Location: Design Room
Moderator: Kelsey Jacobson
Tracy Ross, “ART/IF/ACTS: Rehearsing Embodied Futures in University Space”
From my overlapping positions as lecturer, doctoral student, artist, and parent, I trace the worn paths of a corporate university where exhaustion, disconnection, and “hope circuits” are frayed. My doctoral work asks: how might we re-map these spaces so that educators and students can inhabit them differently, through Body, Space, and Image?
In this paper, I rehearse a not-yet-complete inquiry into a framework I am calling ART/IF/ACTS. Inspired by theatre-based pedagogy, 4E cognition, and Lefebvre’s spatial triad, ART/IF/ACTS imagines pedagogy as something we live through the body rather than simply apply to it. ART names the imaginative, creative potential of learning; IF marks the liminal “as if” threshold where other futures become momentarily possible; ACTS are the embodied practices that leave traces in classrooms, corridors, and meeting rooms.
I outline a three-phase a/r/tographical research design—solo explorations, an immersive event entitled ART/IF/ACTS: A Research Experience (gallery + Long Table), and artistic translations—knowing that by the time of this conference, I will still be in the midst of the work. Rather than presenting findings, I offer this project as a methodology-in-motion, a way of rehearsing futures for university teaching that attends to nervous systems, relational space, and metaphor as tools for repair.
In sharing maps-in-progress, I invite conversation about how we might collectively reimagine institutional practices: not as fixed routes, but as evolving routes and waypoints—places to pause, notice, and reorient—through which more livable academic futures might be rehearsed.
Jenny Salisbury, “When Audiences Build Performance: Inheriting stories and expectations in Nassim Soleimanpour’s BL_NK”
War, armed conflict, and displacement reshape our world, our inheritances, and our expectations of the future. While art and performance are included in the list of casualties, human beings often turn to aesthetic experience as a survival tactic, as we nurture beauty, community, and hope in the midst of war (Howell 2024). Where violence is a means of severing connection and community, performance can often rebuild or reach out past or through the conflict. This is the premise of Nassim Soleimanpour’s play BL_NK, staged at Ottawa’s GCTC in March, 2026.
Soleimanpour is an Iranian theatre artist who uses storytelling and performance participation to combat the isolation of violent regimes and human displacement. Finding himself unable to travel, he created a stagecraft to build community across distance. In BL_NK, a new performance is created each night between audiences and actors encountering prompts and scripts from Soleimanpour for the first time. “This collaboration transforms the script into a story machine to share the life of the playwright, the performer, and an audience member who sees their future determined by the imagination of others” (GCTC). This paper examines the audience aesthetic labour within the bounds of the play, and the remembered legacies and futures described after.
Building on my previous research into aesthetic trust and community-care webs, BL_NK becomes a case study in audience care and creation in aesthetic experiences that combat war.
Works Cited
GCTC. (2025). BL_NK – GCTC: Great Canadian Theatre Company. https://www.gctc.ca/shows/blnk
Howell, G. (2024). RESTORING ARTS PRACTICES AFTER ARMED CONFLICT: The Critical Junctures that Support Collaborative Arts-Based Interventions. In Routledge Handbook of Arts and Global Development (pp. 163–175).
Atefeh Zargarzadeh, “Rehearsing Belonging, Administrative Inheritance, and the Politics of Legibility: A Case Study of Nowadays Theatre”
Canadian theatre institutions often frame equity and multicultural inclusion as settled inheritances of the field. Yet the mechanisms that allocate legitimacy—grant eligibility, juried assessment, presenter networks, and data categories—still reproduce uneven access. This paper argues that emergence can function as an administrative inheritance: a classification produced through institutional design that can re-position established immigrant artists as “emerging” after migration. I read this not as a personal career reset but as a field effect shaped by what Bourdieu names symbolic power: the authority to define value, professionalism, and “fit,” and to convert those definitions into material outcomes.
The paper centres on Nowadays Theatre through oral histories with its co-founder Mohammad Yaghoubi, an Iranian-Canadian artist whose prior cultural capital in his home country was substantial, yet whose Canadian trajectory required rebuilding networks, eligibility, and institutional recognition. I place their testimony in conversation with Canadian cultural policy documents, Canada Council strategy materials, and census- and survey-based evidence on arts labour, participation, and belonging. I will argue that these data sources are not background; they are governance tools that shape identities and equity priorities through what they measure, aggregate, and omit. I show how “arms-length” arts funding—often presented as neutral distance from the state—can still operate as a proximate form of governance when status assumptions, category design, and support programs differentially enable access.
Using Bhabha’s liminality to name the in-between position immigrant artists inhabit, I trace how “intercultural legibility” pressures (what must be explained, translated, or made saleable) intersect with administrative filters to stall/shape capital conversion. In closing, I outline practical shifts in eligibility design, applicant support, and data tracking that would better align equity commitments with the realities of immigrant theatre-making.
Biographies:
Tracy Ross is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, where she has taught for the past seven years, and a doctoral student in Educational Leadership. A multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theatre artist, her work explores embodied pedagogy, a/r/tography, and arts-based approaches to reimagining university learning.
Jenny Salisbury is a director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and a lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her work is published in Theatre Research in Canada, Qualitative Inquiry, Arts, McGill Journal of Education and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.
Atefeh (Aati) Zargarzadeh is a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies at the University of Victoria. Her doctoral research historicizes nuanced narratives of dislocation and identity negotiation within minoritized communities, focusing on less-represented Middle Eastern immigrant artists. It examines how these diverse exilic identities intersect with the politics of theatre production, cultural appropriation, and identity representations within Canada’s intercultural theatre spaces.