Curator: Jose Miguel Esteban
Location: Room 0030 – Pavilion de la Faculté de l’aménagement – 2940 ch. de la Côte Ste-Catherine – Université de Montréal
(Building 36 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Responding to this year’s CATR theme of Staging Justice, this curated panel provides us an opportunity to challenge the Western frames and colonial registers that reverberate through the spaces of our embodied performances. Reflecting on what we noticed as the call for proposal’s lack of definition and critical engagement with how we encounter the “stage,” our papers reflect on our scholarly, artistic, and activist work toward justice in order to discuss, rethink, and possibly even refuse what we come to know of as the stage.
In particular, this panel brings together emerging scholars whose practices center the body and questions of embodiment. For each of us, the body is where we engage with performance, dance, theatre, and pedagogy. Our bodies are sites of knowledge—the place where knowledge is stored and transmitted. Our body is a stage on which, and through which, we perform knowledge.
Reflecting on the colonial residue of how we come to know the stage through its manifestation of colonial erasures, ableist hierarchies, and racial capitalist logics, we ask: Who belongs to the stage? Who continues to be erased and be absented from it? What is it like to perceive the body, the classroom, the land as a stage? Lastly, we reflect on our responsibility as artist-scholars, activists, educators, and performers to take up the stage that is a conference setting.
Dreaming Elsewhere: Troubling Dance Studies through Abolitionist Questions
What would it mean to abolish the stage? As an artist schooled in Western forms of postmodern dance, I feel troubled by such a suggestion. The stage has become a place of comfort, a site for an embodied expression that I don’t usually have access to in my daily life. And still, I feel a sense of excitement and desire when I imagine what this question invites me to pursue. Afterall, the stage of Western concert dance has also been a place of violence for my racialized body, a site where my queer and mad gestures are policed and rehabilitated in service of neoliberal systems and colonial structures…I am excited by the possibility of other ways to enact performances of/through dance; I desire different spaces to feel into these expressions of my radical embodiments.
Inspired through critical interventions offered by a disability studies questioning of access (Titchkosky, 2011) and Black radical traditions of fugitive study (Moten & Harney, 2013), this paper encounters the trouble that the question of abolition poses within my own artistic and scholarly encounters with the stage. Prompted by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s suggestion of abolition as “a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently” (Petijean, 2018), I rechoreograph this trouble into a creative space for dreaming different ways of be(com)ing that resist racial capitalist expectations of artistic production and colonial logics of academic scholarship. I reflect on what other worlds are manifested when we reinterpret the ways that embodied difference troubles the stage.
Jose Miguel Esteban, University of Toronto
Jose Miguel (Miggy) Esteban is a dance/movement artist, educator, and PhD candidate at the Department of Social Justice Education, University of Toronto. Influenced by disability arts and culture, Black radical traditions, Indigenous storytelling, and queer performance, Miggy’s research engages in embodied practices of improvisation to re-interpret curriculum as choreographic sites.
Staging the Body: The Body is Who I Am
This paper addresses the notion of dance and the body as sites of knowing and learning. I build on embodied forms of inquiry (Bergonzoni 2022; Snowber 2016, 2018) as a way to reflect on what we consider as a “place of research and praxis” (CATR Call For Paper, 2023). The physical appearance of this body, that is who we are, is always charged with political, social, economic, and other labels; the choices we make, and desires we have to fit in certain ‘stages’.
When I introduce myself by saying “I am Carolina”, I am using a shortcut to say that I am the body that is in front of you: the physicality, presence, and breath. However, the definition of what the body is and who I am can become interchangeable. The body is a place of research and praxis that can ‘stage’ justice and – more often than not – injustice. As an example, let’s consider the clothes we choose to wear depending on the context in which we are: business casual, formal clothes, pink tights and a unitard, etc.
In the paper, I will continue by addressing how I have changed my body to better ‘fit’ certain ‘stages’ and identities. I lost weight to be ‘the dancer’, I wore glasses to look like ‘the smart kid’.
Carolina Bergonzoni, Simon Fraser University
Dr. Carolina Bergonzoni (she/her) is a dance artist, a somatic educator and practitioner, and an emergent scholar. Carolina holds a Ph.D. in Arts Education, a BA and MA in Philosophy, and an MA in Comparative Media Arts. She is the 2023 recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award for the Arts & Inquiry in Education at AERA. Her practices span between dancing, writing, and teaching from the body.
Justice Will Dance Outside the Proscenium Stage
As a Black Canadian woman of Afro-Guyanese descent, Murray is a dance artivist and emerging scholar navigating the performing arts, education sectors, academia, and world using a revolutionary lens: to decolonize the stereotype that African diasporic dance is beyond performance. Murray is a dance artist engaged in work on anti-racism in dance and centering justice outside the proscenium stage. The longevity of Murray’s career is not dependant on being legitimized on proscenium stages. Justice is an intentional act that Murray carries in every space she occupies in Canada and abroad, through artistry, cultural practice and community arts, leadership, and scholarship.
Through this paper, a personal pedagogy is unpacked with examples of Miss Coco Murray’s work on being a living archive who lives an intersectional cycle of critically analysing, embodying Afrodiasporic dance, applied performative praxis to the reflection, theorizing and producing of scholarship. Justice is centred by Murray in the places, lands in Canada and abroad and discussed through specific ethnocultural practices in the street, museum, art gallery, classroom, and community.
Collette Murray, York University
Collette Murray is a multi-award-winning artist-scholar, dance educator, cultural arts programmer, mentor, and arts consultant. Murray pursues a Ph.D. in Dance Studies at York University focusing on dance education and anti-racist dance pedagogies. She is the Artistic Director of Coco Collective offering culturally responsive projects that connect participants to African and Caribbean arts. Miss Coco Murray is her mobile dance education business (www.misscocomurray.com). Murray’s background includes Caribbean folklore and West African dance styles while amplifying Black arts and dance, in a Canadian context.
Sensorial Snapshots: Standing in the Paradoxical Spaces between Erasure and Existence
As a participant in the curated panel, Troubling the Stage: Bodies, Space, and Justice, through the performance of what I conceptualize as sensorial snapshots (Glover, 2023), I invite audience-participants to listen to and from their own embodied resonances as I proclaim my body as stage.
I will perform three sensorial snapshots that flesh out moments of my lived experience as a Punjabi-Sikh Canadian woman of color whose ancestors were among the first wave of Punjabi-Sikh migrants to arrive in Canada in the early 1900s. In considering the etymology of the word stage, “to stand…something to stand on” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/stage) and its linkages to my multigenerational narrative, I ask:
How has my identity as a Punjabi-Sikh Canadian woman been staged for me and implicated in colonial dynamics from the moment I took my first breath? For those who are marginalized, what are some challenges of finding one’s stance amid the societal entrenchment of colonial legacies?
As the first in my lineage to pursue doctoral studies, how may I navigate pangs of grief when confronted with the visceral void of my family’s multigenerational un-staging, the ongoing colonial erasure of their voices, stories, and cultural knowledges in education and research?
How may sensorial snapshots offer (re)humanizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies for those who have been marginalized in society to stand in dignified ways that transgress the clasp of colonialism? And how may sensorial snapshots open up possibilities to honour our ancestors, those whose shoulders we stand on?
Sandeep Kaur Glover, Simon Fraser University
Sandeep Kaur Glover (she/her/hers) is a seasoned educator, multidisciplinary artist, and PhD candidate in the Arts Education program at Simon Fraser University. Her interdisciplinary research integrates arts-based approaches, decolonizing perspectives, and Sikh-Punjabi onto-epistemologies in investigating culturally responsive, embodied pathways that foster wholeness, healing, and social justice activism.