Moderator: Kim McLeod
Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Spectating With/Against: How Do Postshow Talkbacks Ask Which Bodies That Matter?
Postshow talkbacks invite the audience to pose questions, make remarks, and provide feedback to the cast, director, and dramaturg. In the two talkbacks I witnessed in 2022, for both plays written by Korean Canadian playwright Ins Choi, I examine how postshow talkbacks become
“offshore performances” by entangling the crucial roles of both the audience and the performers in establishing what they make of the play. In this paper, I ask: “How do the postshow talkbacks of “Kim’s Convenience” and “Bad Parent” expose and regulate bodies at (dis)play?” Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “enactments of power,” Karen Shimakawa’s “abjection of Asian
performers,” and Jacques Ranciere’s “emancipated spectator,” I investigate how presenced bodies are enmeshed in the political realm of curating discussions in talkbacks. Moreso, I offer an analysis of the renegotiation of power relations juxtaposing the [w]hite dominated audience and racially marginalized artists. I argue that talkbacks do not mark the play’s ending but rather an extension of it. It furthers the crevice created through spectatorship insofar as the questions posed by the audience members alter the narrative of the actors and characters at (dis)play. Ultimately, this paper exposes the dramatic stakes involved in asking questions and providing feedback as ways of examining how spectatorship operates with and against the gaze of [w]hiteness.
Allen B. Baylosis, Ph.D. Student, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia
Bio: Allen Baylosis is an emerging dramaturg and performance scholar. He is interested in the intersections of transnational theater, minoritarian performances, migration, and the Filipinx diaspora. He is a Ph.D. student in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. He is currently an Institute of Asian Research fellow, primarily affiliated with the Centre for Southeast Asian Research and the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. He holds an MA in Performance Studies (New York University) and a BA in Speech Communication (UP Diliman).
Feeling Together: Boundaries, Exchanges, and Shared Spaces Amongst Audiences
How does co-presence generate or negate feelings of comfort and safety amongst audience members in live performances? While the pleasure of sharing effects is a common idea – it is popularly understood that we go to the theatre to feel together (Hurley, 2010) – notions of risk and discomfort are arguably front of mind in a pandemic-effected world. By putting the scholarly works of Erin Hurley and Sara Ahmed in conversation with data collected from a tiered audience research method, we ask how audiences co-create effects, specifically examining effective safety and comfort. Audience members’ firsthand reporting of their experiences attending theatre at the Kick and Push Festival in Kingston, ON, suggests that safety is not just a practical, material experience (e.g. physical safety, masking, vaccine policies) but also an effective, discursive project; one that has the power to circulate amongst a multiplicity of bodies and generate emotional, felt responses.
This paper argues that audience members generate feelings of safety through self-imposed responsibility that either reaffirms or reduces boundaries with those around them. Safety is as personal as it is collective, insofar as one’s perceived safety also depends upon the actions and behaviours of others. For this reason, audience members may be inclined to not only awareness over their own behaviour but the behaviour of those around them as well, feeling pleasure in shared response and frustration with difference. Applying Sedgman’s (2018) understanding of behaviour-policing, this paper investigates how audience self-governance can be a method of affective co-creation that highlights modes of inclusion and exclusion in audiences.
Kelsey Jacobson, Assistant Professor & Bethany Schaufler-Biback, Incoming Master’s Student
Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor at the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. She is also a co-founding director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and is currently working on an SSHRC-funded project about audience co-presence.
Bethany Schaufler-Biback is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Drama at Queen’s University. She is working on an undergraduate research project on audience safety and care and is working with Dr. Jacobson as the senior undergraduate research assistant on her
SSHRC-funded project.
Learn/Roll/Play: Using Game Structure to Scaffold Participation
The uncharted waters of participatory performance continue expanding as creators find new depths to explore each year. This audience-driven theatrical style boasts the opportunity for meaningful collaboration driven by the agency of participants; however, it also creates the potential for a pressure-cooker environment which hinges its success on audiences who may be wary of assuming responsibility for the outcome of a performance. Spectators turned players may contend with the risk of embarrassment because the expectations being placed upon them are sometimes murky. How might we support an audience paralyzed by uncertainty so they can comfortably engage in this exciting realm of theatre? Such was the impetus for my project Learn/Roll/Play, which sought to bring people together in a gamified performance playground built on a clear set of rules to scaffold participation.
Drawing upon tabletop role-playing games and educational theory, I designed a performance-game hybrid to facilitate the improvisation of a collective storytelling experience. Using an iterative development process, I solicited participants to help test the game over the course of a few months, allowing me to build practice-based strategies for supporting players. For example, I saw great success in providing a“need card” to give each individual motivation for their character. Players reported that this functioned as a helpful guidepost for their role-play. For CATR, I propose drafting a paper presentation highlighting these performance tactics to map a working framework for inviting confident audience participation and creation.
Derek Manderson, York University
Bio: Derek is a Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. His research focuses on participatory theatre, using a game-design framework to analyze collaborative play rules. He is passionate about education and currently holds a teaching assistant position in the AMPD faculty.