Panel: Engaging Place and Space

Location: Zoom Room A

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8075386377?pwd=QGMSB3uhyUxwIbvOIzkUanoMoqRkOX.1

Online Session

• Christine Balt, “How to Thrive in a Crisis: Generating the ‘Conditions of Possibility’ for Living Well (Enough) in Drama Spaces”

This paper engages with ‘thriving’ as a productive concept for thinking about ‘living well’ amid the many ‘economies of abandonment’ of our current era of late-stage capitalism (Povinelli, 2011). Drawing from conceptual and empirical material exploring the significance of drama spaces in the lives of young people in a time of crisis – marked by the myriad ‘abandonments’ of thwarted climate goals, ongoing war, pandemic, and the unregulated proliferation of destabilizing technologies – the paper asks if drama classrooms and rehearsal halls can emerge as interior spaces where the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Coffey, 2022) for collective thriving can be nurtured. Thriving has become a popular concept in ‘discourses of transition’ seeking out alternatives to what Amit Singh Chaudhuri (2024) sees as late capitalism’s ‘extractive circuit:’ economic theorists like Kate Raworth (2017) have proposed ‘thriving’ rather than ‘growth’ as a more sustainable measure of a nation’s wealth in the climate crisis, while ‘buen vivir’ (‘living well’) is a principle driving Latin American Indigenous and Afro-descendent resistance efforts against colonialism and resource extraction. I engage with ‘thriving’ as a performative that can be generated in drama spaces. Leveraging Amartya Sen’s (1999) contention that a flourishing life is measured according to what one is able to do (as opposed to what one owns) and Julia Coffey’s (2022) framing of ‘collective wellbeing’ as a non-personal capacity that arises from its ‘conditions of possibility,’ I ask if it is within the aesthetics and ethics arising in the collective artistic encounter that the roots of social and planetary thriving can be nurtured.

• Kimber Sider, “Where Does the ‘Wild’ Begin?: Interspecies Lessons from a Shared Expanse of Green”

Where Does the “Wild” Begin?:  Interspecies Lessons from a Shared Expanse of Green In The Urban Bestiary Lyanda Lynn Haupt speaks of a “lost boundary” (p. 15), acknowledging that though we may still conceive of “nature” as elsewhere, a pristine and untouched expanse of wild that exists beyond human reach, this place no longer exists. The wild is equally discovered within and amongst human communities. It is found within the green spaces that we often consider our own (human) domains— within parks, yards, and often (against our wishes) within the walls of our homes. These liminal spaces, where interior “home” intertwines with exterior “nature,” offer the potential for a community space of interspecies meeting. A domain where we are invited, and challenged, to release our grip of colonial ownership over the land and acknowledge that these expanses (even when urban or suburban) were never ours to begin with.   In this paper, through interspecies entanglements in my “own” backyard, and how my students perceive (and learn to see) the interspecies community of the University of Waterloo campus, prompted by a series of performance-based observation activities, I explore how these liminal spaces of “wildness” invite us to recognize, engage with, and more equitably cohabit with our nonhuman neighbours? How might performance be used to bring our own “wild life” forward (Haupt 14)? How might these urban wilds offer an opportunity for humans to become more positively intertwined within the interspecies community which supports us all?

• Lisa Woynarski, “Imagining Urban Ecologies through Indigenous Performance”

As most of the world now lives in cities, they reflect the inequalities of society at large and embody historic nature/culture divides, histories of displacement and dispossession, anthropocentrism and material inequalities. Pervasive future ecological visions of cities are often built on representations on apocalypse, natural disasters destroying urban environments. These representations of apocalypse can foreclose the possibilities of other possible futures. In this presentation, I look to performances that ask: what happens if we reject the apocalyptic future of the city? How can we live together in more just and ecological ways? Dismantling the urban/nature binary and understanding the city as a liminal space where histories and futures collide, the two performances included here imagine the urban futures in hopefully and optimistic ways based on community action, regeneration and decolonization. Peter Morin’s (Tahltan Nation) Cultural Graffiti in London (2013) embodies Indigenous knowledge and culture by foregrounding how legacies of colonialism are living in the structures of contemporary cities. In this site-based work, Morin sang Tahltan songs to different monuments in London (UK), bringing Indigenous awareness, existence and art into the city where Indigenous presences have been wilfully forgotten or erased. The Unplugging (2014) by Yvette Nolan envision a pluralistic future through envisioning a post-electricity world in which Indigenous values build community. I argue that both of these works allow us to see the potential of performance in imagining a more climate just future, by taking colonial marked systems and transforming them into decolonized, community-driven ones that prioritise Indigenous knowledge and environmental justice.

Biographies

Christine Balt

Christine Balt is a researcher and educator based in Toronto, who is interested in how performance practices intersect with ‘wellbeing’ in drama and learning spaces. Winner of CATR’s 2024 Richard Plant Award, she has published articles in Theatre Research in Canada, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance and The International Journal for Qualitative Studies in Education. She is currently a Research Associate at University of Toronto Schools’ Research Institute.

Kimber Sider

Kimber Sider is a multimodal storyteller and eco-scholar working predominantly in performance and documentary film. Sider is the Artistic Director of the Guelph Film Festival, holds a PhD in theatre from the University of Guelph, and is a Lecturer in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.

Lisa Woynarski

Lisa Woynarski (she/her) was born on traditional Anishinabewaki territory in Ontario, Canada. She is Associate Professor in Theatre at the University of Reading, UK. Her work connects performance and ecology, from an intersectional lens, foregrounding decolonisation. She is the author of Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change (Palgrave, 2020) and the forthcoming Performing Urban Ecologies (Cambridge).