Location: Movement Room
Moderator: Kelsey Blair
Kym Bird, “Poly-Glamorous: The Queer Life and Playwrighting of Amy Redpath Roddick as it is expressed in her 1921 drama The Key That Unlocks”
Drawing on the philosophy of Lynne Huffer, and through her Luce Irigaray and Michele Foucault, this paper subjects the life and theatre of playwright Amy Redpath Roddick to a feminist genealogical practice. It reads her biography and her 1921 play, The Key That Unlocks, as a challenge to the rationality of Western morality and to Ursprung, or first principles, as neutral points of departure, by exposing their foundations in sex-biased and sex-based origin narratives. It argues that the fabulously wealthy Roddick had the means and self-possession to live a queer life, at once residing with her lover for 45 years while marrying a man who joined the couple in their Montreal mansion for 23 years.
The Key That Unlocks uses the heterosexual literary stereotype of the sick and inspired ‘artist in the attic’ to illuminate a feminine eros that is queer in its sensibility. It is a play about poetry, the poet themselves and their contribution to art, ideas, and ethics. A fantasy in its structure, it transports us to an alternative world that reconceives gender and moral regulation as it is expressed in the story of Adam and Eve, and invites us to critique normative codifications of middle-class men as patriarchal subjects. It stages a new narrative of creation that rewrites this conventional Christian myth of origins and imagines a multifaceted mother who is selfless, protective, and sympathetic, but who is also a lover and saviour, in this way envisioning genealogy as maternal at the level of the symbolic.
Clayton Jevne, “Taming the Elusive Influencer in Scripted Performance”
This talk describes a University of Victoria Scholarship of Learning and Teaching Research Grant Project that tested the effect of a novel actor training approach integrating the two conditions considered by skill development experts necessary to skill acquisition: #1: criteria against which the skill performance success can be measured; and #2: the recognition and mitigation – in the training process – of the performance circumstances. This project involved two higher level acting students and two lay-audience groups. Using criteria derived from scientific studies into the patterns that occur in verbal/gestural relationship expression in “real-life” (condition #1), the participants’ gestural expression was deliberately adjusted to match that which would occur in “real-life” situations at levels of comparable spontaneity to those inferred by the spoken memorized text (condition #2: mitigating the effects of the circumstance of speaking learned lines). The goal was to determine if such an adjustment would enhance an audience’s experience of an “acted” scene. Two performances of a single scene were videoed: one without reference to these criteria, and a subsequent performance with criteria-directed adjustments. Audience response to these performance videos showed a marked increase in their level of engagement with the performance using the deliberately applied verbal/gestural patterns. This talk will also explain the apparent reasoning behind the absence of these two conditions from current training methods, and how this absence impacts teaching acting as a skill, and the wider implication to the development of acting as a transformative art form.
Kayla McIntyre, “Exploring TTRPGs and LARP as a Rehearsal Method in The Hands of Fate”
Live-action role-play, otherwise known as LARP, is generally defined as a roleplaying game (RPG) that occurs in a live setting. Games incorporate costumes, props, and specific roles most often playing in a fantasy genre. To Jason Cox, “larps are embodied, experiential, ephemeral, and notoriously difficult to document and portray in a way that allows others to have an authentic sense of that experience” (24). As larps are heavily dependent on the roleplaying group, Cox’s work looks at engaging with larp through player-created artefacts. These artefacts allow role-players an entry point into the game- very similar to how an actor might approach their character when staging a theatrical production. Earlier this year, I premiered a new work called The Hands of Fate, as an exploration of both improvisational and scripted media in Vancouver, BC. Narratively, this play focused on a rogue Dungeons and Dragons session turned into a murder mystery. In the rehearsal space, The Hands of Fate focused on a collaborative, interactive approach, starting our time together by playing a TTRPG which quickly developed into a thread of larping. Using the phantasmic traces of larp, that momentum bled into our show and shaped the elements of both interactivity and improvisation. Expanding on how larping made a play come to fruition as a valuable rehearsal process, I explore larp through a performance studies lens and consider its benefits to everyday rehearsal and thought. Using The Hands of Fate as an example, how does larp combine what actors know about characterization and how do we use those discoveries to fuel audience interaction and life beyond play?
Biographies:
Kym Bird is an award-winning author, teacher, and full Professor of Drama/theatre at York University’s Department of Humanities. She is also the Director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies. Bird has made her career recuperating the dramatic works and lives of early Canadian women dramatists.
Clayton Jevne has a BFA (Acting), an MFA (Directing), and a PhD (Actor-Training); teaches in UVic Theatre Department (2010-); founded Theatre Inconnu (1987) and continues as Artistic Director (directing, acting, designing); founded Victoria Shakespeare Festival, tours various solo shows (1000+ performances) nationally and internationally; and is passionate about enhancing actor-training methods.
Kayla McIntyre (they/she) is a PhD student at UBC in the department of Theatre and Film. Kayla’s work explores queerness and (dis)ability in game-based performances. Kayla recently completed their MA at UBC which examined how members of the queer community have used table-top-role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons to explore gender and sexual identity. Kayla is additionally an active theatre practitioner where their creative work focuses on directing and playwriting.