Location: Design Room
Moderator: Jill Carter
Claire Borody, “Backwards into the Future: Observation of Past Performance-making Practice as a Means Forward”
The conference theme Inheritance in Transition: Rehearsing Change for Theatre and Performance Futures aptly identifies the present as a time of shift and revision within the field of theatre and performance.If there were ever a time that new models and structures for studying and making theatre might take hold, that time is now.
In his book, The Compassionate Imagination, arts critic and commentator Max Wyman states that “we are at the end of the world as we knew it” and argues that the shared experience of art is integral to the rebuilding of community and communal spirit in a splintered world. He also argues that this restructuring must be defined by a vision and purposeful action.
Nothing is created in a vacuum. In a time of renewal and reconstruction perhaps examining and re-examining that which has come before provides the most viable means for strategizing the way forward. This is important for theatre organizations of all kinds, however, the focus of this study is small independent companies.
Where to start? In 1998, Primus Theatre, an independent theatre company based in Winnipeg, shuttered its doors after a nine year existence. Yet, more than twenty-five years laster, some of the most innovative and resilient theatre companies in Canada can be identified as part of the Primus legacy. What makes these companies so resilient within a constantly fluctuating theatrical landscape that has been even more challenging since pandemic lockouts? How do foundational influences serve to stabilize an evolving performance practice?
Aamna Rashid, “The Body as Archive: Embodied Performance and the Politics of Disappearance in Sambizanga (1972)
Considering an intervention between performance studies and decolonial cinema, my paper situates how bodies enact “embodied memory” (Taylor 30) and function as a counter-archive, or “repertoire: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing” (Taylor 22) against the silence of colonial archives. Drawing on Joseph Roach’s notion of “performance genealogies” as “mnemonic reserves” (Roach 26)—patterned, residual, and imagined movements that exceed textual record—and the repertoire’s position as “traditions of embodied practice” (Taylor 20) transmitting knowledge through gestures, orality, and presence, I argue that Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror, 1972) positions the female body as enacting resistance against the erasure of the disappeared. Maldoror emphasizes silencing and erasure as part of historical production (Trouillout 26) by showing an archive of the disappeared—no paperwork, no acknowledgment, no trace. In constructing a counter-archive, she turns to Maria’s (the wife of the disappeared) body as the site through which disappearance becomes visible. Her walking, waiting, questioning, and refusal to abandon the search constitute a “repertoire” (Taylor 22) of resistance, demonstrating the gendered labor of sustaining memory against erasure. Across the film, Maria’s movements produce expressive mnemonic reserves: patterned gestures remembered by bodies, residual movements embedded in images or silences, and imagined movements constitutive of thought (Roach 26). Thus, Sambizanga reveals how women’s embodied persistence operates as a decolonial counter-archive, transforming gendered labor into the primary means through which disappearance becomes visible and politically undeniable.
Manvendra (Noor) Singh Thakur, “Listening to What Is Missing: Hijra Archives, Refusal, and Rehearsed Futures”
This paper turns to the life and self-archiving practices of Mona Ahmed, a hijra person from Old Delhi whose friendship with photographer Dayanita Singh produced Myself Mona Ahmed, to think about what it means to inherit an archive marked by erasure, silence, and colonial violence. Much of what we know of hijra performance histories emerges through criminalizing colonial documentation or through fleeting ethnographic glimpses shaped by the Global North’s gaze. What happens, then, when the archive is partial, inaccessible, or shaped by those who sought to discipline the very subjects it records?
Drawing on Tina Campt’s methodology of “listening to images,” this paper reads Mona’s self-performances including her poses, gestures, humour, refusals, as low-frequency traces of a counter-archive. Her collaboration with Singh becomes a rehearsal of another future: one where hijra presence is neither specimen nor spectacle, but an act of world-making. By listening to these images, I suggest that Mona rehearses a future she was denied, imagining a home in a cemetery, dreaming of a palace, and insisting on kinship beyond heteronormative or genealogical forms.
This paper argues that hijra archives, precisely because they are missing, fragmented, or violently inherited, open up a method for rethinking performance historiography. Instead of asking only what is preserved, I ask how refusal, survival, and everyday gestures act as embodied inheritances that rehearse otherwise futures for trans and gender-diverse lives in the Global South. In attending to Mona’s echoes, I explore how counter-archival listening becomes a form of rehearsal, one that challenges inherited structures of exclusion and imagines more capacious performance futures.
Biographies:
Claire Borody is active in the Winnipeg theatre community as a director, playwright, production dramaturge and creative consultant working exclusively on independent experimental performance and dance projects. She recently wrote and directed Kateryna and Havrylo, a full-length play rooted in Ukrainian-Canadian culture. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg.
Aamna Rashid (she/her) is a PhD student in English at UBC, researching post-colonial and gender studies in the SWANA region. Her work examines the construction of “new archives” of resistance, transnational solidarity, and anticolonial aesthetics through art and performance. She has worked as a curator and oral historian, documenting Partition and war histories in Pakistan.
Manvendra (alias Noor) Singh Thakur is a performance artist and PhD student in Comparative Literature and Intermediality at the Université de Montréal. Their research explores queer and trans notions of home, missing archives, and performance in Delhi and Montréal. They work across writing, research-creation, and community-based artistic practices.