Moderator: Conrad Alexandrowicz
Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal
(Building 19 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Sponsored by the Department of English – McGill University
Queer characters on the Maltese stage in the 1970s and 1980s
This presentation will explore how queer characters were portrayed on the Maltese stage in theatre performances from 1973, the year in which homosexuality was decriminalised till 1989. In this study, a spectrum of performative genres will be referred to, including experimental theatre and pantomime. This analysis will be embedded within queer theory, with specific references to the seminal works of authors such as Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler and Sara Ahmed. The study will also be juxtaposed against the social and political developments that happened in the country, and how this impacted on the awareness of the LGBTI community. The sources that will be used to examine and delve deeper into the study are: newspaper reviews; previews; and interviews conducted with practitioners and performers.
The study will be divided in three parts. The first part will focus on the 1970s, discussing whether the decriminalisation led to the featuring of more queer characters and how these were perceived. The second part will focus on the eighties, till the year 1987, a pivotal year in Maltese history, where a fundamental change was made in the Maltese constitution, preceded by various incidents of violence and civil unrest. This element of violence is also evident in the selection of plays with LGBTI characters that were staged in this period. The third part will present the dynamics between 1987-1989, and reflect on how the emergence of queer narratives in Maltese society impacted the depiction of queer characters on stage. Hence, a constant parallel will be presented between the political oppression that the country was experiencing; how the LGBT community endured this oppression; and the implications of these dynamics on the Maltese stage.
Tyrone Grima, Malta College for Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST)
Dr Tyrone Grima is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at MCAST in the department of the Performing Arts. His main areas of interest are the interface between theatre and spirituality, and queer performance. Tyrone has published numerous articles based on his research in a variety of academic journals.
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays: imagining a way forward through a staging of queer histories
In June 2023, as part of Toronto Pride, Gailey Road productions offered a staged reading of Tara Goldstein’s The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays, a new verbatim play that stages six stories from the last 50 years of queer liberation efforts. As Fisher argues “contemporary verbatim theatre tends to use personal narrative to authenticate a particular truth process or to validate the narrative the play seeks to establish” (2020). The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays certainly does this, as Gailey Road intentionally chose celebratory moments of community activism in order to gather and uplift contemporary queer communities. Or, as Auerswald suggested in 2019 “verbatim theatre’s prime innovation [is that] it feeds back its stories into the communities where they had come from”. This is a political action, motivated by the desires and hopes of the artist-researchers, playwrights, directors, musicians, visual artists, and performers. The performance of The Love Booth and Other Plays was a political act of queer joy, which attempted to bolster queer people and allies for the difficult political work ahead.
Auerswald, Bettina (2019). “Feeding Back: Verbatim Theatre and/as Communal Practice”. in Marco Galea, & Szabolcs Musca. (2019) Redefining Theatre Communities: International Perspectives on Community-Conscious Theatre-Making. Intellect Books.
Fisher, Amanda Stuart (2020). Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Dramaturgies. Manchester University Press.
Jenny Salisbury, Independent Scholar
Jenny Salisbury is a theatre creator, arts-based and audience researcher. Her recent post-doctoral fellowship at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, UofT was titled 60 Years of QTBIPOC Activism: A Verbatim Theatre Project. Jenny is co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and co-artistic director of Gailey Road Productions.