Moderator: Sheila Christie
Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre
The Stickiness of Impact: Tracing Policy to Public
This paper explores how benevolence, transformation, and social impact narratives move through policy, practice, and public in the Canadian performing arts. Integrating affect theory from Dylan Robinson, Brian Massumi, and Sara Ahmed with textual analysis of Canadian1 granting organizations’ publications, qualitative audience data from “Being Together” (an SSHRC-funded research project on how audiences perceive co-presence), and individual interviews with Canadian theatre practitioners, this paper traces how impact moves in and throughout the various bodies engaged in performing arts.
Specifically, this paper asks how both Canadian theatre practitioners perceive the public benefit of their work and how audiences perceive the public benefit of theatre practice. This paper thus contributes to the broader discourse on inequality and the instrumentalization of the arts and argues that the “stickiness” (Ahmed) of impact, as understood by artists and audiences, sustains narratives of good citizenship, cohesiveness, and universal transformation in Canadian theatre practice.
The language with which artists are encouraged to frame their work is predicated on social benevolence and benefit, which often places audiences in the role of receiver of social good. Paradoxically, audiences also perceive their role to be one of benevolence: supporting artists whose work is inherently important to a good society. This inherent disconnect between artists and audiences in their role in the ‘impact cycle’ points to the complex and ill-defined impact discourse that pervades Canadian performing arts making: while stakeholders may agree that impact is essential to artistic practice, what impact that is, who benefits, and at whose cost it is achieved remains unclear.
Meghan Lindsay, Queen’s University
Bio: Meghan Lindsay is a Ph.D. Candidate at Queen’s University Department of Cultural Students. She is on the Faculty of Carleton University’s School of Public Policy. Meghan is an acclaimed member of the Canadian performing artistic community. She is currently working on an SSHRC-funded project about audience co-presence
Improv for the Win! Competitive and Sport-Style Forms in Canada
Improv markets itself as a fun and freeing mode of performing and entertaining. Yet, improv’s frequent claims to use “creativity” and “fun” as a means toward self-improvement are steeped in neoliberal ideologies. The improviser must become, in Ulrich Bröckling’s (2015) Foucault-inspired formulation, an “entrepreneurial self.” For many theorists, competition is the most crucial feature of neoliberal entrepreneurialism in North America (Bloom 2017, Wilson 2018, Olsen 2019). Therefore, when thinking about improv and neoliberalism together, I explore the popularity of competitive and gamified improv in Canada. Though Theatresports creator Keith Johnstone clearly states that the competitiveness of the form (and its offshoots, the Canadian Improv Games, ComedySportz, or Whose Line) is just “for show,” accounts from improvisers describe tangible competitive energies and behaviour on and off stage. Through performance analyses of the Theatresports 40 anniversary performance series and interviews with their artistic directors and performers, I ask how the competitive side of improv’s form and culture fit into Canada’s social and economic landscape.
The stakes of this question emerge when we take seriously (1) Randolphe Hohle’s argument that ‘competition’ as a feature of “market-based solutions to problems” makes it so that “race is silenced in neoliberal discourse” (2019, p. 6) and (2) that improv continues to afford more stage time and leadership roles to white men. In answering my core question, this paper goes beyond critiques of representation. It is not about who is onstage; rather, it is about how neoliberal institutional politics create the conditions of possibility for what happens on and offstage. In its uncritical embrace of neoliberal modes, competitive improv serves as a case study for understanding how market-based discourses shape performance practices.
Keira Mayo, University of Toronto
Bio: Keira is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in collaboration with the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her SSHRC-funded research, Innovating and Incorporating Improv in Canada and the US, examines the relationship between racial capitalism and improvisation. Keira is currently a research assistant for Flourish: Community-Engaged Arts. She is committed to anti-racist praxes and going slowly.
The Business of Theatre: Shoring up the Industry or Creating Change-Makers
For four years, I have been drawing on my experience as a producer and artist to teach a Business of Theatre course that prepares students for an arts career. Lacking a suitable textbook for this course, in August 2022, I received a research grant to create an open-source textbook. I have since undertaken a national survey of theatre graduates, highlighting gaps in their training. Interviews then began with theatre professionals from across Canada. In addition, contributors have been engaged to share their experiences by writing sections addressed to future theatre graduates.
A theme that has arisen in the work to date on the book and through teaching the course has been how we prepare students to enter an industry that is not necessarily equitable or healthy. This has led me to question my role, research, and teaching. Should I prepare students to enter into the current structure by teaching them the way the theatre industry currently operates? Or should I be working with students to reimagine an accessible, inclusive, and sustainable model that they can actively pursue as change-makers.
This paper will provide an update on the national survey and interviews to date, as well as my own response to the data. I will tackle two main questions. Have I been erroneously teaching students to shore up a problematic structure? How can we, as post-secondary educators, prepare students to find work successfully after graduation while supporting future waves of change?
Hope McIntyre, University of Winnipeg
Bio: Hope McIntyre is an award-winning playwright/director and Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg. She has a BFA in performance and an MFA in directing. After completing an apprenticeship in England, she worked for a commercial producer and managed an arts school in Toronto. She was Artistic Director of Sarasvàti Productions for 22 years.
Strategic Foresight and the Future of Prairie Theatre
Future Prairie Theatre (FPT) is a team of theatre researchers and practitioners taking a multi-pronged and multi-year approach to engaging theatre artists and theatre institutions about the sector’s future on the Canadian prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba). Anchored
in the values of relationality, responsibility, and accountability, and with a place-based commitment, FPT is dedicated to working with diverse stakeholders to help the sector meet current challenges and envision and collectively create a preferred future. Building upon the first stream of activities, Re-imagine & Re-build Prairie Theatre (R&R), the Future Scenarios for Prairie-based Theatre (FSPT) furthers and deepens this sector-driven work by engaging invited participants to tackle specific issues through different modalities. FSTP involved conversations and workshops with independent theatre artists, companies, funding organizations and
governing bodies to strengthen interprovincial connections and forge a regional identity. In this panel, the research team— Professor Christine Brubaker (UCalgary), Dr. Taiwo Afolabi (URegina), artist/scholar Yvette Nolan and Heather and Jessica shared some of the research findings from FSPT. The research team works within both the academy and the profession. It invests deeply in facilitating collaboration within the sector for a healthy, equitable and thriving prairie-theatre ecosystem.
Panelists/Research Team
Christine Brubaker is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary.
Taiwo Afolabi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Regina.
Yvette Nolan is a playwright, director and an MA candidate at the University of Regina. Heather Russet and Jessica Thornton are the founders of Creative Futures. Cali Sproule is an MFA candidate at the University of Calgary. Ibukun Fasunhan is PhD student at the University of Regina. Steven Condo is an MFA student at the University of Calgary.