Location: Design Room
Moderator: Sara Schroeter
Islay Burgess, “(Trans)substantiation and Monstrosity: Consecrating Theatrical Liminality as Additional Liveness”
A longstanding investigatory fixation and debate of theatrical scholarship is that of the precise nature of “liveness” in its relation to theatre. This paper argues that if theatrical text is framed as living document, if theatrical language is “inescapably embodied,” and if there is no fixed definition of “liveness”—but that it can be understood as a simultaneous making and unmaking of theatre—then the fuzzy boundaries therein can be seen as site wherein transgender readings and play may be sought. Positioning a new live subjectivity at each stage of the communicative process—word forming in mind, moving from mind to tongue, word ambulating tongue, tongue giving life to word, word passing between lips, word heard by third parties—then in this precise transition of tongue-to-lips-to-sound it is consumed and thusly slain. This project analyzes the breath wherein the word is neither the liveness of being spoken and the liveness of being received, which gives additional life to myriad chimeric “monstrosities” which prepare for theatrical consumption and consummation. Following in the lineage of transgender scholars and artists’ appropriation of Frankenstein’s monster as embodied subjectivity wherein reclamation and self-authorship seek to circumvent and overwrite prescriptive narratives wrought by cisgender spectators, and borrowing Artaud’s resentment of the cycles of cruelty of both deity and humanity, this paper explores the potentialities of word made flesh and of claiming space within the liminality of the (trans)substantiative process wherein new understandings of “liveness,” “deathness,” and self-authored theatrical “monstrousness” may flourish.
Hannah Cheslock, “Staging Belief and Belonging: Metatheatre and Conservative Religious Identity in The Christians and Heroes of the Fourth Turning:
This presentation examines how contemporary American theatre uses metatheatrical staging practices to challenge inherited conservative religious authority by dramatizing contested religious realities. Focusing on Lucas Hnath’s The Christians (2015) and Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning (2019), I consider how both plays position the theatre as a space in which the entanglements of faith, identity, and politics are not only represented but actively interrogated. Each play embeds its audience within conservative religious environments and invites their implicit or explicit participation in live debates over belief and belonging.
In The Christians, spectators become congregants in a megachurch, listening as a pastor’s provocative sermon triggers a cascading theological and communal rupture. The play stages a searching inquiry into what sustains belief and the emotional and social costs of reexamining doctrines that structure one’s place within a religious community. Heroes of the Fourth Turning similarly foregrounds interior conflict, reuniting four young conservative Catholic friends in the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Through metatheatrical confessions spoken directly to the audience, the characters voice both their frustration with secular dismissal of their faith and their struggles to reconcile the faith they were raised with and the politics they align with.
By situating audiences within these unfolding debates, both plays cultivate reflective participation rather than detached observation. I argue that their nuanced depictions of conservative religious life, made possible through metatheatrical framing, ultimately equip audiences, regardless of their beliefs, with tools to engage more empathetically and sustainably in inter-religious dialogue.
Katharine Low, “Countering Epistemic Injustice with intergenerational Women taking spaces to connect”
Delivered between 2023-24, the Book of Knowledge was a collaborative participatory research project focused on creating space for women participants to reclaim authority about their own health experiences in London, UK. This paper considers the learnings of this co-led collaborative project, drawing attention to the need for more intergenerational spaces for womxn to share and exchange their knowledges and experiences, specifically around health concerns; it addresses the challenges of working co-collaboratively where the participants (the co-researchers) are at the heart of the development process, content and decision-making.
Bringing together an intergenerational group of women living and working in the London Bridge area, the project explored the theme: “What I’d Wish I’d Known and What I’d Like to Pass On”. Through monthly creative arts-based workshops involving conversation, food, and reflection, we explored new ways of thinking and talking about women’s health and wellbeing, exchanged knowledge, experiences and supported one another. Our collaborative research focus was on women’s health experiences, specifically how women’s health concerns tend to be dismissed and are disregarded. For us, this dismissal is a form of epistemic injustice and hermeneutic disregard of women’s health knowledges (c.f. Fricker 2007). This is particularly apposite for the community group we collaborated with, mainly older women from global majority and/or working-class backgrounds. Holding a space for women to reflect on and share their lived experiences of health, being centred as experts in a research context was fundamental to the practice-research.
Biographies:
Islay Burgess is a neuroqueer artist-scholar and PhD student in the University of British Columbia’s Theatre department. He is a playwright, actor, ardent lover of “bad” cinema, and someone deeply uncomfortable writing about himself in third person.
Hannah Cheslock is a PhD student at McGill University. Hannah’s doctoral research explores how religion is staged in contemporary drama as well as how faith and religious belief/non-belief is communicated through embodied performance. Her previous work has studied the politics of dramatic biblical adaptations in ‘secular’ performance settings.
Katharine Low is a practitioner-researcher and is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Medical Humanities at King’s College London. She has over 20 years’ experience in applied theatre practice and health, working in the fields of sexual health, gender equity and urban violence, in the UK and internationally. Her research is embedded in collaborations with arts and cultural organisations, medical practitioners and NGOs to co-facilitate participatory theatre and arts-based projects based around social concerns. Recent publications include: Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication: Apertures of Possibility (2020, Palgrave Macmillan). She currently hosts a podcast called Positively Women: Past and Present.