Location: Design Room
Moderator: Andy Houston
Kamrun Naher Liza, “Simple Theatre: A Space for Debate, Dialogue, Reflexivity, Dreaming the Impossible, and the Flight to Infinity”
This panel paper presents a study in which my mentor envisioned a “simple theatre” that “allows debate, dialogue, reflexivity, dreaming the impossible” (Ahmed 218). This project was my attempt to translate that vision into action, grounded by Freire’s principle that transformation emerges through dialogue rather than imposed ideas. Using a combined arts-based research (ABR) and reflexive ethnographic methodology, I worked with schoolgirls aged 12–18 in rural Bangladesh who were interested in sports through thirteen participatory workshops.
In Bangladesh, applied theatre has rarely engaged specific groups in participant-led creation, where participants perform their own stories with minimal facilitation. The absence of sustained, intensive workshop structures revealed a gap in both theory and practice. To address this, the project explored immersive, arts-based processes that integrated movement, local traditions, and theatre-in-education strategies to cultivate embodied learning without external funding. These approaches moved beyond top-down, donor-driven models toward practices that confronted internalized oppression, supported critical thinking, and empowered participants as “architects of [their] own liberation” (Shafeeullah 31).
This study argues that inherited social norms, cultural practices, and artistic traditions can be explored, questioned, and reimagined through applied theatre. The work shows how participants rehearsed new possibilities for movement, voice, and agency, transforming themselves from silent followers of social expectations into active agents of resistance. In performance, audiences also encounter hidden truths, turning post-show spaces into shared forums of dialogue and imagination. By working with inheritance as both a constraint and a creative resource, the project offers insights into how applied theatre can rehearse change for theatre and performance futures.
Rachel Rusonik, “Troubling an Inherited Catharsis: Spectatorship, Empty Gesture, and the Afterlife of Theatrical Devices”
This paper delves into how contemporary spectators navigate a long-standing inherited framing of theatre as a site of escapist entertainment, emotional resolution, and interpretive closure, rather than a catalyst of ethical or political activation. For instance, take the cultural phenomenon of Wicked—a production that trains audiences to equate decoding open allegory with a gratifying “aha, I get it moment”—an example of how fostering this spectatorial reflex is deeply praised and appreciated across modern performance. Yet, exploring pop-culture magazines and Reddit threads suggests that Elphaba’s green skin has stood in for myriad interpretations throughout the years; ranging from a metaphor for racial discrimination to a symbol for those who feel alone advocating on their student councils. This paper analyzes post-performance interviews conducted moments after a Toronto production, analyzing how spectators interpret aesthetic and literary devices like metaphor and symbolism in political productions. While these devices successfully invite audiences to decode meaning, they also act as what Kelsey Blair terms an ‘empty gesture’: an action that fosters a fleeting sense of political comprehension that soothes rather than inspires genuine action. By capturing audience responses precisely in the charged interval between applause and exit, this project traces when aesthetic strategies reinforce inherited expectations of closure versus when they interrupt them, encouraging a productive witnessing. Ultimately, this study argues that refusing vague aesthetic and literary devices in theatrical dramaturgy is central to cultivating more ethically generative and political theatre in so-called Canada.
Fraser Stevens, “Conspiracy and Paranoia: The Consequence of Performing Lies”
This paper explores the theatricality of deception, building on Els van Dongen’s positioning of lies as theatrical events, and examines how such undertakings reshape social realities. Drawing on sources such as Jonas Barish’s Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, Augusto Boal’s conception of theatre as a tool for social change, and Sissela Bok’s ethical analysis of lying, the study positions the lie as a theatrical act with profound societal consequences—corrosive legacies that persist beyond the initial performance. If, as Boal suggested, theatre can liberate and empower, so too can it corrupt and destabilize, engendering paranoia and conspiracy through duplicitous performance. Lies, like theatre, are defined by their artificiality and require staging, scripting, and an audience. Consequently, as Bok notes, lies often set in motion a “chain of deception” (Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life). This paper explores how such chains unfold through theatre and theatre-like practices, eroding trust and fostering systemic distrust. By mapping theatrical techniques—such as staging, scripting, and role-playing—onto the mechanics of deception, the study illuminates the ethical and political stakes of performative falsehoods in contemporary culture.
Biographies:
Kamrun Naher Liza, from Bangladesh, is an MA Applied Theatre student at the University of Victoria. Her work in applied theatre and community projects uses theatre as a tool for social change, fostering critical thinking, creative expression, education, and empowerment, particularly for women and marginalized communities.
Rachel Rusonik is an MA student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies researching dramaturgy and the politics of interpretation. Rusonik has directed multiple productions and worked as an Assistant Production Manager at Kingston’s Kick & Push Festival, inspiring her research in how audiences decode meaning.
Fraser Stevens is an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan in the School for the Arts–Drama. A performance historian, his research engages with duplicitous uses of theatre and performance or what he calls ‘bad theatre’. His practical work, produced most often through his company Almost Human, exists within the experimental world, using complex scenographic practice to explore contemporary issues.