Location: Zoom Room B / Salle Zoom B
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5324702280?pwd=yuo077u9YJNihv59FvXxbosHNeVpvv.1
• Sungwon Cho, “Eating the Other: Food-Performance Aesthetics in Asian Canadian Theatre”
| In the years following COVID-19 lockdown, there has been an emerging pattern in Asian Canadian performance which positions food as a central object across different works; dinner and a show has made a comeback. Rather than the evocation of food through mimetic gestures, actors and audience at these experimental food-performance events consume food during and after performances. Critically, the inclusion of food in these events is not only a form of interactivity, but also a locus for diasporic identity formation. With this in mind, what does food facilitate in these works of Asian Canadian Performance? How does the food-body link of diasporic subjectivity serve those who perpetuate it? What does the sociality of these food-performance events suggest about diasporic cultural production? Engaging with these questions, I engender three works of Asian Canadian performance that have been staged in Toronto between 2023 and 2024: Silkbath Collective’s Woking Phoenix, Amanda Lin’s Between a Wok and a Hot Pot and So Tasty?! a drag anthology hosted at the University of Toronto. Taking up the work of food studies scholar Anita Manuur and her notion of intimate eating publics, this paper frames these food-performance events as radical and liminal spaces which leverage the intimacy of eating to challenge the appetites of a normative Canadian audience hungry to consume the Other. |
• Taylor Marie Graham, “Theatre, Ghosts, and the Southwestern Ontario Gothic”
| Stages all across Southwestern Ontario are haunted. As Marvin Carlson asserts, “the relationships between theatre and cultural memory are deep and complex” and theatre buildings themselves act as memory machines for those who inhabit their structures (2). Michael Hurley argues that “there is a disturbing break-boundary recognition of, and insistence upon, gothic discontinuities and contradictions” in the “spirit of place of Southwestern Ontario” (156-7). Specifically he links the area’s gothic narratives with “periods of cultural disorder or upheaval” and twentieth century postcolonial tensions embedded in the search for a so-called Canadian identity (161). This region is deeply complicit in the layers of colonial violence which are felt all throughout Turtle Island. By examining three ghosts, caught in that liminal space between life and death, from three plays performed on stages in this region, a discussion concerning the colonial injustices present on this land and its stages begins to emerge. First, the ghost child in Falen Johnson and Jessica Carmichael’s Ipperwash remaps the Blyth Festival Theatre within Indigenous space on Canada’s 150th birthday, and reveals federal, provincial, and local violences enacted on Indigenous people in this area. The Wilberforce Hotel by Sean Dixon spotlights the ghosts of the Wilberforce Settlement, Black settlers just outside London, Ontario, in the 1830s. Amal by MT Space is a collective creation about the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, and the ghosts of the migrants’ ancestors that they attempt to bring with them to their new home in Kitchener, Ontario. |
• Izuu Nwankwọ, “From Lagos with Love: Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters’ Garbing of Chekhov in Danshiki”
| This paper explores Inua Ellams’ innovative transposition of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters into a Nigerian setting by taking the place and matter of action from pre-revolutionary Russia to late 1960s Nigeria, shortly before the Nigerian-Biafran War. Ellams’ Three Sisters was staged in Toronto to high acclaim, becoming part of the meagre, albeit emergent Canada-Africa theatre connections. My examination of the play is centred around the motif of the danshiki—a long flowing gown worn by men in parts of Nigeria—used here to denotate the concurrent specificities of difference and sameness between Ellams’ and Chekhov’s texts, and how they figure in the imaginations of a multicultural North American performance setting. Consequently, this paper examines the universal themes of longing, displacement, and familial bonds that undergird the story structure for the initial Russian society, then the Nigerian environment in which the play is set, and for the multicultural Canadian audiences that saw the play staged at Soulpepper Theatre in March 2024. The methodological purview of the enquiry is hinged on performance and textual analyses coupled with perspectives drawn from performance and play adaptation theories as well as from postcolonial and decolonial studies. Through comparative interrogation of character, language, and particularities of staging, this paper posits Ellams’ Three Sisters as one that enriches Chekhov’s by eliciting newer epistemes and ways of seeing, in turn making the text more relevant and poignant for contemporary audiences regardless of whether they live in Canada or anywhere else. |
Biographies
Sungwon Cho
| Sungwon Cho (He/They) is a PhD Candidate at York University’s Department of Social Anthropology and a theatre practitioner with a focus in directing. His research interests include food cultures, diaspora and transnational studies and experimental performance mediums. |
Taylor Marie Graham
| Taylor Marie Graham is an assistant professor in the Drama Department at Bishop’s University. Taylor is an award-winning playwright with an MFA and a PhD from the School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. In 2024, Talonbooks published her play anthology Cottage Radio & Other Plays.https://taylormariegraham.com |
Izuu Nwankwọ
| Izuu Nwankwọ is an assistant professor at CDTPS, University of Toronto. He is a theatre scholar, teacher, playwright, and essayist whose research interests revolve around African and African diaspora theatre, performances, and popular culture. He has researched particularly taboo, self-censorship, and the limits of humour in African (diaspora) stand-up and online humour acts. |