Moderator / Animé par: Robin C. Whittaker
Location: Golden Room, Atlas Hotel

• Leah Decter, “Remains: The Implicated Body, Collective Action and Stepping into Spaces of Monumental Absence-Presence”

This paper discusses my performance, remains (2024), part of a series commissioned by Métis curator Erin Sutherland in which artists responded to the site in Kingston, Ontario where the John A. Macdonald statue stood until 2021. The reparative removal of this statue is significant in recognition of its damaging impact tied to projects of settler colonial violence Macdonald spearheaded, and his long-unquestioned position as a Canadian icon. However, the absence of such statues does not erase the harms they perpetuated, nor those caused by the figures they represent. Further, as this site demonstrates, everyday spaces are littered with referents of settler colonial whiteness that garner much less, if any, scrutiny, while often acting as “narratives of truth”  that nonetheless inform policies, practices and beliefs. The third performance My third performance at this site, remains addresses the absence-presence of monuments after their removal and shines a light on less prominent trappings of settler colonial memory that linger, while implicating myself, as a white settler, in both. 

In this paper I consider through-lines of interior and exterior, and the affective potential of implicated embodiment and relational interaction within liminal spaces between performer, place and audience/participants. It also brings remains into conversation with works that engage with the John A. Macdonald statue in Regina and its absence, including Métis artist and writer David Garneau’s Dear John; Louis David Riel (2014) and settler artist Tomas Jonsson’s Stone in the Shoe (2021).

• Fraser Stevens, “Performing Secrets”

Secrets are, at their core, a performance of both something that is, and something that is not. They are imbued with theatricality–an individual pretends not to know something when they really do–while also being performative undertakings of repeat behaviour. Secrets might also be framed as instances of what Victor Turner refers to as ‘social drama’ and as interactions of a utopic theatre that bring groups together. Using a lends of Theatre/Archeology, I will analyze destroyed spaces of former residential schools and orphanages to argue for the case of reading secrets as theatrical undertakings. In doing so I hope to show how theatre can, once again, be found at the in the liminal plane of both being true and not true in the same instance, and thus demonstrate that theatrical readings can help us edge closer to the truth in instances where truth evades us.

Biographies

Leah Decter

Leah Decter is a Canadian-based white settler inter-media/performance artist-scholar and Assistant Professor in Media Arts/Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies at NSCAD University. She has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork in Canada and internationally, and her writing has appeared in edited collections, academic journals and contemporary art publications internationally.

Fraser Stevens

Fraser Stevens is an Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Saskatchewan. His work explores the intersection of clandestine practices and theatre and performance. Beyond his scholarship, Fraser is the co-director of Almost Human whose work has been presented in North America, Europe and the Middle East.