Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre
Moderator: Anthony Vickery
Kelsey Blair, “Rehearsing Empire in Canada: Ordinary Spectacles and Performance Venues”
From October to December of 2024, Centre Bell in Montreal hosted 19 Montreal Canadiens’ games, 15 performances of Ovo by Cirque de Soleil, and 3 stadium concerts by Justin Timberlake, Sabrina Carpenter, and Bruce Springsteen. Each of these performances attracted thousands of participants. This is indicative of a twenty-first century performance trend, wherein large-scale venues in major Canadian cities frequently host multiple genres of spectacle-scale performances throughout the year. Indeed, the regular occurrence of spectacle-scale performances is generally considered an ordinary part of urban life in Canada. What gets rehearsed—individually, collectively—in these regularly scheduled spectacles? What performance legacies are passed down in these venues? How, and to what ends, do multi-purpose large-scale performance venues host civic performances that connect with national and international cultural imaginaries?
This paper has a two-fold aim. First, drawing together formalist theories of spectacle (Kershaw, MacAloon, Schechner) with Guy Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle, I will introduce the concept of what I call ordinary spectacles—regularly scheduled, secular spectacles such as touring Broadway musical theatre shows, Cirque-de Soleil-style nouveau cirque shows, professional sporting contests, and arena-housed music concerts. I will briefly overview the emergence of this category of performance in the United States and Canada in the twentieth century. Second, through a combination of archival research and close reading, I will focus on one aspect of the history of ordinary spectacles post-1945 in Canada: the updating and building of spectacle-scale multi-purpose performance spaces such as large-scale theatres, arenas, and stadiums. In so doing, I aim to surface how these venues provide space to host ordinary spectacles and also function as hubs that connect civic performance to international cultural imaginaries, thereby becoming contemporary sites where logics of global capitalism and imperialism are repeatedly rehearsed and performed.
Works Cited
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Radical American Black & Red, 1994.
Kershaw, Baz. “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism.” Theatre Journal, vol. 55, no. 4, 2003, pp. 591–611.
MacAloon, John J., et al., editors. Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed, Routledge, 2006.
Martha Currie, “Enfranchised Audiences in Modern Theatre Programming”
The economics and expectations of modern theatre programming are dependent on a guaranteed, enfranchised audience willing to spend their money on a safe option with promised enjoyment subsequently drawing audiences to familiar narratives they’ve already experienced in film format. The proposed presentation will explore the influx of screen-to-stage adaptations in contemporary theatre programming with a focus on the productions that market to an audience member’s nostalgia of their beloved films from their youth. The purposeful development of narrative screenplays as musical theatre productions to appeal to established fandom practices of musical theatre fans will be examined through theatre and performance, fandom and film theory. The critical acclaim and profit of screen-to-stage adaptations are confirmed through Matthew Hodge’s study, “21st-Century Broadway Musicals and the ‘Best Musical’ Tony Award: Trends and Impact” (2020), with reports that 40% of all “Best Musical” winners of the 21st- century were adapted from films, which makes screen-to-stage adaptations the primary source material for “all 20 musicals awarded the ‘Best Musical’ Tony Award between the years 2000 and 2019” (Hodge, 2020, p. 7). However, how do enfranchised audiences drive the success of these recycled narratives? How dependent are theatre programmers on the guaranteed profit from fan audiences? The proposed presentation will examine the economic stability offered through the programming of screen-to-stage adaptations and the subsequent impact such predictable programming has on modern audiences.
Work Cited: Hodge, M. (2020). 21st-century Broadway musicals and the ‘best musical’ Tony award: Trends and impact. Arts, 9(2), 58. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9020058
Kristin Leahey, “A History of WP Theater – Excerpt from Chapter 2: WP Lab”
In 2028, New York’s Women’s Project Theater (WP) will celebrate its 50th anniversary, but to-date there is no extensive study recording its complicated history. As the oldest and largest U.S. theatre for women, there is no detailed analysis of its achievements in spearheading women’s art, as well as its failures. From its Upper West Side home, the organization still caters to wealth and elitism, under a traditional American neoliberal capitalist nonprofit free market model. Its fraught legacy has fallen in between the cracks of ‘malestream’ theatre history and feminist accounts of women-centred theatre. The WP has been relegated to the margins of feminist-theatre history due to the company’s neoliberal-feminist approach to challenging male-dominated theatre, as opposed to the radical, counter-cultural, materialist-feminist theatre making that was the focus of the first wave of U.S. feminist-theatre scholarship, as pioneered by Sue-Ellen Case, Elaine Aston, and Jill Dolan. Hence, a task of this paper, which is part of a monograph, is to undertake a feminist recovery and reassessment of the organization’s former years to the present. Where the company resides politically, artistically, and organizationally constitutes an important living history, one that is relevant to today’s ongoing struggles for equality, diversity, and inclusivity. The essay focuses on the WP Lab, which intends to serve emerging directors, producers, and writers. Since its 1992 founding, the Lab has had over 350 members. With an intersectional-feminist lens, I examine the lab’s pedagogy and pursuits for mentorship, lab projects, and members’ industry trajectories over time.
Biographies:
Kelsey Blair is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research interests include sport and performance studies, theatre audience studies, and affect in popular performance. She is also a co-director with the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and the author of Sport and Performance in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge).
Martha Currie (she/her) has a particular interest in nostalgia capitalism, fandom studies and screen-to-stage adaptations within reboot cinema. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Culture Studies with a specialization in Film and Media at Queen’s University as an Ontario Graduate funded scholar.
Kristin Leahey is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. She served as the Director of New Works at Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Literary Manager at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and the Associate Artistic Director of WP Theater. Her publications include articles in Theatre Topics, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and New England Theatre Journal. She is a recipient of a Fulbright.