Moderator: David Fancy
Location: Zoom Room A
Online Session
‘Accidentally’ Decolonizing Theatre: Notes from an Experience of Directing a Non-Verbal Play
In this paper, I aim to show how restrictions on the availability of resources can often lead to pleasant and surprising dramaturgical discoveries, and how decolonization of stage can as much be an effect of material conditions as it is of intent. I intend to argue this through documenting my three-pronged experience as a playwright, director and academic in the creation of my play ‘Execution: A tragicomedy without words’ that premiered in Mississauga in November 2023. Written as a mime piece based on the idea of colonial mimicry derived from the theories of Homi Bhabha, this play was produced by SAWITRI Theatre Group, a company serving the needs of theatre going South Asian community for the past twenty years. Since a not-for-profit organization eventually decided to produce this play, the resources vis-à-vis performance space, funding, availability of actors and lack of marketing were scant, at best. I wish to show how this so called lack of resources eventually allowed me to find ways to be more creative such that at the end of the rehearsal process, I was able to arrive at a theatrical idiom that was decolonizing in its approach and thus fit perfectly well with the themes of the play.
Abhimanyu Acharya (Western University)
Abhimanyu Acharya is a post-doctoral researcher at Western University. He is also a playwright and a director, and serves as the Assistant Artistic Director at SAWITRI Theatre and as a creative writing specialist at Kings University College.
“Hilos de la memoria”: Collective Creation, Mourning, Healing, and Learning
This is a reflection on the lessons learned from a collective-creation I facilitated with performing arts students and female victims of Colombia’s armed conflict at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá during 2022. We devised a piece titled “Hilos de la Memoria” (Threads of Memory) that combined testimonies about the unprosecuted assassinations of loved ones (a father, a husband, a son and a brother) with the students’ embodied responses to living in a culture of violence, silence, fear, mistrust and apathy, as well as invitations to the audience to become (inter)active participants/witnesses, in light of the current peace, reparations and transitional justice process. We reflected on how violence is perpetuated through patriarchal practices of obliterating the “other”, founded on misogyny and territorial occupation, while over-saturation with representations of violence has caused society to become numb to the suffering of “others”. We found that we were all affected by the collective trauma of the armed conflict and there was a need for everyone to speak and listen, not only through narrative, but also movement, song, embroidery, and drawing. Participatory performance can thus revindicate our capacity for radical care, offering a path to peace from below, following the lead of female victims/survivors/artivists. When audiences are engaged in embodying nonviolent, creative forms of coexisting, mourning and healing, a visceral sense of shared response-ability is cultivated. We learned this was best facilitated through singing, in combination with collective actions, such as weaving, while scenes of overwhelming sadness led the audience’s refusal (or inability) to participate.
Sarah Hart, Pontifica Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá)
Sarah Ashford Hart is an applied theatre practitioner/scholar from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American background. Her PhD dissertation in Performance Studies analyzes affective approaches to facilitating expression/witnessing within Latin American contexts of displacement, enclosure and violence. She is currently an adjunct instructor in the Department of Performing Arts at the Pontifical Javeriana University (Bogotá).
A Performance of “Justpeace”? Mapping the Emergence of Intimacy Direction in Canadian Theatre
This paper is an initial interrogation of how the emergence of the intimacy director into professional Canadian theatre is a disruption that may or may not foster justice within the process of theatre making. This paper maps out questions relating to how John Paul Lederach’s explanation of “Justpeace” as a liminal “process-structure… characterized by high justice and low violence” that views “systems as responsive to the permanency and interdependence of relationships and change” can inform how the intimacy director may function as an advocate for justice within the rehearsal hall (36). The configuration of creative roles (e.g., director, designer, choreographer, performer) in professional Canadian theatre is undergoing a radical re-think as the inclusion of intimacy directors have become common practice. The paper examines current language being used in the Canadian Theatre Agreement 2021-2024 Material Terms and the DOT Agreement as well as definitions of intimacy as outlined by leading advocates. In assembling the disciplines of peace and conflict studies and theatre studies, this inquiry, stemming from my on-going research, considers how the addition of this new role within the composition of professional theatre makers may function as a proxy for, or performance of, a shift within the larger society.
Works Cited
Lederach, John Paul. “Justpeace The Challenge of the 21st Century”, People Building Peace 35 Inspiring Stories from Around the World, European Centre for Conflict Prevention, in Cooperation with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Coexistence of the State of the World Forum, 1999, pp.27-36.
Heidi Malazdrewich, University of Winnipeg
Heidi Malazdrewich is a director, dramaturg, and educator. She holds an MFA in directing from the University of Calgary and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Manitoba. Heidi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg.