Moderator: Robin Whittaker
Location: Zoom Room A
Sponsored by the University of Manitoba, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media
Sponsored by the University of the Fraser Valley, School of Creative Arts
(Un)settler Ecologies: interrogating contemporary settler site-based praxis through immersive improvisatory performance strategies
As a recent migrant from Wales to Turtle Island, I have found it increasingly pertinent to focus on processes that call into question the Eurocentric assumptions inherent in my performance studies training and walking-arts practices. Accompanying this critical drive is a desire to understand better, articulate, and position my understandings of placement, home, and belonging as routes toward understanding the complexities surrounding settler and Indigenous relationships with the land in North America.
This paper details an ongoing practice-as-research investigation into embodied settler methodologies, namely the attempted hybridization of the Situationist Deirve (Debord 1958) with the participatory theatre exercises of contemplative walking developed by Nicolás Núñez (2019) and the Taller de Investigación Teatral (Theatre Research Workshop, Mexico). Both perambulatory-based practices affect in participants a deeper understanding of what Lavery and Whitehead refer to as an ‘ecology of place’; the experience of encountering the places one inhabits with a renewed attention and sense of intimacy; and a palpable sense of the responsibilities and reciprocities that exist between the animate, inanimate, human and non-human agents, past and present worldviews that surround one and constitute the world (Lavery, Whitehead, p. 155).
This paper details an ongoing practice-as-research investigation into embodied settler methodologies, namely the attempted hybridization of the Situationist Deirve (Debord 1958) with the participatory theatre exercises of contemplative walking developed by Nicolás Núñez (2019) and the Taller de Investigación Teatral (Theatre Research Workshop, Mexico). Both perambulatory-based practices affect in participants a deeper understanding of what Lavery and Whitehead refer to as an ‘ecology of place’; the experience of encountering the places one inhabits with a renewed attention and sense of intimacy; and a palpable sense of the responsibilities and reciprocities that exist between the animate, inanimate, human and non-human agents, past and present worldviews that surround one and constitute the world (Lavery, Whitehead, p. 155).
Steve Donnelly, Ph.D. Student, Critical Studies in Improvisation, University of Guelph. ON.
Bio: Steve Donnelly’s work combines his interests in improvised play, performance studies, popular culture, belief, and the commons. Steve spent most of his life in the Welsh city of Abertawe, which translates to English as “the mouth of the Tawe River.” Now Living in Guelph, he looks forward to the rain and has come to accept the forms water takes there. Steve is a Ph.D. Student in Critical Studies in Improvisation.
A Home for Our Migrations: Remapping the Routes of Hemispheric Collaborations
A Home for Our Migrations symposium, which took place in Toronto last fall, was a collaboration between the RUTAS Festival and Nuit Blanche as well as two partnership projects: Hemispheric Encounters (focused on hemispheric performance as a collaborative mode of knowledge production) and The Space Between US (focused on connections and collaborations within Indigenous, Circumpolar, and Pacific places). For both RUTAS and Nuit Blanche, the return of in-person gatherings offered an opportunity to explore the possibilities of collaboration between international and local festivals whose communities share aesthetic and political aims across cultural, geographic, and linguistic borders. While RUTAS invited audiences to ‘remap our routes’ through performances from the Americas, Nuit Blanche urged viewers to consider ‘the space between us’ as a potential site for sharing knowledge through connections to place that forge new relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.
In this paper, I explore two theoretical considerations prompted by this collaboration with the aim of rethinking co-production as a strategy for gathering and collaborating within and beyond national borders. The first is a reorientation of hemispheric approaches to performance brought about by these projects. Hemispheric thought has played a key role in shifting performance research and practice away from Euro-American paradigms that have long dominated the field of theatre and performance, but its limits were brought to light in dialogues that moved beyond a North-South/South-North orientation. The second is what scholars have referred to as the ‘immigration-Indigenous parallax gap,’ a disconnection in public and academic discourses between immigration politics and Indigenous sovereignty, which became particularly evident during dialogues focused on mobility and migration. I examine efforts to close (or bridge) this gap to think about future opportunities for knowledge exchange among people with shared political struggles but who are situated differently in relation to the colonial project in Canada, in the Americas, and beyond.
Jimena Ortuzar, York University
Bio: Jimena Ortuzar is a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design. Her research explores labour and migration through the lens of performance and gender studies. Her writing can be found in international journals and edited collections on art and activism, contemporary theatre, and Latino/a/x performance.
Shakespeare in Guantánamo
Last February, US President Joe Biden pledged to close the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by the end of his term. The prison, which still holds 35 terror suspects, has stubbornly remained open for decades, a living (or perhaps undead) archive of the now abandoned US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The prison has managed to outlive the wars it was built to serve the party because of its existence as a nebulous legal entity existing at or beyond the border of various legal jurisdictions. Neither part of the contiguous United States nor administered by Cuba, the small offshore American exclave is sometimes described as a “legal black hole” (Barelli, 2002) for the way that it flouts domestic US law as well as international treaties to protect prisoners of war.
Although Guantánamo Bay is shrouded in official secrecy, it is also a highly theatrical site. In 2006, when Navy medical staff force-fed hunger strikers in prison, they opted not to use their real names. Strangely, the medics’ pseudonyms were taken from Shakespeare’s plays. Strikers were strapped into restraint chairs by Nurses Valeria (Coriolanus) and Lucentio (The Taming of the Shrew) and supervised by Senior Medical Officer Leonato (Much Ado about Nothing) as their stomachs were pumped full of meal-replacement milkshakes. In this paper, I analyze this incident as a metonym for how imperial power fastens itself to cultural knowledge.
Matt Jones, Toronto Metropolitan University
Matt Jones (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is working on a book about performance in the Deathscapes of the War on Terror.
