Moderator: Christine Balt
Location: Room B4250 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant (Building 27 on the UdM map) – Université de Montréal
In-Person Session
Sponsored by the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies – University of Toronto
Rationale
This curated panel asks: What new understandings about the collective and personal politics of young people in the climate crisis can arise when we create art with them? In grappling with this provocation, the following panel engages four papers (12 minutes each) examining the creative and pedagogical work of the Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice research project: which we call ‘Audacious Citizenship’ for short. The primary objective of the project (taking place in Toronto, Canada; Lucknow, India; Bogota, Colombia; Coventry, England; Thessaloniki, Greece and Kaohsiung, Taiwan) is to explore how performance can become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice. What can the aesthetic and pedagogical affordances of a drama-based, or arts-led, methodology and pedagogy tell us about the burgeoning justice-oriented commitments of young people across the globe? Each paper in this panel will look to how performance can invite an array of explorations regarding ‘justice’ and ‘place’ for youth, leveraging ‘site-specific performance’ (in both physical and virtual locations) as a creative vehicle through which to attend to young peoples’ relationships to their local ecologies. Exploring the climate emergency in the lives of youth in ways that attune to, at once, the intimate and the grand, the historic and the everyday, the personal and the public, each paper sees site-specific performance as a methodology for formulating frameworks for justice in complex, emplaced, nuanced and culturally-specific ways.
Paper 1: Towards a Theory of the Drama Classroom for Enlivening Climate Justice ‘In the Minor’
Kathleen Gallagher and Christine Balt
This paper proposes a theory of the drama classroom as a space within which to enliven malleable and nuanced performances of climate justice. Rather than seeing ‘justice-oriented performance’ as something unidirectional and righteous, we argue that it is through the uniquely embodied and affective modes of learning and creating in the drama classroom that more implicit and ‘minor’ modes of climate justice performance can arise. First, we will look at how literature in the fields of applied theatre and drama education identifies criticality, imagination, and relationality as ‘principles’ for ‘turning towards the political’ in the drama classroom (Gallagher et al. 2012). Then, we consider more ambiguous forms of justice-oriented performance in those fields, leaning on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1985) theory of ‘the minor’ and Erin Manning’s (2016) notion of the ‘minor gesture’ as conceptual frames. Following this, an empirical illustration of ambiguity in justice-oriented performance in the Audacious Citizenship research project will take place, where we focus on ‘site-specific performance’ in physical and virtual spaces as ‘minor’ forms of climate justice performance. It is through a consideration of this empirical work that we attune to Leanne Simpson’s (2014) notion of emplaced theory (activated through land-based pedagogies) and Sara Ahmed’s (2014) concept of a ‘politics of wonder’ (Ahmed, 2014) as productive orientations in a ‘minor’ climate justice performance aesthetics, which moves beyond the binary of righteousness/apathy and instead assumes an indeterminacy that, the paper asserts, is a more agile and sustainable mode of engagement in an age of heightened socio-ecological injustice.
Paper 2: Attending to Justice and Place through a Virtual, Sound-Based Metho-Pedagogy
Celeste Kirsh
What can we learn about climate justice when virtual performance is deployed methodologically? This paper explores the research team’s methodological approach in a series of virtual ‘Global Drama Club’ workshops (taking place in Spring 2022), which included young people from all six international research sites. Driving this virtual engagement was a curiosity about how virtual space can itself function as a ‘site’ for climate justice-oriented, site-specific performance. In our metho-pedagogy, we invited the participants to share sound recordings from their local environments and grapple with the following provocation: how are our environments performing with and for us? Responding to the call from scholars in environmental communication (see Boykoff, 2019; Gabrys &Yusoff, 2012; Milkoreit, 2016) for more creative pathways toward environmental justice (Scheider-Mayerson et al, 2023), stories from our research data are shared in this paper that highlight how deep listening, generative cross-cultural dialogue, and reflective invitations transformed what could be possible (methodologically, pedagogically, aesthetically) in virtual site-specific performance. With this workshop, virtual, sensory ethnographic methods were deployed to not only stretch the functionality of the ‘sites’ of the digital platforms as they were originally intended but more importantly, to act as a kind of methodological ‘side-door’ (Gallagher, 2014) to better understand the relationship between people and place in the midst of the worsening injustices of the climate crisis.
Paper 3: Reckoning with Historic and Ongoing Climate Injustices through Mobile, Site-Specific Performance in Toronto
Nancy Cardwell
This paper looks closely at the site-specific theatre-making work created by youth in a neighbourhood park in Toronto in Year 4 (Fall 2022) of the Audacious Citizenship project. Land, History, Presence: Performing a Land Acknowledgement for Now through Mobile Site-Specific Performance was a site-specific performance unit carried out with a Toronto high school drama class. Created by Dr. Gallagher and her team, along with Indigenous community activist Dr. Amanda Buffalo, this unit explored settler-colonial histories and the environmental crisis through a pedagogy of ‘moving through place’ (Bradby and Lavery, 2007). What, the researchers asked, could mobile site-specific performance – as “a doing, a practice, a performance, a way of witnessing” – afford in coming to reckon with the climate emergency as an event of ongoing social and historic injustices on Turtle Island? (p. 12). The focus of the pedagogy was to facilitate open discussions and ‘formulate justice frameworks’ that could acknowledge, reckon with, and bear the weight of historic and continued land-based violence perpetrated against people and place. Uncovering buried stories (through walking and writing as performance) became the theme of the unit and it resulted in a film created from students’ physical explorations of the park as well as their reflective writings over the course of two weeks. This paper traces that creative journey and looks closely at performance and performativity in site-specific theatre-making and its unique position at the intersection of the environment and the imagination.
Paper 4: More-Than-Human Entanglements in Site-Specific Performance in Lucknow
Munia Debleena Tripathi
This paper examines the Audacious Citizenship team’s 5-day in-person field-work with a group of twelve Grade 11 students from Prerna Girls’ and Prerna Boys’ Schools in Lucknow, India. It explores ways of approaching the issue of ecological justice through pedagogies of site-specific performance in a context where immediate socio-political issues often supersede environmental issues in the public imagination. Inspired by posthumanist and new materialist approaches to environmental education and storytelling (Rousell, et. al., 2017, Iovino, 2015 and others), and departing significantly from ‘individual sacrifice’-based and ‘solution-oriented’ narratives of the ecological crisis that the school curricula in India generally promote, the Audacious Citizenship team curated exercises that encouraged deep listening to non-human entities and awareness of their agency in the site of Lucknow’s Janeshwar Mishra Park. Through the act of crafting imagined narratives and finding ways to embody non-human characters, the researcher-facilitators and the participants came to newly appreciate how the human and non-human, the social and the environmental are inextricably linked. This paper will examine the creative work produced by the youth participants and their reflections on the workshop exercises to understand how a turn towards the ontologies of intra-species co-existence has the potential to positively restructure environmental education in the unique context of India.