Location: Roger Bishop Theatre
Moderator: Jenn Stephenson
Adam Paolozza and Karen Fricker, “At The Intersection of Sustainability and Storytelling: A Critical Dialogue between Adam Paolozza and Karen Fricker”
Following the Bad New Days production of Last Landscape (January 2025), which blended eco-dramaturgy with physical theatre, Artistic Director Adam Paolozza invited Intermission Magazine Editorial Director Karen Fricker to write about the work. This sparked an extended critical dialogue, which we aim to present as a shared paper. Our exchange centres on sustainability and eco-dramaturgy, examining how these concepts shaped Last Landscape and how they relate to the current state of Canadian theatre criticism.
A key theme concerns what may be carried forward from past practices into a more sustainable theatrical future. For Paolozza, this includes reconsidering Lecoq pedagogy, broader conceptions of mimesis, and eco-dramaturgy itself: an approach that embeds sustainability in all levels of a creation. From Fricker’s perspective, the dialogue addresses how to cultivate a more sustainable and equitable critical discourse, challenging traditional journalistic power dynamics by placing artist and critic in dialogue and positioning criticism as documentation and archive.
In keeping with the conference theme, we explore how to adapt what remains useful from our respective traditions while imagining a future we hope to help shape.
Last Landscape emerged from Paolozza’s inquiry into these issues, and the dialogue unpacks this process. For Fricker, it probes the shifting role of the critic in relation to the artist; for Paolozza, it asks how one engages with a critical voice less ephemeral than the rapid review produced under tight constraints. Developing our exchange through a slower, sustainability-oriented process allowed it to mature over time, resulting in a piece that contributes meaningfully to conversations on sustainability and eco-dramaturgy.
Kimberly Richards, “Hospicing the institutions of Canadian Theatre Research”
This paper is animated by two questions posed by Vanessa Machada de Oliveira in her forward to Outgrowing Modernity:
What if you knew—in your bones, not just in your mind—that major social and ecological collapse is on the horizon? That sooner or later much of what we take for granted will not longer be viable, primarily because we have crossed at least six of the nine planetary boundaries currently identified? How would you respond if you could stay with this knowledge?
What if we could act today from a collective cultural space grounded in emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational and interspecies responsibility? What would we do differently now, and what actions would our children born today look back on in thirty years and be grateful for? (xvii-xviii)
I believe these questions are worth holding as we examine the anniversaries of organizations, journals, theatre companies, and departments that constitute theatre research in Canada, and contemplate the future of theatre + research + Canada. Drawing on the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/ Research Collective, my paper asks us to face the complexity of the wicked challenges of our time. While I cannot offer neat solutions, I share the framework of “hospicing” as developed by Machada de Oliveira to help us discern how we might act with compassion and support people in the process of letting go of institutions of theatre research in Canada that may no longer serve us.
Kelly Richmond, “Inherited Anthropo(s)cenes: EcoGothic in Susanna Fournier’ Empire Trilogy”
Where will our animal bodies lie when the Age of Man arrives? This is the question asked at the end of The Philosopher’s Wife, the first play of Susanna Fournier’s theatrical trilogy The Empire. A weird and gothic fable, The Philosopher’s Wife tells the story of Tereza, a dog trainer and religious refugee from a country known only as “The South,” as the play vividly explores the animality of humanity in against a mythical backdrop of a rising Anthropocene.
Across The Empire trilogy, Fournier uses her allegorical otherworld to chart how the inheritances of Cartesianism, colonialism, and capitalism have demarcated the violence of imperialism. In this paper presentation, I consider how Fournier’s plays engage with the genre conventions of the Gothic to reveal and critique anthropocentrism. I argue that Fournier’s work inherits a tradition of ecoGothic theatricality well represented – including works by Marie Clements, Thompson Highway, Daniel MacIvor, Daniel David Moses, Wajdi Mouwad, James Reaney, Judith Thompson, Michel Tremblay, and Donna-Michelle St Bernard – and yet under discussed within the Canadian theatrical canon. Through fantastical representations of monstrosity and spectrality, ecoGothic performances make the slow and often imperceptible violence of the climate crisis sensational and spectacular. In my reading of The Empire, Fournier expands the possibilities of ecodramaturgical storytelling and staging while theatricalizing the fraying edges and blurring boundaries of relation between human and inhuman, nature and the unnatural, ultimately challenging how we understand our inheritance of (super)natural Anthropo(s)cenes.
Biographies:
Adam Paolozza is an award winning physical theatre creator, arts educator and scholar, and Artistic Director of Bad New Days.
Karen Fricker is a contributor for The Toronto Star, writing about theatre, adjunct professor at Brock University, and editorial director at Intermission Magazine.
Kimberly Skye Richards is a settler scholar and dramaturg whose writing, teaching, activism, and artistic work engages performance as a vehicle for resisting extractivism and inspiring a just transitions. She teaches in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia.
Kelly Richmond (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and the 1855 Professor of Arts and Climate Justice at Michigan State University. As an artist-scholar, Kelly creates work that explores queer adaptation while combining practice-as-research, community collaboration, and artivism. Her research examines the intersections of queer performance, environmental activism, and gothic aesthetics.