Location: Design Room
Moderator: Robert Motum
Laurel Green and Derek Manderson, “The Assembly: A Game of Civic Decision-Making & Future Thinking for Young Audiences”
Would you rather raise the minimum wage, or build a new hospital? Allocate funding for a rooftop garden, or build new housing developments? If charged with making decisions for their city’s future, what would an audience of young people decide? The Assembly is a participatory performance designed by Toronto-based artists that uses collaborative structures from Legacy board games to invite young people into the shared act of civic decision-making. Donning colourful sashes, flashing voting paddles, and debating the best response to Toronto’s rapid resource fluctuations, the young audience becomes policymakers. Played over the course of eight fictional years, the game draws from real-world scenarios and integrates principles of doughnut economics to make balance, rather than limitless growth, the win condition. The young Assembly is tasked with co-designing a sustainable future wherein present-day needs must be weighed against the needs of future generations. Blending fact and fiction to scaffold participation inside a ‘magic circle’ of play, the performance creates space for young audience-players to grow a capacity for long-term Seventh Generation and ‘cathedral’ thinking. Moving into and out of the role of player and spectator, young participants interrogate, rehearse, and transform systems, relationships, and power structures. As scholars whose research interweaves games and participatory performance, our paper will analyze the dramaturgical implications of The Assembly’s structure to reveal how playing together inside this gameful performance prepares (and doesn’t prepare) young people to reshape the urban cities they are set to inherit. What vision of the future are we playing for?
Jacob Pittini, “Inherited Involvement: Current Trends of Participatory Theatre and Historical Precedents in Canada”
In Collective Encounters, Canadian theatre historian Alan Filewod observed how documentary theatre’s widespread popularity “has proven its premise that Canadian audiences welcome theatre that speaks in their idiom about the communal issues of their lives” (188). This paper will investigate how the endurance of forms of performance such as documentary and verbatim theatre and the current popularity of participatory theatre in Canada affirm this reality.
Conceiving of this enduring impulse to present the communal issues of audiences’ lives to them in ways which actively involve them as an inheritance of Canadian theatre, I will briefly examine the changing contexts fuelling historical and current trends of performance. Contextualizing theatre practices can help determine “virtues and values of theatre and performance that are, if not unique, at least especially important today” (Freeman and Gallagher 3). Contextualizing both past and present practices and comparing them can help demonstrate which virtues and values have been inherited, and how they have endured and evolved over time.
By focusing particularly on the current popularity of participatory performance, this paper will question whether and how audience involvement in the moment of performance may inherit prior national tendencies yet also be a way of rehearsing new futures. If theatre in Canada complicating boundaries between subjects, creators and receivers precedes the twenty-first-century phenomenon of participatory theatre, how do current performances in which participants “have agency to interact in a material manner, creating moments of rupture in the narrative telling or world” (Lewis 18) differ or align with their predecessors.
Filewod, Alan D. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada. University of Toronto Press, 1987.
Freeman, Barry, and Kathleen Gallagher. “Introduction: Taking a Step Back.” In Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions, edited by Barry Freeman and Kathleen Gallagher, University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 3-18.
Lewis, William W. Experiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization. Routledge, 2025.
Jenn Stephenson, “Episodic time in pandemic theatre at home: The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries”
In April 2020, in the very early days of the pandemic lockdown, Toronto-based theatre company Outside the March presented an at-home theatre experience called The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries. When you signed up online and bought your ticket, in addition to sharing your phone number, you were asked to submit to the inspectors at the Ministry your own mundane mystery, something simple and domestic. Mine was the mystery of the door that wouldn’t stay closed. The show then unfolds over the course of six episodes of ten minutes each. On the given week, each day at noon, Monday to Saturday, my phone rang. Each episode featured a different single character for a one-on-one conversation, focused on helping to solve my mystery.
Thinking about the participatory experience of time, what are the dramaturgical properties of serialization. Serialization has been a feature of fictional narratives in other media, notably written stories in newspapers and magazines in the nineteenth century and radio and television in the twentieth century. By contrast, there is no tradition of serial theatre. (Perhaps Angels in America part 1 and part 2 or Shakespeare’s historical tetralogies – but examples are rare.) Three questions: 1) Why doesn’t theatre (typically) serialize when other media do? 2) What does serialization make possible for the artist-creators? 3) What does serialization make possible for the audience, i.e., What are the meaning-making or experiential effects of a serial story? Bonus question: What does this all mean specifically for our experience of The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries?
Biographies:
Derek Manderson is a PhD Candidate in Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at York University. His research imbricates participatory performance and game studies to unpack the dramaturgical structures of play in audience-driven theatrical experiences. His writing has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, and Theater.
Laurel Green is a nationally regarded artist and doctoral scholar whose research-creation work bridges participatory performance and games for social transformation. She is a PhD Student in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at York University, supported by Connected Minds, an interdisciplinary research unit exploring the enmeshment of new technologies in communities.
Jacob Pittini (he/him) is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, developing methodologies for ethically co-theorizing with Canadian theatre audiences. Jacob is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and a Junior Fellow at Massey College.
Jenn Stephenson is a Professor at Queen’s University in the DAN School of Drama and Music. She is the author of three books on drama and performance in Canada. Her most recent book, co-authored with Mariah Horner is PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation (Playwrights Canada Press 2024).