Location: Roger Bishop Theatre
Moderator: Carmen Alatorre
Yasmine Kandil and Jena Mailloux, “Reimagined Places of ‘Home’ through Newcomer Immigrant Queer Journeys”
Places, locations and experiences from the past are embodied and brought to life in places of the present, creating a reimagined hopeful future for newcomer queer immigrants and refugees. Celebratory theatre workshops and a devised applied theatre performance become the vehicles from which to create a bridge between the two worlds, bringing healing and a sense of belonging and increased self-worth for this participant group. The research team asks, what transformations take place when place of the past reconciles with place of the present, and how does that shift perspectives of racialized queer newcomers by settlers and non-queer immigrants?
Colby Mackenzie, “Rejecting Secular Inheritance: Belief in Kim Senklip Harvey’s Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story”
Secularization, the theory that modernity necessitates a decline in religious belief, has failed, with scholars such as Peter L. Berger and Mark C. Taylor arguing that the theory failed to account for the continued vitality of religious expressions in the modern world. However, the field of performance scholarship has maintained an attitude of secularization–reifying the staunch separation of the rational academy and the irrational church–despite its collapse. Scholars such as Dana Tanner-Kennedy and Sharon Aronson-Lehavi have pushed back against the academy’s tendency to cringe away from discussions of belief but these works do not examine Canada’s unique religious contexts. My paper addresses the issue of secular attitudes in performance studies with special attention to how Indigenous drama resists the colonial inheritance of secularism. Specifically in my essay I will look at Kim Senklip Harvey’s Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story in order to show how Harvey stages Indigenous resurgence through spirituality in response to the colonial imposition of “Christian secularism” (Pellegrini 2009). I argue that secularism is an inheritance we should not accept as it upholds Western narratives of colonialism that discount the embedded and embodied nature of Indigenous faith. When we set aside traditional secular views that diminish the affective potential of belief, we uncover the rich world of compassion and connection that exists within theatre that stages belief.
Biographies:
Yasmine Kandil is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria. Her research is in the area of applied theatre with special focus on celebratory theatre. In this presentation, she is collaborating with Carmen Aguirre and Carmen Alatorre to present papers on the topic of Race and Identity Politics in the Theatre profession and academic spaces.
Colby Mackenzie (they/them) is a white gender queer MA student in Drama at the University of Alberta in Treaty 6/Métis Region No. 4. Their research focuses on contemporary immigrant and Indigenous drama in Canada responding to secularization and the continued vitality of belief.
Jena Mailloux is a queer researcher who recently completed an Interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Education and Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria. Prior to her graduate studies, she lived and worked in Northern Canada. In 2018, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a specialization in Applied Theatre.