Moderator / Animé par: Fraser Stevens
Location: Golden Room, Atlas Hotel

• Mélanie Binette, “Trading Interiorities: A One-on-One Audiowalk on Bereavement”

Errances is a one-on-one audiowalk that I created and performed in 2019 at the site where my father died of a heart attack in 2002: the underground entrance of a venue in Montreal’s Place des Arts. As I led each solo spectator hand in hand through every corner of the complex’s outdoor and indoor public spaces, we followed an invisible line of liminal space between life and death, between past and present, walking my father’s very last steps. The recorded track, that both the spectator and I were listening to as we were holding hands, exposed my grieving process intertwined with critical accounts of the site’s many transformations, digging through layers of history as if we were walking outside of a particular time. The disappearance of an entire block in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, the political upheavals following an inauguration led by Montreal’s economical elite: my father’s ghost was doubled by the former mayor’s ghost, the public sphere encompassing my personal narrative. The headphones were paired with binaural microphones, which enabled mixing the live sound environment with the recording, creating an eerie effect of disembodiment, as if I was communicating through telepathy. The performance ended in a quiet space, to encourage intimate conversations. 
Many spectators shared their own bereavement stories before leaving. This intimate encounter with each of them also felt like crossing a boundary we rarely transgress in our relationship with audiences.  I hereby suggest that interiorities were traded to become part of an ad-hoc community of bereaved wanderers.

• Andy Houston, Brooke Barnes, and Joanna Cleary, “In the Liminal Space of Fantasy, Denial, and Retail at the Mall: The Making of Mall of Maladaptive Dreaming”

In early 2020, members of WOOMcollaborative sought inspiration for a performance project at a mall. This mall exists in the middle of Waterloo, Ontario. Similar to most malls in mid-sized cities in Canada, this mall was—and still is—dying. This death cycle seemed intriguing as a creative resource; when the COVID pandemic hit, it seemed all encompassing. For two years, we labored to realize and animate aspects of this retail landscape that addressed the very real feel of precarity we all faced. This labor assumed a form of dramaturgy that materialized the liminal space between the mall’s built environment and the natural landscape upon which it exists, between collaborators and their lived experience of retail, and ultimately between our performance practices (writing, acting, video and soundscape creation) and the practices of retail.

At the core of our practice on this project is a concern for how the liminal space of misery and exploitation may exist within the euphoric fantasy and retail reality of the mall. Most retail in the 21st century, especially with almost all of it online, exists because people have the capacity to fantasize. Fantasy designates our ‘impossible’ relationship to the person, thing, or lifestyle that we most desire. What fantasy stages is not a scene in which desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes—that stages—desire as such. *Mall of Maladaptive Dreaming* attempted to realize this highly theatrical liminal space of retail in this form of yearning.

• Liam Monaghan, “The Architecture of Adaptation: Dramatizing the Lives of Arthur Erickson and Francisco Kripacz”

Arthur Erickson (1924-2009) is perhaps Canada’s most celebrated architect. While his buildings made him famous, the story of his equally extraordinary private life—especially his partnership in work and love with the interior designer Francisco Kripacz (1042-2000)—is far less well known. David Stouck is author of Arthur Erickson: An Architect’s Life (2012), but much remains to be investigated in Kripacz’s uniquely enigmatic biography. To help revitalize Canada’s queer and architectural histories for both scholarly and public audiences, I am writing the first-ever dramatic adaptation of Erickson and Kriapcz’s story. 

At CATR, I will outline the project and describe my research-creation process, which includes (1) secondary research and primary archival research; (2) adapting my findings using documentary/verbatim methods; and (3) experimenting with devising and scenographic techniques to dramaturgically recreate Erickson’s architectural aesthetic, especially in a planned April 2025 workshop with director Mia van Leeuwen. I may also share a short excerpt of the script as well as future directions for the piece. 

CATR’s conference theme, On Interiority, resonates with my project. The play explores the liminality of architectural space, especially as practiced by Erickson, who sought to integrate site and building, and especially as translated into mise-en-scène. It historicizes and interrogates the phenomenon of the queer open secret within a mid-century Canadian milieu. And the play activates the theoretical paradoxes of dramatic biographical adaptation, which seeks, through necessarily artificial forms and exogenous performer/author perspectives, to get inside the phenomenological truths of past experiences.

Biographies

Mélanie Binette

Mélanie Binette is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and researcher. She is the co-founder and director of Milieu de Nulle Part, an in situ and in socius art collective. She is particularly interested in the way performance transforms sites by creating virtual, alternative and mythical spaces: blurring the boundaries of the so-called real world.

Andy Houston

Andy Houston (he/him/they) is an associate professor in the Theatre and Performance program at the University of Waterloo. He is a white, settler artist-researcher focused on site-specific performance to critically engage with social and political issues.  He also interrogates notions of ‘place’ by experimenting with the interface between digital and live events. Andy has published broadly in his field. For more information see: andyhouston.ca and WOOMcollaborative.com.

Liam Monaghan

Liam Monaghan is an award-winning writer, artist-researcher, and educator. He specializes in playwriting and performer-created theatre, academic and creative writing pedagogies, and cultural theory. He is currently Writing Centre Programs Specialist at MacEwan University Library and also teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Communication. 

Brooke Barnes

Brooke Barnes (she/her) is an emerging artist-researcher of site-specific and intermedia creations with a background in dramaturgy, directing, performing/devising, and digital media creation and management. In 2019, Brooke completed her B.A. in Theatre and Performance at the University of Waterloo. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brooke went through the Social Media graduate certificate program at Seneca College to explore ways to incorporate social media marketing for theatre companies during a time where social distancing was top of mind and developed an interest in digital dramaturgy. In 2020, Brooke spearheaded the digital materialization and co-creation of WOOMcollaborative. Brooke continues to pursue her vocation in the arts through WOOM and is a collaborator and freelance digital manager with theatre companies within Kitchener-Waterloo. For more information visit Brooke’s website.

Joanna Cleary

Joanna Cleary (she/her) is an emerging theatre practitioner. As a recent graduate of the University of Waterloo, she is a co-founder of the Kitchener-Waterloo-based WOOMcollaborative. Through WOOM, she has written Mall of Maladaptive Dreaming, a site-responsive theatre production exploring the parallels between decline of the retail industry and treatment of women and the environment. She sees dramaturgy as essential to devised theatre creation, believing that everyone involved–from playwrights to designers–must approach theatre from a dramaturgical critical thinking and problem-solving perspective to meaningfully create work. As a poet, she has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Hunger, Funicular, Canthius, and Mascara Literary Review, among others.