Location: Imperial Room, Atlas Hotel

 • Session co-organizers: Jenn Boulay (Concordia University) and Signy Lynch (University of Toronto Mississauga) 

Participants: Sedina, Fiati, Andy Houston, Jimena Ortuzar, Bethany Schaufler-Biback, Angela Sun

Sponsored by / Commandité par: The CATR Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Committee and the CATR Committee on Conduct

Institutions, including theatre and performance ones, have historically been and continue to be spaces of exclusion where those ‘inside” and normative structures shape who is admitted into the interior or expelled. 

Our roundtable session seeks to explore the role of listening in challenging these structures of power and oppression within theatre and performance institutions, including universities and theatre companies. We invite roundtable participants to lend Sara Ahmed’s “feminist ear” to consider what it means to listen, to attend to, or engage in other parallel practices towards more just and equitable spaces for theatremakers, arts workers, students, and faculty. 

The session’s focus on listening also foregrounds allyship, which recent conversations, like those invoked in Canadian Theatre Review vol. 190 “Intersections of Allyship, Action and Artistic Access,” have centred the importance of to justice work. Allies are those who are often called to do work “from the inside,” and our discussion will consider how allies can apply a listening practice towards their privileged positionalities in order to enact change onwards the aim of justice (including disability justice). By drawing on disability justice and listening, we strive to question what it means for allies to be a part of creating sustainable spaces, using collective access for those who experience barriers within DTPS institutions

This session builds from the co-organizers’ work over the past three years of CATR conferences (Seminars: “Performing Complaint”, “Burning it All Down”; Roundtable: “Reflections on staging justice”), and brings together those involved in justice work within theatre and performance institutions like CATR (including members of the anti-racism and conduct committees), with the the goal of engaging the membership in a conversation about the organization’s ongoing justice initiatives and parallel initiatives outside of it.

• Works Cited
  “10 Principles of Disability Justice” Sins Invalid, sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice

Ahmed, Sara. Complaint!. Duke UP, 2021. 

Biography

Jenn Boulay

Jenn is an emerging interdisciplinary performance artist/creator, playwright, performer, singer-songwriter, musician, theatre reviewer, and scholar. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and a GrDip from Concordia University in Communication Studies. She is currently pursuing her MA at Concordia University in Media Studies.

Signy Lynch

Signy is an Assistant Professor at UofT Mississauga, and the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. She is a scholar, educator, and critical dramaturg, whose research investigates topics including theatre criticism, audience studies, and contemporary interdisciplinary, intercultural, and Black theatre in Canada. She is co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research.