Moderator: Fraser Stevens
Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal
(Building 19 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Being Underground in Public as Silent Resistance and Critique: Using “invisible site-specific immersive theatre” to reclaim space and unseal buried/forgotten histories of place
In a highly financialized capitalist city like Hong Kong, “public” spaces are largely privatized by developers/owners of shopping malls and estates. The city is built commercially according to designs that keep people moving in public areas unless they stop as a customer.
In such a city, theoretically, site-specific art-based practices in public areas can function as affective-social interventions for criticizing the neoliberal space-politics, re-imagining city design towards spatial justice, and remembering voices/stories/life-style erased by the capitalist monologue of progressive myth. However, practically, the privatization of public space make such interventions impossible, because performance/art activity in those “open/public areas” requires application for permission, which “space-owners” mostly reject with excuses like “disturbing the public/retail business”.
Accordingly, the author devised site-specific immersive theatre projects in different public sites, without applying for permission but performed “invisibly”—only visible to audiences with audio-tour system telling them not only the stories of the place but also where the actors/characters were among pedestrians and which actors/characters to follow for traveling through the site.
This paper reflects upon two of them, one happened in a shopping mall, exploring capitalistic work ethics, consumerism and space-politics, while the other in a touristic site with a history of fisherman community eliminated during urban development, analyzing both the performance and methodology of the creative process that required an investigation into the concrete power operation of governance and commodification, and showing how symbolic imageries and fictional stories were used to re-open spectators’ spatial sense colonized by the capitalist monologue, somatically, affectively and conceptually.
Larry Ng, University of Toronto
Larry Ng is a registered drama therapist and an artist, trained in physical theatre and mime. He practices also different applied theatres. He has a MPhil in Philosophy, a Master in Drama Education, and is currently a MA student in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in the University of Toronto.
Performing Social Justice on the Nigerian Stage: A Post-dramatic Theatre Approach
This paper explains how I adapted Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of Post-dramatic theatre to ‘retell’ Ola Rotimi’s play, Hopes of the Living Dead. Hans-Thies Lehmann, a German philosopher and dramatist de-emphasizes the centrality of “drama” (script) in rendering the message of a performance, thus equating its significance to other media in a performance. It is, therefore, on this premise, I reassessed my vision of staging Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead not just as a performance on social justice, but also a forum for socio-political activism. Consequently, this paper intends to provide answers to the research questions which are: how did the performance resonate with social justice? How did the staging of Hopes of the Living Dead make it a performance of socio-political activism? How did the use of Hans-Thies Lehmann Post-dramatic theatre implicate the directorial vision, approach and techniques of staging the performance as a space for initiating social change?
Adenekan Lanre Qasim, Bayero University, Kano
Adenekan Lanre Qasim is a Scholar-Artist and a lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts department, Faculty of Communication, Bayero University Kano, and an associate researcher with Theatre Emissary. He is passionate about using drama/ theatre for social engineering and advocacy.
Spacemaking/Spacetaking: Staging Colonial Alchemy in Site-Specific Performance
The idea that space is socially produced, rather than naturally occurring, anchors the “spatial turn” and continues to serve as an animating logic for site-specific performances that attempt to stage justice. Western chronologies typically begin with Henri Lefebvre’s work to make this argument. However, by prioritizing processes of social production, processes of social destruction (like processes of colonization) remain under-acknowledged. In response, this paper moves away from white, Western spatial theories focused on spacemaking in order to probe the stakes of, and alternatives to, spacetaking.
To do so, I turn to The Industry’s site-specific opera about U.S. colonization, Sweet Land, staged in 2020 in the Los Angeles State Historic Park. The performance stages ongoing histories of colonial spacetaking by remapping the park site as an accumulation of specificities – of conflicting land claims, histories, bodies, and memories. The opera toggles between fever dreams and waking nightmares to untangle and interrogate the ongoing project of settler colonialism in the U.S. Through interdisciplinary engagement with theories of (dis)possession and (de)colonial haunting from critical Indigenous studies, I revise and complicate the spectral grammars commonly used within site-specific performance praxis – “host” and “ghost”. My revision highlights that, very materially, the sites that anchor site-specific performance in the U.S. are, among many other things, sites of dispossession.
This paper is drawn from a larger project that moves from a universal understanding of space as an essential element of all performance practice to a situated understanding of space as workable terrain for more just futures.
Rebecca Struch, University of California – Berkeley
Rebecca Struch centers social justice and community engagement as an artist, scholar, educator, and cultural organizer. Her current research reorients theories and practices of site-specific performance around racial geographies, making antiracist and decolonial politics central to its questions of space and place. She is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.