Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Convenors: Leah Decter, Erin Sutherland, Carla Taunton
Panelists: Vie Jones, Colleen MacIsaac, Erasure Art Collective Shauntay Grant and Tyshan Wright)
This roundtable situates the conference theme of shores as liminal spaces that can simultaneously encompass the geographical, the conceptual, the theoretical, the methodological, and the relational. As a space between, the liminal can be a site for critically transformative dreaming, the kind of dreaming scholar and cultural worker Leigh Patel suggests is necessary for acting outside the bounds of settler colonialism and white supremacy to envision and “build on wholly different terms.” 1 In considering how performance can advance these vital shifts, this roundtable prioritizes practices that critically encounter, disturb, unsettle, resist and/or reject settler colonial and white supremacist ways of thinking and being in the context of the lands referred to as Canada. The roundtable participants will share knowledge using various approaches, including short papers and performances and poetic, audio, and gestural activations. Working from their distinct cultural perspectives and experiences, they each engage with performance through careful activation of the body in conjunction with the specificities of place and/or material culture, all of which are situated as historicized and politicized sites for mobilizing knowledge. The goal of this roundtable is to experientially and intellectually explore the capacity for performance as a “complex, rhizomic network of… practices,” 2 to destabilize entrenched patterns and mobilize interventions into the past, present, and future through dreaming that generates radical remembering and refusals to forget. Before the conference, each participant will circulate a document proving the background for their roundtable presentation.
Dr. Leah Decter, Canada Research Chair /Assistant Professor, Media Arts, NSCAD University
Bio: Leah Decter is a white settler scholar, inter-media/performance artist, and educator based between Treaty 1 territory and K’jipuktuk/Halifax, where she holds a Canada Research Chair at NSCAD University. Decter’s artwork has been presented internationally, and her recent publications include papers in Qualitative Inquiry and Performance Matters and an issue of PUBLIC Journal co-edited with Dr. Carla Taunton.