Location: Movement Room
Moderator: Julia Henderson
Chantal Bilodeau, “Daring to Be Solarpunks”
British philosopher Mark Fisher wrote, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In the theatre, this translates into a failure to envision a thriving post-capitalist, post-colonial, post-climate future; instead, offerings on our stages rehearse “capitalist realism.” Indeed, few plays tackle climate issues, and those that do are trapped in the imaginaries of our current systems and the false belief that we have no other options. As a result, they tend to depict dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds. However, in disciplines such as literature, architecture, design, and visual arts, solarpunk – an optimistic, forward-thinking movement that imagines what sustainable societies could look like – is gaining momentum. How might plays adopt the same aesthetic? How can we dare to be solarpunks and rehearse inclusive, decarbonized, decolonized, collaboration-driven, and flourishing futures? Looking at two plays written for Climate Change Theatre Action, a global festival of short plays presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts – Jessica Huang’s Lifeday (2022) and my own Homo Sapiens (2017) – I identify narrative strategies, themes, and motifs that embody the values of the solarpunk movement. I show that there is a world of unexplored possibilities between utopias and dystopias, and argue that as artists, it is our responsibility to break down the self-imposed limits on our imaginary landscape.
Becky Low, “‘I don’t even remember making the conscious choice’ – what narratives of luck and passivity reveal about Vancouver professional theatre”
As part of my doctoral research examining Vancouver professional theatre through a social-relational economic lens, I have spent six months conducting semi-structured interviews with Vancouver theatre artists and arts workers. These interviews have focused on questions of how artists and arts workers evaluate compensation for their work, and by what metrics they determine success.
This paper presents preliminary findings from those interviews. Using the social relational theories of Becker, Ingham, Simmel, and Zelizer, I argue that first-person narratives of careers in theatre illuminate how negotiations of power and value operate within the sector, opening up the possibility for understanding the complex calculations involved in creating and maintaining theatre careers, theatre companies, and the theatre sector more broadly.
This presentation will explore and trouble two notable themes emerging in participant responses to-date: the relative lack of autonomy or desire expressed in theatre artists and arts workers’ narrations of their careers, and the near universal incidence of participants describing themselves as “lucky” when discussing positions of privilege, career advancement, or their access to forms of support like potential access to emergency housing. The template for my process is based on that used by Brook et al for their study of cultural workers in the UK, and builds upon work by Alacovska on relational labour in the arts.
This presentation provides a snapshot of the current state of the professional theatre sector. It is my hope that unveiling this information can serve as a building block towards informed and imaginative sectoral shifts.
Sara Schroeter, “Arresting Hierarchies: Applied Theatre’s Inherited Gifts, Curses, and the Quest for Ways Forward”
Applied Theatre has a rich history that is generally situated between two fields of practice and research: theatre and education. This means that researchers working in this area have also inherited debates about legitimate forms of research and academic rigour from both fields, as well as the cleavages between them. Taking seriously the call to think about Afro- and Indigenous Futurities and the limitations of anthropomorphism, on this 50th anniversary of CATR I would like to re-explore the often unnamed but ever-present hierarchies that exist in the fields that feed Applied Theatre and think about the work that these hierarchies do. Building on MacKey (2016), Busby (2023), and Gallagher’s (2020, 2022) work, I propose that, rather than being treated as second class scholars who are neither perceived as “real” theatre artists nor rigorous scholars, Applied Theatre practitioners and researchers might be viewed as visionaries. With methods that are often collaborative, process-oriented, situated in praxis, and attentive to the ethics of representation, Applied Theatre might offer the kinds of future-oriented practices necessary to meet this socio-political and ecological moment. However, this is not to suggest that Applied Theatre has arrived at perfect solutions or answers for the yet unwritten future. Through my exploration of disciplinary hierarchies, this paper will also examine the blind spots and “stuck places” (Lather, 1998) of Applied Theatre practice and research and imagine possibilities for the future.
Biographies:
Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright and the founding artistic director of the Arts & Climate Initiative, an organization that uses storytelling and live performance to foster dialogue about our global climate crisis. She is writing a series of plays about the social and environmental changes facing the eight Arctic states.
Becky Low is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre at UVic. Her research deals with how artists and arts workers experience, and make sense of, the realities of working in Canadian professional theatre. Becky has worked as a theatre producer and arts administrator. She holds a BA from University of Alberta, and an MA from SFU.
Sara Schroeter is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, where she teaches drama, literacy and anti-racist education classes in French and English. Her research in applied theatre explores youth discourses of race, multimodal literacies, francophone minority language schools, and social justice pedagogies.