Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre
Moderator: Jessica Riley
Selena Couture, “Guinness World Records: Dazzle Camouflage & British Imperial Inheritances”
If you search the Lək̓ʷəŋən , Xʷsepsəm and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples lands (aka Victoria, BC where CATR will be convening this year) in the Guinness World Records database, 20 entries pop up. These include: the oldest player to score his age in golf (103 yrs old in 1973); the tallest tower of Guinness World Records books (1000 books measuring 6m in 2019); the most rotating puzzle cubes solved one-handed while hula hooping (531 cubes in 2021) and the most recent female swimming speed records set in June 2025. This paper is a historiographic inquiry into Guinness World Records as a colonial artifact of soft power driven by a fascination with performativity. Now celebrating its 70th year, the book was first published in 1955 and compiled by twin brothers, journalists and right-wing libertarians Ross and Norris McWhirter. I argue this cultural phenomenon that continues to fascinate and repulse readers and viewers around the world, has its origins in the record keeping practices of the British empire which were accessed as it was collapsing post WWII. This seemingly frivolous categorizing of geographic formations and the extremity of human bodies and actions, was originally intended to settle disputes in pubs and was distributed by the Anglo-Irish Guinness beer corporation. That its popularity has never waned, and that it has rarely been the subject of critical analysis, underscores the cultural persistence of the British imperial structures and the success of what I term “dazzle camouflage” extending Laura Levin’s articulation of camouflage in Performing Ground (2014), as a spatial strategy for human identity formation (5) to include the disorientation caused by dazzle.
Tracy C. Davis, “Critical Media History: Fight, Fight, Fight”
The focus of a new book series “Critical Media Histories: Performances and Repertoires” (Bloomsbury) is to think differently about historical subjects by addressing how societies develop forms of aesthetic and media representation while centring performance within (not in opposition to) cultures’ media landscape. Considering performance among, and often integral to, other cultural products of the imagination (literary, visual, material, and corporeal), recognizing how embodied and mediated practices have always coexisted, and countering performance histories that privilege innovation and “breakthroughs” shows how performance is a vital technology for memory and knowledge that is intermittently independent, intermixed, and co-dependent with other formats. This paper draws from the inaugural book in the series to address the knowledge transfers between theatre and warfare. This implicates the training of cavalry for battles in tandem with tilts at arms and other courtly entertainments. Likewise, the history of gunpowder resonates through the histories of warfare and performance, for during the early modern period the same physical chemists who were mercenary consultants for armies’ battlefield tactics moonlighted, in peacetime, to stage spectacles for treaties, betrothals, and other milestones of empires. When later hybrid performance types of wild west shows, tattoos, battle reenactments, and film emerged as distinct media products, they continued the practice of using warfare’s historical technologies and employing pyrotechnics along with live human and equine co-performers, while leaning on the theatrical specialties of costume and prop construction, stage management, and choreography to confirm impressions of authenticity and enhance effects. Thinking of the long interdependent history of performance, martial skills, and production logistics denaturalizes separations between media while recentring performance as the intermediary.
Mariah (Mo) Horner, “Abolition Dramaturgy: The Normative or Liberatory Chorus”
Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s chorus in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, I consider the genealogies and methodologies of communities, collectives, and series’ of carcerality and of abolition. Through the lens of theatre and performance studies, I consider the chorus as both a normalizing presence (like the jury, the “law abiding public”) and as a liberatory, revolutionary body (like the abolitionist activists actively protesting police and prisons) This paper begins with a look at the history and function of theatrical chorus primarily from the perspective of Greek theatre, thinking through the ways the choruses enact control and surveillance. I consider Michel Foucault’s panopticon as another chorally performed normative voice, against his “Lives of Infamous Men” that tarries with the pleasures and dangers of a different sort of chorus. Alongside this theoretical universe, I consider two theatrical case studies. The first, Erin Shields’ play If We Were Birds, an adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis that features a chorus of women who embody victims of sexual violence in war. The second, Prison Dancer by Romeo Candido and Carmen Leilana de Jesus, based loosely on the viral YouTube dancers “the Dancing Inmates,” a group of incarcerated people who turned marching into dancing in a prison in Cebu, Philippines. In this paper, I consider the ways that the chorus can be both normalizing and liberatory as carceral theatricality and abolition dramaturgy.
Biographies:
Dr. Selena Couture (U of Alberta) is a settler scholar whose research deconstructs conceptions of settler colonial white possession while foregrounding the maintenance of Indigenous places through performance. Publications include: Against the Current and Into the Light (2020) and On this Patch of Grass (2018). She is a co-director of the Ecologies research cluster with Hemispheric Encounters.
Tracy C. Davis (Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Northwestern University) specializes in the historiography and methodologies of TaPS research, 19th-century theatre history, economics and business history of theatre, performance theory, and gender and theatre. Her most recent book, The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, won ATHE’s Edited Works Award in 2025.
Dr Mariah (Mo) Horner is theatre artist, musician, abolitionist, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. Along with Dr. Jenn Stephenson, Mo co-authored Play: Dramaturgies of Participation and co-edited Canadian Theatre Review 197: Participation. She currently co-facilitates a Philosophy and Creativity Discussion Group in Collins Bay Institution.