, a trust that is built on mutual vulnerability, freedom of expression, and the common experience of losing people we love. This play offers a key example of affective trust, and the critical work collective creation and devising practices can do in building trust among strangers.

Our current political moment seems to be predicated on a breakdown of trust. Francis Fukuyama, author of the 1996 book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, has argued that over the last 20 years, the United States and much of the Western World has transformed into a low-trust society (2024). Trust, as Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup defines it “is to lay oneself open” (Stern ‘Trust is Basic’). Perhaps another way to define it is to expose, or bring to light what lies inside: inside our basements, our closets, our hearts, and our memories. 

Crow’s Theatre. “Big Stuff – Streetcar Crowsnest.” Crow’s Theatre. www.crowstheatre.com/whats-on/view-all/big-stuff.
Fukuyama, Francis. “The Crisis of Trust.” Persuasion. 18 Oct. 2024. www.persuasion.community/p/the-crisis-of-trust.
—. Trust : The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. in Faulkner, Paul and Thomas Simpson. The Philosophy of Trust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

• Bethany Schaufler-Biback, “From Compliancy to Intimacy: Cultivating Access Intimacy In and Amongst Theatre Audiences”

In an era where theatre practitioners are striving to move beyond treating accessible practices as an afterthought, what does it mean to create spaces where disabled audiences feel truly understood– not only accommodated, but intimately seen? While discussions on accessibility have gained traction in Canada’s theatre landscape over the past decade, many accessibility practices remain rooted in what artist and scholar Alice Sheppard refers to as “compliancy” or “inclusionary thinking” in the arts–approaches that attempt to “solve” disability’s presence through surface-level interventions, often tacked on at the end of a project (“Disability Justice”).

This paper examines how an understanding of access intimacy in relation to theatre audiences  might reshape these approaches. Access intimacy, as first defined by activist and writer Mia Mingus, describes the elusive feelings which become when one’s access needs are deeply understood by another (“Access Intimacy”). To explore access intimacy in a theatre audience research landscape, this paper turns to The Disability Collective’s production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, featuring an all D/deaf shadow cast. Drawing on affect theory, disability studies, and audience studies, this investigation calls on theatre practitioners to embrace the slowness of interdependence, integrating practices curated by and reflective of the community. In doing so, it offers theatre practitioners integral insight on how their accessibility practices may better serve their communities by striving towards fostering the intimacy of disability in and amongst their audiences.

Biographies

Colleen Renihan

Dr. Colleen Renihan is Associate Professor at Queen’s University, and Senior Associate Researcher at Providence Care Hospital. She is an interdisciplinary arts humanities researcher, trained in musicology, with multiple intersecting research foci on issues of voice, gesture transmission, memory, temporality, and the role of the arts in healthy aging.

Mariah Horner

Dr Mariah (Mo) Horner is theatre artist, musician, abolitionist, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. Along with Dr. Jenn Stephenson, Mo co-authored Play: Dramaturgies of Participation and co-edited Canadian Theatre Review 197: Participation. She currently co-facilitates a Philosophy and Creativity Discussion Group in Collins Bay Institution.

Jenny Salisbury

Jenny Salisbury (she/her/elle) is a theatre artist and educator. She teaches Critical Arts Pedagogy at OISE, University of Toronto. She is co-director of The Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and co-artistic director of Gailey Road Productions. She has published with Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, Arts, Qualitative Inquiry, and Perspectives on Urban Education.

Bethany Schaufler-Biback

Bethany Schaufler-Biback (she/her) is a theatre practitioner and PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Her research explores audience studies, concerning the intersections of care ethics, affect theory, and disability studies. As a theatre practitioner, Bethany works as a stage manager, most recently at Achura Karpa in Bogotá, Colombia.