Location: Design Room
Moderator: Karen Fricker
Barry Freeman, “Stage Wright: a Celebration, a Critique, a Mourning”
On April 19, 2023, my friend and colleague Kevin Wright unexpectedly passed away. Kevin was the Technical Director of the Leigha Lee Browne Theatre at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where I have worked as an undergraduate student, staff member and now a professor for 30 years. His passing came at a terrible time: my mother had also passed away just three weeks earlier. She had been with me the day I met Kevin, arriving at the theatre for a tour during my first-year undergraduate orientation.
Kevin and I were collaborating on a new project: an archive of the campus’s theatre history dating back to 1966. We had a practical reason to do this: faculty were retiring and historical materials needed to be cared for. But there was a deeper reason for it, too: the pandemic had amplified our sense of dislocation, and this memory work reconnected us to place. When Kevin died, I onboarded students and collaborators and saw the project through. We launched the digital archive and physical exhibit Stage Wright, renamed in tribute, in March 2025, with a community celebration that brought out generations of students (see here).
In this paper, I reflect on my journey with this project within a broader inquiry into the values shaping post-secondary theatre education in Canada. As Critical University Studies scholars remind us, institutional memory is never neutral; it works maintain a benevolent self-image (Ferguson, Moten with Harney, Stein). Shifting perspective from the national surveys of my other research projects to the hyper-local of my daily work life, I explore the contradictions of activating intergenerational nostalgia at a time of heightened institutional critique. How can a project like this support continuity and foster a sense of place while also unsettling our institutions’ ideological investments?
Shabnam Sukhdev, “Re-embodying the Archive: Rehearsing Diasporic Inheritance in ‘Kill Mama'”
How do we rehearse what we inherit? What happens when the archive we inherit is fractured, intimate, and embodied? Approaching this paper through an autoethnographic lens, I turn to ‘Kill Mama’, a hybrid performance work co-created with my muse and mother, Kanta Sukhdev, as both subject and method. The project stages my own diasporic inheritance as a site of improvisation, vulnerability, and generative unruliness, asking how performance can function as a living archive that moves, breathes, and resists closure.
In dialogue with the conference theme, I treat diasporic memory not as a fixed repository but as a repertoire of embodied practices of gestures, ruptures, and improvisations that families repeatedly rehearse across generations. Through personal narrative, oral history, and devised performance, I explore how performing the mother becomes an act of counter-archival reclamation, one that unsettles gendered expectations and opens space for alternative modes of relationality.
‘Kill Mama’ engages critical fabulation (Hartman 2008) and improvisational openness (Goldman 2010) to reimagine the archive as something we can re-make rather than merely receive. In the studio, the autoethnographic body becomes both witness and instrument, navigating intergenerational trauma, tenderness, and the politics of care. Instead of seeking resolution, the work dwells in the instability of inheritance, using improvisation and refusal as tools for imagining new futures.
Ultimately, I argue that diasporic research-creation when rooted in autoethnography, performs a form of archival improvisation, generating new relationalities and rehearsing change as a creative, embodied practice.
Robin Whittaker, “What Remains? Drama in the Classroom “From Adaptation to Archive”
One inheritance constructed in academe in the mid-twentieth century, and arguably more pronounced today, is the disciplinary divide between the study of dramatic literature (traditionally in English departments) and theatre and performance studies (traditionally in theatre departments). Teaching English students and teaching theatre students can seem like different tasks entirely owing to differences in experience and expectations.
In STU’s English department, I teach dramatic literature and theatre studies to undergraduate students across liberal arts disciplines. My classes are comprised of students who have been in plays since middle school and students who have neither read nor seen a play. I realized I needed a strategy to introduce any student to the academic study of drama without alienating them.
I thus developed and refined the flexible assignment “From Adaptation to Archive: An In-Class Performance Creation Exercise.” Adjustable for dramatic literature, acting, and theatre archive courses, the goal of this 75-minute exercise is to familiarize students to the lifecycle of a play, from adapting a (very short) story into a (very short) play, to performing the play, to writing a (very short) review, to interviewing the cast and playwrights. We then ask, what remains of your performance to study in 200 years? And what does this mean for studying of drama and its archives? Students can collaborate on the creation, performance, and reception of a play regardless of their theatre background, ready to enter into the acts of reading plays and researching in archives with some firsthand knowledge of performance practice and reception.
In this paper, I introduce the elements of the exercise, describe how it has been adapted for 15 unique courses, and consider how students receive the exercise and refer back to it throughout their studies in relation to the principle “theory must always be practised, and practice must always be theorized” (Knowles 1998, 159).
Biographies:
Barry Freeman is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. His current research and writing is focused on developing new resources, partnerships, and visions for theatre education.
Shabnam Sukhdev is a multi-disciplinary artist, scholar and TDPS doctoral candidate at York University. Her research-creation practice uses autoethnography, devised theatre, and digital storytelling to explore identity, intergenerational memory, and diasporic healing. She creates participatory works bridging art and activism, including Kill Mama, a hybrid performance investigating agency and authorship.
Robin C. Whittaker is Associate Professor of Drama at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, NB where he teaches dramatic literature, dramatic theory, theatre archives, and research methods. His publications include Alumnae Theatre Company (UTP 2024), the verbatim play No White Picket Fence (Talonbooks 2019), and the edited anthology Hot Thespian Action! Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse (Athabasca UP 2009). He completes his second term as President of CATR in 2026.