Panel: Theatre Space and Labour

Moderator / Animé par: Andy Houston
Location: Silver Room, Atlas Hotel

• Charlotte Peters, “‘All Doing the Same Nothing’: Ghost Lights and Covid-19”

This paper is offered as an ethnographic exploration of ghost lights’ symbolic uses during Covid-19 in English-speaking Canada. Research methodology is guided by the field of folkloristics, and aims to highlight the seemingly mundane through viewpoints shared by those who work in the industry. The analysis is influenced by literature from the field of Folklore and Performance Studies, and finds its theoretical bases in performance theory, through exploration of the manifest bodily expressions of this occupational group’s tradition. With an emphasis on spotlighting the voices of career technicians, this paper analyzes the liminality of live performance venues mid-pandemic shutdown, and how ghost lights became iconographic of theatre workers’ grief and creative response to hardship. Ultimately, these expressions problematize how we define who is an insider and who is an outsider to cultural practices, and how important spaces and objects, such as the theatre and the ghost light, can not only contribute to a definition of community, but become a part of it.

• Jacob Pittini, “Thinking Outside the Box: Shifting Audience Spaces at SummerWorks Performance Festival 2024”

In PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation, Jenn Stephenson and Mariah Horner explain how in some participatory performances “we experience the effects of seeing the world afresh through our active engagement in it” (11). This paper will consider what can happen when performances move participants inside outside, into the world. To do so I will reflect upon three performances I attended in August as part of the 2024 SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto: AWAKE & STILL DROWNING, Home Buddies and Sur-Veil Salon.  I read these performances as liminal in how they combine the space of the performance with the space of the real world and move audiences outside conventional theatre settings.  In Gareth White’s Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, he writes how in immersive theatre “an audience inhabits and moves through the space of a performance rather than sitting outside it” (170). This paper will explore this act of inhabiting and moving outside, being immersed in the frame of a performance while also immersed outside of it simultaneously. Employing dramaturgies of roving and virtual reality, these performances transport audiences elsewhere, whether physically by moving outside, or digitally through VR-headsets. Such movement renders participants drifters, “actively engaged with the environment in a disciplined way” (Bradby and Lavery 47). This paper will consider the embodied properties of these experiences and how they creatively position audiences in communities broader than those attending the performances and in relation to social concerns such as climate change, housing crisis and living in a surveillance state.

• Alessandro Simari, “Dinner and a Show: Theatre, Food, and Capital Circulation”

Extant studies at the intersection of food and theatre have primarily been interested in the signifying power of food on stage (Chansky and White) or the theatricalization of food especially as part of haute-cuisine (Hunt). More generally, we are most used to causally describing the relationship between food and theatre as one enjoined primarily through practices of consumption: theatre and food are commodities that are made to be consumed, and the performing arts are replete with metaphors that relate the amorously connoted consumption practices of both. However, the relationship between commercial theatre and agribusiness goes beyond the not insignificant social act of consuming food before, during, or in the time in-between performances. Using Medival Times and the string of restaurants formerly operated by Mirvish Productions alongside their King Street theatres in Toronto as catalysts, this paper discusses how the ideal average productive operations of commercial theatre are parasitically or symbiotically connected to the restaurant industry and that shape both performance aesthetics and labour practices, all oriented towards the goal of commercial performance: that is, hastening the circuit of theatrical capital.

Biographies

Charlotte Peters

Charlotte Peters (she/her) is an early-career stage manager and scenic painter from Southern Ontario. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, focusing on theatre technicians as an occupational folk group. Her thesis research is all about ghost lights.

Jacob Pittini

Jacob Pittini (he/him) is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. He is invested in research methodologies for ethically co-theorizing with audiences of contemporary Canadian theatre and exploring how participatory performance can allow audiences to collectively and creatively engage with social issues.

Alessandro Simari

Dr Alessandro Simari is a Toronto-based scholar and theatre director/playwright whose research focuses on the cultural politics and political economy of theatre through the lens of theatre history and contemporary (Shakespeare) performance. Current projects include: a monograph on the history and economics of theatre ushers and a collectively-written monograph about the aesthetics and political economy of Commercial Performance. He is part of the steering committee of the Performance & Political Economy Research Collective (www.pperesearch.com).