Location: Design Room

Moderator: Heather Fitzsimmons Frey

Murielle Bechame, “Le théâtre, une transmission du temps long”

Héritages en transition : répéter le changement pour les futurs du théâtre et de la performance
Cette proposition interroge la tension entre temporalité longue et présentisme dans les arts vivants. Si, comme le rappelait Amadou Hampâté Bâ, « une société humaine se construit sur le temps long de la transmission », nos pratiques culturelles se trouvent aujourd’hui confrontées à une injonction à l’accélération, renforcée par les régimes temporels mécaniques et informatiques. La mémoire, externalisée et fragmentée en données, tend à effacer l’origine et les processus de recomposition. Or, le théâtre et la performance, par leur nature éphémère, reposent sur une logique de transmission comparable à celle de l’oralité. Combien de spectacles disparus ont pourtant transformé le théâtre, au point qu’il ne peut se penser sans eux ? Face à un présentisme qui écrase la notion de futur, ces pratiques résistent aux modèles informationnels dominants et posent la question du choix et du désir pour la société de demain. Cette communication propose d’explorer comment le théâtre, par ses temporalités longues, réaffirme la valeur de la transmission dans un monde obsédé par l’immédiateté.

Tessa Perkins Deneault, “The great inheritance: Companies, choreographies, and artist-driven archival projects in Vancouver dance”

This paper will outline the numerous Vancouver dance organizations that have been bequeathed to the next generation over the past ten years, and the implications of this great inheritance. These organizations include EDAM Dance, Les Productions Figlio, Kinesis Dance Somatheatro, and the Vancouver International Dance Festival (Perkins Deneault, 2024). The paper will also examine the parallel phenomenon of artist-driven archival projects, such as the Karen Jamieson Legacy Project, which aim to preserve an artist’s legacy while passing on choreographies. 

As company founders reach the age of retirement, a new generation of dance artists is inheriting the organizational wealth of established non-profit organizations and associations. These administrative structures provide a solid foundation for emerging artistic directors and choreographers to present their own work, often with a new name: Serge Bennathan’s Les Productions Figlio is now Ralph Escamillan’s FakeKnot; Paras Terezakis’s Kinesis Dance Somatheatro is now Rachel Helten’s Soma Anima Arts. 

Legacy projects such as the Karen Jamieson Legacy Project and associated Coming Out of Chaos digital archive preserve an artist’s work while they are still active. Artist-driven archives are created by an artist as a part of their creative process and are a deliberate curation of their own legacy (Candelario, 2018). 

The bequeathing of dance organizations, artist-driven archival projects, and choreographic inheritances are signals of a dance scene in transition and a moment to consider lineages and legacies of dance in Vancouver. Which dance futures are being rehearsed? Which legacies are being preserved? How can we ensure lineages and legacies of artists who laid the foundation for a thriving contemporary dance scene are not forgotten? 

References 

Candelario, R. (2018). Choreographing American Dance Archives: Artist-Driven Archival Projects by Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson. Dance Research Journal, 50(1), 80–102. https://www.proquest.com/iipa/docview/2158646112/abstract/3B99436AB08A462DPQ/1 

Perkins Deneault, T. (2024). New leadership and new directions for Vancouver dance institutions. Dance Central. Fall 2024. 4-11. https://issuu.com/thedancecentre/docs/dance_central_november_2024/s/61232316 

Cyrus Sundar Singh, “Floating to The Lure of The Promised Land”

CATR2026’s 50th Anniversary also marks the 40th Anniversary of another Canadian story: the rescue and arrival of 155 Tamils Refugees off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1986. Floating to The Lure of The Promised Land [Floating…] is a 20-minute participatory-performative-experience that collectively tells the story of these brave men, women, and children who risked their lives for the promise of tomorrow.

The essay/script, with verbatim transcripts from interviews, is presented against the backdrop of the on-screen audio/visual elements along with the participation of members of the audience who read/perform from the first person verbatim transcripts. The site becomes the stage and all gathered become the players in the story—all complicit in the telling and the experience.

The multimedia presentation moves through: an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Jaffna, Sri Lanka; onboard a resurfaced refuge lifeboat, which carried Tamil Sri Lankan refugees to Canada in 1986; a 150-day vigil by the Mothers of the Disappeared in Kilinochoci, Sri Lanka; onboard trains, planes and motor-scooters—all contained within 20 minutes.

Floating… aligns with the following conference themes:
Archival, oral history, and counter-archival practices in revising performance histories
Contesting colonial conceptions of legacy, ownership, and institutional structures
Rehearsal as a political site for imagining alternative futures (Afro-futurism, Indigenous futurism, and other cultural imaginaries and cosmologies)
Reconceiving pedagogies and institutional practices for new directions in theatre and performance
Challenging inherited structures of exclusion along lines of race, gender, ability, mental health, wellness, and other intersections and/or protected characteristics

Biographies:

Murielle Bechame est doctorante en recherche-création en arts de la scène et de l’écran (Université Laval et Université Paris-Nanterre). Sa thèse explore les dispositifs temporels dans le théâtre de Maeterlinck, articulant histoire scientifique et sociale du temps et modélisation scénique avec technologies génératives. Metteuse en scène et professeure, elle interroge les imaginaires et temporalités contemporaines à travers dramaturgie, esthétique et numérique.

Tessa Perkins Deneault is a PhD student at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. She contributes to The Dance Current, Dance International, and Dance Central. She recently published “Dancing on the Mountain” in A Magical Time: The Early Days of the Arts at Simon Fraser University. 

Cyrus Sundar Singh: Gemini Award-winning filmmaker, scholar, speaker, composer, singer-songwriter, author, and published poet, this AcademiCreActivist arrived in Toronto as a fresh-off-the-boat ten-year-old from India and almost embraced the winter. dr. Cyrus’ creative research and multimedia productions have traveled the world from Senegal to Sri Lanka, and cross-Canada delivering over 60 multimedia projects.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Barry Freeman

Robert Motum, “The Divine Right of Queens: Mapping Micronational Rehearsals of Queer Sovereignty”

In the summer of 2020—amid lockdowns, bubbles, and stalled travel—the Wall Street Journal asked its readers: “If COVID-19 has put the kibosh on your summer travel plans, why not form your own country?” The front-page story introduced the world of micronations: self-declared nation-states unrecognized by any other. From a house in Montreal to a land claim in Antarctica, more than 200 micronations exist globally. Through expansive worldbuilding, these projects invent or rewrite histories and national narratives. They create flags, flowers, anthems, passports, citizenship documents, medals, currencies, and elaborate constitutions; they stage elections and design lines of succession. Many even participate in international summits such as MicroCon and the Micronational Olympics.

Founded for reasons ranging from earnest to satirical, micronations have recently seen increased participation from LGBTQ+ creators responding to anti-trans legislation in Florida, Texas, and Quebec. These projects function as activist interventions, using worldbuilding to imagine safe, Queer-centered futurities. Where official governments may deny gender identities or restrict rights, these micronations issue passports that reflect citizens’ lived experience and enshrine protections for same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights within their invented constitutions.

Examining how these Queer-led projects mobilize worldbuilding to articulate political demands and alternate futures, my paper frames micronations as inherently performative (Austin; Derrida; Butler). Without recognition or legal standing to justify their existence, micronations come into being through performance alone. Turning to Queer futurity and concepts of utopic and heterotopic space (Muñoz; Foucault; Thompkins), the paper argues that micronations simultaneously expose the violence of the nation-state while rehearsing its hopeful alternatives.

John Olusola, “Performance and Black Migration in Canadian Prairie: a case study of Afolabi’s Past Shadow, Present Shade”

This article critically examines the intersection of performance and Black migration in the Canadian Prairies through the lens of Taiwo Afolabi’s Past Shadow, Present Shade, illuminating how dramaturgy, aesthetics, and the politics of migration converge on stage. It explores how socially engaged theatre can dramatize immigrant experiences and systemic inequalities, celebrate diasporic resilience, and offer a nonviolent, dialogic space for peaceful coexistence. The work is situated in the Prairie among the African immigrants of 1903 and contemporary experiences, created by artists of African descent and other racialized communities. The analysis discusses how the play’s structure developed from community-driven skits and monologues, and engages pressing questions of identity, cultural memory, belonging, and social justice. Using a qualitative investigative approach and textual analysis, the paper examines what constitutes racism. How are immigrants responding to social inequalities? In what ways might performance offer a balanced narrative? What are the solutions to the continued tension in the multicultural society of the Prairie? The play, through its multivocal narrative strategies and intercultural aesthetic choices, illuminates the challenges and contributions of African immigrants in Canada. Ultimately, the performance reimagines Canada’s official multicultural politics and expands the nation’s performance traditions.

Biographies:

Dr. Robert Motum is a playwright, director, and researcher whose work has appeared in The Drama Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and collections from Palgrave and Routledge. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s CDTPS and teaches at the Rotman School of Management.

John Olusola is a theatre researcher and a Postdoc Fellow at the faculty of  Media, Arts, and Performance, University of RegiunaHe received a PhD in Theatre and Performing Arts from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Nigeria. His research interests include African Theatre and Performance; Cultural Studies; Creative Economy; Applied Theatre; Post- Colonial Studies, Dramatic Literature and Criticism, and In-Flight Entertainment. He was a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Socially Engaged Theatre (C-SET), University of Regina. He is a certified Emotional Intelligence Coach.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Derek Manderson

Eva Bojner Horowitz, “Expertise in creative arts in boardrooms: A new perspective on transformative learning and problem solving”

Drawing on Eva Bojner Horwitz’s interdisciplinary research and the conceptual foundations outlined in her book “A New Manuscript for societal stages” (2025), this paper presents a new method for integrating creative arts professionals—particularly those working in music, theatre, and visual arts—into leadership structures and decision-making arenas. Framed within social medicine, the approach highlights how artistic processes can enhance organizational well-being, strengthen collaborative problem solving, and support leaders navigating societal complexity.

Central to this method is the creation of new learning environments for boards and powerholders, where artistic expertise becomes a strategic catalyst for reflection, innovation, and adaptive thinking. Through embodied practices, improvisational techniques, and narrative exploration, artists help reshape traditional boardroom dynamics by facilitating aesthetic experiences that promote emotional awareness, social attunement, and deeper collective insight. These environments encourage leaders to move beyond linear reasoning toward more holistic, relational, and transformative learning processes.

By embedding artists within boards, management teams, and policy contexts, the model expands the role of the creative arts from cultural enrichment to structural societal innovation. Drawing on Bojner Horwitz’s research, the method demonstrates how arts-based interventions can strengthen organizational resilience, support more human-centered governance, and open new pathways for socially sustainable leadership.

Lisa Davenport, “”Yes, and…”: Improvisational Theatre Foundations as Pedagogy”

As educators in all forms – directors, professors, mentors – we must demonstrate confidence in our knowledge. This confidence, which may teeter on being ‘all knowing,’ establishes that students can trust us to guide them in their quest for knowledge. Yet, how can we as educators continue to grow when we cannot predict the shifting questions, skills, and curiosities of each generation? Drawing on Heathcote’s (1997,
2008) focus on using drama frameworks to process change, this paper asks: How can foundations of improvisational theatre drive pedagogical transformation within our interactions with students and our educational institutions?

“Yes, and…” is a notable foundation of improvisational theatre that fosters mutual acceptance of ideas within collaboration. Tompkins (1990) and hooks (2010) identify that a pervasive culture of fear can impede genuine inquiry and challenges of the status quo. However, Johnstone (1999) and Spolin (1986) suggest that breaking free from the cyclical nature of education is the key to promoting creativity and maintaining students’
interest in knowledge.

This paper will analyze how the application of “Yes, and…” could generate valuable moments of challenge, inquiry, and curiosity, for students and educators. Both improvisers and teachers rely on their ‘bag of tricks’ to claim their success in their careers and to avoid the perception of inadequacy in their role. I question how modeling “Yes, and…” can serve as a vital pedagogical tool to reinvigorate training and curriculum during this current period of transition in education, helping educators collaborate with students to navigate complex challenges that standard textbooks cannot address.

Bibliography:
Johnstone, Keith. Impro for Storytellers. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
Heathcote, Dorothy. “Drama as a Process for Change,” in The Applied Theatre Reader, edited by Tim Prentki, Sheila Preston. Volume 1, Routledge, 2008.
hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Tompkins, Jane. “Pedagogy of the Distressed.” College English, vol. 52, no. 6, 1 Oct. 1990, pp. 653–660, https://doi.org/10.58680/ce19909632.

Kara Flanagan, “Rehearsing Stage Fright: Transitioning Drama Curriculum to Support Musicians with Music Performance Anxiety”

This study is informed by my dual practice as a drama and music educator in exploring how drama curriculum can be transformed to address a significant and unsolved issue in education that impacts music students (Orejudo Hernández et al., 2018; Sims and Ryan, 2023) and professional musicians (Beder, 2017)—music performance anxiety (i.e., stage fright). My research exists in a sub-field of music performance anxiety that is virtually non-existent (i.e., adapting acting education) and offers a practical approach to reduce debilitating (Powell, 2004) and harmful (Kenny & Halls, 2018) impacts of anxiety. The purpose of my study is to create drama curriculum as an educational intervention for managing music performance anxiety. My curriculum design is based on: acting education (e.g., Stanislavsky & Hapgood, 1936/2004; Strasberg, 1996); my 13 years in curriculum and acting; robust curriculum design principles (Meyers & Nulty, 2009); curriculum theory (e.g., Dewey, 1916/2018); self-presentation theory (e.g., Leary, 1983); and feedback from my doctoral study. This three-part qualitative study consists of the creation, implementation, and assessment of curriculum. I draw on Johnson and Christensen (2020) for research design and collection of data and Braun and Clarke (2006) for thematic analysis. The study will examine how acting curriculum supports, or fails to support, professional musicians in managing music performance anxiety and enhancing performance delivery.

Biographies:

Eva Bojner Horowitz: Professor of music and health in Stockholm. Specialized in psychosomatic medicine and creative arts, co-founder of the Center for Social Sustainability (CSS), Karolinska Institutet (KI). Internationally known for the implementation of cultural & contemplative activities in school and health care systems. Combining quantitative (stress hormone analyses, heart rate variability, flow) with qualitative research. Established the Healing Theatre in Sweden with professional actors in 2008.

Lisa Davenport (she/her) is an OCT certified drama educator and a PhD Student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Kara Flanagan’s research focus is on the development and applications of acting curriculum. Kara works as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Victoria. She is a co-founder of the Victoria, Academy of Dramatic Arts, a post-secondary acting conservatory in B.C.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Jessica Watkin

Kimberley McLeod, “Relative Care: Destabilizing Human-AI Relations in Secret Theatre’s Alone Together”

Alone Together by Halifax’s Secret Theatre imagines a world in which family rental agencies have become the norm, particularly as a means of combatting loneliness. The experience takes place in an app where the user moves back and forth between watching films following an employee of a rental agency and interactive scenes in which the user becomes this character. Each interactive scene features a one-on-one encounter between the user and someone who has hired them to replace a family member or friend. In an inversion of the increasingly common scenario of humans casting AI as a tool, in this scenario the scene partners hiring the user are played by AI. This choice places the human user in a helper/companion role in which they must comfort, console, entertain and support the AI characters.

While there is an emphasis on disconnection in the content of Alone Together, the uncanny user experience emphasizes connection. The tension between the dystopic future of disconnected families and the connection the user finds with AI characters points to complex questions about the future role of synthetic media in digital performance and daily life, particularly in relation to performances of care. In this paper, I consider how Secret Theatre’s work destabilizes dominant understandings of AI-human coperformance by placing the user experience in conversation with recent work on how AI performs (Annie Dorsen; Lisa Moravec; Ulf Otto; Robert Ellis Walton) and a core touchpoint for Secret Theatre in the creation of this work, Sherry Turkle’s cautionary book also titled Alone Together.

Jayna Mees, “(Dis)Connecting and Colliding: Generating Sites of Disability activism in AI Biometric Performance”

With the popularization of wearable AI biometric devices (wearables), such as Smartwatches and fitness trackers, the social boundaries between “public/private,” “internal/external,” and “self/other” are being questioned, challenged, and explored anew. Among the many affordances of wearables, the characteristic that I will examine in this paper is the political potential of what Gabriella Giannachi calls the “hypersurface.” According to Giannachi, the “hypersurface” is a liminal site of exchange generated through entanglements between the “real” and the digital or virtual, and that enables the spectator to simultaneously be “present in the work [of art] and verfremdt estranged from it” (95). While some attention has been paid to the harmful ways in which wearables are used to augment exclusionary ideologies and practices, few have considered how they might subvert ableist structures of power through immersive performance. Given that this is the case, my paper will examine the hypersurface as an embodied site of world-building in Deaf artist Marco Donnarumma’s 2025 immersive performance: “Ex Silens.” Utilizing a combination of sound, movement, and wearable AI biometric prosthetics, “Ex Silens” engages the interior/exterior of the spectating body to immerse participants in a Deaf-led inter-corporeal and transmedial encounter with the “other.” In my analysis, I will consider the following: How might the show’s entanglements between the digital and the “real” produce more accessible approaches to structuring immersion in performance? How is the hypersurface being leveraged in immersive performance to revise the social conditions of “welcome” and to co-create meaningful sites of belonging? And finally, how might the hypersurface afford new ways of thinking through collective/ individual identity with(in) and beyond the realm of the digital?

Kyra Lin Oser, “From Stage Hypnosis to Stage Hypnotherapy, 1996-2005: Performances of Paul McKenna”

How and why have hypnotherapists since the 1980s incorporated clinical hypnotherapy techniques into entertainment hypnosis to perform therapy as public ritual? Following Milton Erickson’s lifetime, ​I assert that stage hypnotherapy emerged as a popular genre. The shift in which clinical hypnotherapy techniques merged with stage hypnosis is most identifiable in the performances of Paul McKenna, who started in the 1990s as a popular stage hypnotist with an interest in Erickson’s techniques. This paper traces hypnosis performance techniques in McKenna’s television shows beginning in 1993, identifies turning points from 1996 on when he introduced hypnotherapy techniques into entertainment hypnosis, explores an increased demonstration of hypnotherapy techniques from 2003 to 2005, and proposes economic and social forces that popularized these alternative healing techniques in the UK and US. Stage hypnotherapy attempts to bridge a gap between transactional performances and mental health services by borrowing non-denominational healing rituals from the private spaces of nineteenth and twentieth-century therapeutic developments​ and moving them into a less cost-prohibitive public forum. Yet stage hypnotherapy resists the practises of Freud, Jung, and Erickson because performative aspects such as production restrictions and the marketability of therapists as talent are unavoidable factors when therapy is filmed, whether for entertainment, educational, or healing purposes. As our Canadian healthcare system ​is in crisis and considering privatizing, a study of other regions that have experienced reduced healthcare access can benefit Canadian scholars who want to examine how similar economic and social changes may affect future Canadian audiences seeking alternative healthcare options.

Biographies:

Kimberley McLeod is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and an Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review.

Jayna Mees (she/her) is an artist-scholar whose current doctoral research at York University examines access aesthetics, practices, and politics in digital and XR forms of immersive performance. Some recent roles include Assistant Dramaturg for SpiderWebShow’s You Should Have Stayed Home (2022) and Movement Director for Peter Kuling’s Macbeth VR Experience, Ontario Exchange Network (2024).

Kyra Lin Oser instructed Theatre History, Acting, and Children’s Theatre at Moorpark College; Film and TV Acting, Rehearsal and Performance, and Oral Communications at Oxnard College; and Comedy Improv at Hollywood’s Friends and Artists Studio. A certified hypnotherapist and member of AHA/ASCH, she guest lectured for Psychology courses at Pacific States University.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Robin Whittaker

Yasmine Agocs, “Nuestro Hogar (Our Home): Collective Memory and Belonging in Latina/o Canadian Playtexts”

The looming presence of home for exiles, migrants, and refugees invokes an ambivalent, complex blend of familial warmth and alienating coldness. In Latina/o narratives in Canada, ‘home’ is often depicted as a distant and disconnected concept, presenting both utopian and dystopian images that challenge Canadian policies, economy, intercultural relations, and community. It is crucial to observe that these narratives are typically anchored in personal memory, historical events, and collective experiences within communities.

Memory and community are two themes in Latina/o Canadian theatre and performance that offer a distinct perspective on the concept of home for Latina/o immigrants and refugees. Themes such as dedication to family, resistance to Canadian cultural hegemony, and the preservation of language are woven into these stories through the usage of memory and community, drawing links between Latina/o personal and collective identity.

This paper examines the role of memory and collectivity as counter-archival engagements in three Latina/o Canadian playtexts. I will conduct a close reading of three Latina/o Canadian playtexts, The Refugee Hotel by Carmen Aguirre and Fronteras Americanas (American Borders) by Guillermo Verdecchia, along with my original play Quiltro, which debuted at the 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival. All three plays use memory and collectivity as thematic tools to explore the depths of Latina/o Canadian collective consciousness, cross-generational community, and a desire to belong.

Dale MacDonald, “Dark Silence: Sounding Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights”

The goals for this research project are activated by Sara Bey-Cheng’s assertion, “that Gertrude Stein’s drama deserves consideration on its own terms, as drama and as theater” (3). My study is a departure from the ‘dramatic’ analysis Bey-Cheng provides and instead foregrounds the ‘theatrical’ via the sonic within Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. To do so, I offer a reading of Stein’s play as score as opposed to script and compose a possible soundscape for the play. Engaging with research-creation methodology, my intention is to manifest Hans-Thes Lehmann’s assessment: that Stein’s text “emancipates the clause from the sentence, the word from the clause, the phonetic from the semantic potential and the sound from the cohesion of meaning” (63). This approach brings to light and subverts the academic inclination towards literary analysis, even when Stein’s work is considered “performable”. Sounding Doctor Faustus results in a unique realization of the play and offers a method for “un-closeting” any of Stein’s theatrical texts.

Zach McKendrick, “Virtual Performance Practice: Translating The Nether into mixed reality”

This paper investigates a performance-creation methodology for translating a traditional stage script into a hybrid mixed-reality production. Using Jennifer Haley’s The Nether as the case study, the project explores how a text written for live theatre can be reimagined across two interdependent performance planes: the physical stage and a bespoke, real-time virtual environment. Working with actors, designers, and technologists, the creative team probes how and what it means to translate scenes conceived initially for a representational stage into digital form. This includes examining how virtual avatars, embodied perspectives, and networked presence function as performative materials rather than mere technical affordances. Instead of treating VR as an add-on or spectacle, our process positions it as a dramaturgical partner: a site where blocking, gesture, proximity, and scenic transitions must be rediscovered through iterative experimentation. Our interpretation reframes the script’s virtual scenes not as metaphors for digital space, but as playable architectures that shape action and rhythm while investigating the tension of corporeal life in digital societies.

The resulting hybrid performance invites two audiences, co-located and online, to experience the production through distinct but interwoven dramaturgies. Physical spectators watch actors navigate material and virtual worlds, while remote spectators inhabit the fictional environment directly through VR avatars. This dual staging raises questions about liveness, embodiment, and representation. By charting the creative, technical, and dramaturgical decisions that inform this work, our paper articulates a practical framework for adapting scripted theatre to mixed-reality performance.

Biographies:

Yasmine Agocs is a trained actor and PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies. Her current research explores the connections between Latin American communities and theatre in Canada, with a particular interest in community-building and intersectionality in Chilean Canadian feminist playtexts.

Dale MacDonald is a writer, educator, and artist working in so-called Vancouver since 2016. Currently working towards a PhD at the University of British Columbia, Dale’s research examines settler corpse-performances, ethical rot, and interspecies collaboration.

Zach McKendrick‘s work sits at the nexus of Drama, Technology, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). With a background as a director (MFA), actor, and technician, he has investigated ethnographic shifts towards immersive and extended virtual reality in the live performance sector and broader HCI research community.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Taylor Marie Graham

Amanda Attrell, ““You stole it”: Truth in Cliff Cardinal’s Radical Retelling”

In the fall of 2021, Cliff Cardinal entered Crow’s Theatre’s mainstage from behind a red velvet curtain to radically adapt Shakespeare for Toronto’s theatre audiences: “Let’s just be here, together, for a moment, and acknowledge the land” (5). In As You Like It, which won the Governor General’s Award for English-Language Drama and toured internationally, Cardinal baldly speaks truths to his audience. His monologue confronts the lack of knowledge about Indigenous history and culture among settler descendants in Canada: “I’ve often wondered what these land acknowledgements accomplish. Aside from making white people feel good about themselves. Beat. Hi. Beat” (11). This paper listens to Cardinal’s use of direct address to understand how he conveys truth to his audience through humour, potentially upsetting language, and by concluding with the “saying . . . All my relations” (74).

In his performance, Cardinal baldly proposes a shift in a societal understanding of Indigenous culture that holds the potential to reorient the historiographer’s understanding of what we can “accomplish” when we “think about Indigeneity” and “acknowledge the land” (11). As such, this paper documents and records my experience of attending Cardinal’s performance during its premiere and twice more as it toured. I then consider Cardinal’s choice to refer to Residential Schools as “rape camps,” and how he depicts the cultural erasure enacted by genocide and forced adoption which continues to impact everyone who lives on this land now called Canada (52). Finally, I end by considering Cardinal’s conclusion to his “protest: a campaign to raise awareness to support Indigenous people” in which he brings the audience together as family, and into the performance’s ruse (15, 75). During CATR’s 50th Anniversary, I hope to look to the future with an expanded understanding of how historiographers of theatre can pay close attention to retellings of this country’s colonial past through listening to Cardinal’s land acknowledgement.

Amy Blondell, “…girls, girls, girls all up in here”: Self-Determination, Struggle, and Belonging in Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade and Dominique Morrisseau’s Confederates”

Whether women can be historical actors in the context of a political uprising is the question posed by Frances Koncan’s play, “Women of the Fur Trade” and Dominique Morrisseau’s play “Confederates”. Koncan, an Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright, sets her drama in what is now Manitoba during a Metis rebellion against encroaching settler colonialism. African American playwright Morisseau sets her play in two time periods, addressing institutionalized racism within the contemporary academy and in a Southern plantation at the beginning of the US Civil War. Both dramas illuminate the often-fraught struggle of women to forge alliances given a hostile context and competing personal and political needs.

Both playwrights work creatively with temporality activating historical memory and producing a twin consciousness in the audience. In “Women of the Fur Trade”, the women from “Eighteen something something” engage in continuous and often hilarious banter in contemporary language that often expresses a post-colonial consciousness. In “Confederates”, there is a bifurcated stage. On one, actors play contemporary faculty and students at a private university, and on the other they double as enslaved persons of African descent and white plantation owners, continuously reminding the audience about the antecedents of institutional racism. These two powerful plays illuminate structures of oppression and their corrosive effects on human social relations. The pivotal question they ask is whether and how, in the face of patriarchy and racism, alliances may be forged.

Katrina Dunn, “Prairie Theatre Exchange: Inside an architectural reinvention”

The persistence of theatre buildings as an amenity in the western city is, for Marvin Carlson, a sign of theatre’s ability to adjust alongside civic transformations and can be read as a map of theatre’s accommodation to the political, social, philosophical, and economic form of cities (Places 14-36). Many theatres in Canada aptly demonstrate this tethering, but Prairie Theatre Exchange is uniquely tied to a series of architectural structures seminal to the economic geography of Winnipeg and the company is poised to transform yet again as part of an urban renewal project linked to the downtown Indigenous community that will see its host environment shift from a beleaguered site of consumerism to a nexus of care. PTE takes its name from its first home in the Winnipeg Grain Exchange building, the historical seat of grain futures that drove the first century of the provincial economy. In 1989, the company moved to a new $3.5 million, 42,500 square foot venue with a distinctive thrust stage on the third floor of Portage Place Shopping Centre. Three levels of government have now signed agreements with True North Real Estate Development and the Southern Chiefs’ Organization that will enable the redevelopment of Portage Place into a campus for residential and affordable housing and health services with integrated mental health and addictions supports, in what the president of True North has called “an historic example of economic reconciliation” (“True”). This paper asks how the complex urban and cultural processes driving this architectural reinvention are changing the company’s programming and artistic process and whether a theatre so aligned with the machinery of civic capitalism can reorient towards spatial justice.

Biographies:

Amanda Attrell has a Ph.D. in English from York University. Her historiographic methodology seeks to listen to marginalized and unheard voices held in Canadian theatre archives and beyond. Her work appears in Linda Griffiths (Playwrights Canada Press, 2018) and Theatre Research in Canada (2023). She has a forthcoming piece on Infinity in Making Moscovitch (Playwrights Canada Press, 2026) and the co-created Secret Life of a Mother.

A social historian, Amy Blondell focuses on material survival, community efflorescence, political activism and desire. Her recent play, Rise Up at Liberty Springs, draws on interviews and archival materials to create a community story about persistent passions and political acts.

Katrina Dunn is an Associate Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media. Her chapters and articles explore the spatial manifestations of theatre, as well as ecocritical theatre. Her long career as director, artistic director, and producer has been recognized by a number of awards.

Location: Roger Bishop Theatre

Moderator: Jenn Stephenson

Adam Paolozza and Karen Fricker, “At The Intersection of Sustainability and Storytelling: A Critical Dialogue between Adam Paolozza and Karen Fricker”

Following the Bad New Days production of Last Landscape (January 2025), which blended eco-dramaturgy with physical theatre, Artistic Director Adam Paolozza invited Intermission Magazine Editorial Director Karen Fricker to write about the work. This sparked an extended critical dialogue, which we aim to present as a shared paper. Our exchange centres on sustainability and eco-dramaturgy, examining how these concepts shaped Last Landscape and how they relate to the current state of Canadian theatre criticism.

A key theme concerns what may be carried forward from past practices into a more sustainable theatrical future. For Paolozza, this includes reconsidering Lecoq pedagogy, broader conceptions of mimesis, and eco-dramaturgy itself: an approach that embeds sustainability in all levels of a creation. From Fricker’s perspective, the dialogue addresses how to cultivate a more sustainable and equitable critical discourse, challenging traditional journalistic power dynamics by placing artist and critic in dialogue and positioning criticism as documentation and archive.

In keeping with the conference theme, we explore how to adapt what remains useful from our respective traditions while imagining a future we hope to help shape.
Last Landscape emerged from Paolozza’s inquiry into these issues, and the dialogue unpacks this process. For Fricker, it probes the shifting role of the critic in relation to the artist; for Paolozza, it asks how one engages with a critical voice less ephemeral than the rapid review produced under tight constraints. Developing our exchange through a slower, sustainability-oriented process allowed it to mature over time, resulting in a piece that contributes meaningfully to conversations on sustainability and eco-dramaturgy.

Kimberly Richards, “Hospicing the institutions of Canadian Theatre Research”

This paper is animated by two questions posed by Vanessa Machada de Oliveira in her forward to Outgrowing Modernity:

What if you knew—in your bones, not just in your mind—that major social and ecological collapse is on the horizon? That sooner or later much of what we take for granted will not longer be viable, primarily because we have crossed at least six of the nine planetary boundaries currently identified? How would you respond if you could stay with this knowledge?

What if we could act today from a collective cultural space grounded in emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational and interspecies responsibility? What would we do differently now, and what actions would our children born today look back on in thirty years and be grateful for? (xvii-xviii)

I believe these questions are worth holding as we examine the anniversaries of organizations, journals, theatre companies, and departments that constitute theatre research in Canada, and contemplate the future of theatre + research + Canada. Drawing on the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/ Research Collective, my paper asks us to face the complexity of the wicked challenges of our time. While I cannot offer neat solutions, I share the framework of “hospicing” as developed by Machada de Oliveira to help us discern how we might act with compassion and support people in the process of letting go of institutions of theatre research in Canada that may no longer serve us.

Kelly Richmond, “Inherited Anthropo(s)cenes: EcoGothic in Susanna Fournier’ Empire Trilogy”

Where will our animal bodies lie when the Age of Man arrives? This is the question asked at the end of The Philosopher’s Wife, the first play of Susanna Fournier’s theatrical trilogy The Empire. A weird and gothic fable, The Philosopher’s Wife tells the story of Tereza, a dog trainer and religious refugee from a country known only as “The South,” as the play vividly explores the animality of humanity in against a mythical backdrop of a rising Anthropocene.

Across The Empire trilogy, Fournier uses her allegorical otherworld to chart how the inheritances of Cartesianism, colonialism, and capitalism have demarcated the violence of imperialism. In this paper presentation, I consider how Fournier’s plays engage with the genre conventions of the Gothic to reveal and critique anthropocentrism. I argue that Fournier’s work inherits a tradition of ecoGothic theatricality well represented – including works by Marie Clements, Thompson Highway, Daniel MacIvor, Daniel David Moses, Wajdi Mouwad, James Reaney, Judith Thompson, Michel Tremblay, and Donna-Michelle St Bernard – and yet under discussed within the Canadian theatrical canon. Through fantastical representations of monstrosity and spectrality, ecoGothic performances make the slow and often imperceptible violence of the climate crisis sensational and spectacular. In my reading of The Empire, Fournier expands the possibilities of ecodramaturgical storytelling and staging while theatricalizing the fraying edges and blurring boundaries of relation between human and inhuman, nature and the unnatural, ultimately challenging how we understand our inheritance of (super)natural Anthropo(s)cenes.

Biographies:

Adam Paolozza is an award winning physical theatre creator, arts educator and scholar, and Artistic Director of Bad New Days.

Karen Fricker is a contributor for The Toronto Star, writing about theatre, adjunct professor at Brock University, and editorial director at Intermission Magazine.

Kimberly Skye Richards is a settler scholar and dramaturg whose writing, teaching, activism, and artistic work engages performance as a vehicle for resisting extractivism and inspiring a just transitions. She teaches in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia.

Kelly Richmond (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and the 1855 Professor of Arts and Climate Justice at Michigan State University. As an artist-scholar, Kelly creates work that explores queer adaptation while combining practice-as-research, community collaboration, and artivism. Her research examines the intersections of queer performance, environmental activism, and gothic aesthetics.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Narges Montakhabi

Jenn Boulay, “Accessible by Design: Building a Future of Inclusive Theatre through Creative Accessibility”

This paper examines how embedding accessibility practices–such as audio description and captioning–can enhance accessibility within the theatre. I argue that accessibility is not a “simple add-on” (Dokumaci n.p), but rather a fundamental form of communication that challenges the dominance of conventional methods of experiencing theatre. By integrating these practices into the creative process, I explore how they can dismantle ableist structures, fostering inclusivity and offering a more accessible and engaging theatrical experience. Drawing from two plays–The Year of the Cello by Marjorie Chan and Njo Kong Kie, and I am Magnificently Ugly by Jenn Boulay–that integrate audio description both into the script and production design, I demonstrate how accessibility practices can be woven into the creative process. This approach not only challenges traditional ableist assumptions, it creates a more accessible theatre environment for everyone.

The paper asks theatre artists and scholars to reflect upon their own practices, advocating for accessibility to be more than an “afterthought”. Gerry Ellis writes, “designing to only cater for the needs of the extraordinarily narrow band of what is considered ‘normal’ resulted in societies where large groups of potential consumers could not use some products and services” (35-36). The paper thus urges the theatre community to treat accessibility as a key component of their creative practices, ensuring that their work is truly accessible to a wide range of audiences. By doing so, we rehearse accessibility, transforming it into an artistic endeavour that provides new possibilities and perspectives for the future of inclusive theatre.

Shannon Constantine, “Rehearsing an Otherwise: Performing Abjection”

What does it mean to pursue abjection as an aesthetic and political strategy of minoritarian resistance? How do feminist performers use their own bodies to reveal inheritances of social and political abjection? My paper analyses two performances to answer these questions: Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’ and Priyanthi Amunugama’s ‘Mother’s Painting’. It suggests that feminist abject performances embrace a being otherwise and pursue what Leticia Alvarado calls “an elsewhere”. My paper engages rehearsal as both method and framework to approach theatricality and visuality in performance art, and to consider viewing as a key component of performance. It draws on theory from woman of colour feminisms and queer of colour critique, and on theories of abjection and the minoritarian. The paper examines femininity as a form of embodiment that is accompanied by an inescapable inheritance of abjection in all its complexity. It analyses inscrutability, animacy, and objecthood across both performances to trace abjection as a minoritarian strategy of resistance. I argue that feminist performers such as Ono and Amunugama manipulate abject positions and choose to linger in abjection despite its risks to make minoritarian social positions more visible and tangible, to refuse incorporation into ‘acceptable’ social positions and identity categories, and to pursue alternative forms of existence. Through this reading, I highlight abject feminist performance as a rehearsal for minoritarian being, where minoritarian being becomes an alternative framework of existence and persistence despite minoritarian subjects being relegated to the fringes of society.

Heidi Malazdrewich, “Keeping the Score: Including Trauma Informed Care/Practice in Professional Directorial Process”

Engaging with Judith Herman’s and Bessel Van Der Kolk’s definitions of trauma, this paper investigates how trauma informed practice/care is shifting the way some professional theatre directors are rehearsing and presenting plays. Beginning with a brief overview of the history of the study of trauma, it offers a sociological and physiological framework to understand the primary questions surrounding caring for people affected by trauma. Further, the paper cites recent North American surveys calling attention to the public’s relationship to trauma post-COVID 19 pandemic and tracks the emergence of trauma informed practice/care in professional theatre spaces. The paper employs James Thompson’s notion of the Aesthetics of Care and links it to post-pandemic Canadian theatre practices while offering Claire K. Redfield’s trauma responsive directorial approach as an example of trauma informed practice/care in action. Lastly, the paper links the emergence of trauma informed care/practice in theatre spaces to the, now common, inclusion of intimacy directors onto professional theatrical creative teams.

Biographies:

Jenn Boulay is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar with a passion for working at the intersections of theatre and performance studies and disability studies. Her Master’s thesis situates the D/deaf and disability arts landscape across Eastern Canada, with the culmination of her project being an interactive-sound installation.

Shannon Constantine is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her current research interests lie in the architectures of state power and transnational violence. Her work has been published in ASAP Review, Society and Culture in South Asia, and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.

Dr. Heidi Malazdrewich is a director, intimacy director, dramaturg, actor, and theatre educator. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg and has worked with theatre companies across Canada.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Wes Pearce

Shelley Scott, “”We Are All Related”: Theatre Calgary’s production of Awoowaakii by Sable Sweetgrass”

At the June 2025 CATR conference in Regina, Sara Schroete and j skelton delivered a paper entitled “Seen Elsewhere: Queer and Trans Identities as a Place of Liminal Belonging on the Prairie Stage.” Their excellent presentation about the spaces available and accessible to Queer and Trans performances made me think about the play I had just seen the month before in Calgary. Awoowaakii by Sable Sweetgrass was produced by Theatre Calgary 22 April to 11 May of 2025 and, in this paper, I will explore how this “living room comedy of errors” about a transgender Blackfoot woman and her family, set in the inner city of Calgary, found its audience.

Stafford Arima, the artistic director of Theatre Calgary, describes the play as “one rooted in Blackfoot worldview, shaped by Two-Spirit experience, and written with extraordinary emotional clarity.” As the largest performing arts company in Southern Alberta, most shows are staged in the 750-seat Max Bell Theatre, located in downtown Calgary. Awoowaakii, however, was presented in the smaller, more flexible Big Secret Theatre, located in the same building. My paper will explore how, far from sidelining the importance of Awoowaakii, the use of the more intimate venue was strategic, artistically and culturally appropriate, and contributed to the play’s enthusiastic reception. The audience was enveloped within the world of the play and, in her Program Note, Sable Sweetgrass encouraged us to respond with laughter and tears: “in this immersive Theatre Calgary experience, you are now part of the play.”

Walter Strydom, “Empowering theatrical ensemble-making through Ubuntu ethics”

You observe a diverse group of performers moving freely around the rehearsal space. Patterns emerge and dissolve. Short bursts of serendipitous synchronicity, unplanned and unrehearsed, halts your breath. But, what keeps you enthralled is the shared focus that radiates from group: their energy is almost palpable, their “oneness” captivating, there are no leaders, and no followers. The exercise they are doing develops mutual awareness, shared attunement, and performance presence. But, like many other ensemble-making practices, it might also lead to increased social cohesion beyond the rehearsal room by cultivating “being with” as a model of living in the world (Neelands 2009:181). You feel a connection to everyone else in the space, much deeper than what these creative activities warrant. Britton (2013:278) highlights relationships – “Self-With-Others” – as the primary focus in ensemble development. But, relationships are fraught with visible and invisible power-dynamics, especially among people hailing from diverse positionalities. As such, are you experiencing a real sense of equitable togetherness? Or, is the exercise simply perpetuating a performative form of coerced assimilation and self-denying acquiescence? Relationships are also at the core of Ubuntu, an Indigenous philosophy from southern Africa. Explicated by the isiZulu maxim, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (“I am because we are”), moral subjectivity relies on interpersonal relationality: practicing other-regarding virtues in service of harmonious communal relationships premised on social and rectification justice. Correspondingly, this paper will explore ways in which Ubuntu may empower more ethically sound and sustainable ensemble-making, while reflecting on the possibilities for ensemble-making practices to facilitate Ubuntu relationality.

Ceanna Wood, “Relationality in Workshop Practices”

In 2022 I was offered an internship with the Education and Community Outreach team at the Arts Club Theatre Company. During this internship, I was able to collaborate with my fellow intern to create workshops that centered around Indigenous theatre practices which was titled, Introduction to Place-Based Practices. This workshop series had its challenges that encouraged me to consider different ways of teaching Indigenous knowledges. About a year later, my previous bosses at the Arts Club reached out to me to create a workshops series for Metis youth. I had recently met another Metis artist, Jill Gornason, and I was keen to build these workshops with her. These workshops were titled Land, Body and Spirit (LBS) and were embedded with knowledges that Jill and I both learned through our late exploration of our Indigenous cultures. Jill and I have now had the opportunity to teach these workshops to Indigenous youth & adults as well as all peoples, which was done by establishing a protocol that honored the knowledges and ways of doing we were sharing with others. 

The LBS workshops were influenced by Floyd Favel who stated that Theatre was the younger brother to Indigenous Traditions because they both use voice/sound, movement/body, and narrative structure/storytelling. These three things were purposely woven in this workshop series. The LBS workshops were also guided by teachings from Elders and community members, as well as a Cree word that describes relationality, Wahkotowin. This word and practices done in these workshops will be shared through this panel in a way that honours protocol.

Biographies:

Shelley Scott is Professor Emerita of Drama at the University of Lethbridge and a former President of CATR. She writes about Canadian women playwrights and is the author of The Violent Woman as a New Theatrical Character Type: Cases from Canadian Drama and Nightwood Theatre: A Woman’s Work is Always Done.

Walter Strydom is an award-winning South African theatre artist and student passionate about how the arts can empower self-actualisation, strengthen cross-cultural bonds, and promote social justice. He lectures theatre-making and performance theory (University of the Free State, South Africa), and his doctoral research explores social justice and devised theatre (University of Regina, Canada).

Ceanna Wood is a Métis-Cree and Italian artist working across Turtle Island. Wood holds a MA in theatre studies from the University of Victoria. She has co-created & co-facilitated workshops titled Land, Body, and Spirit. Wood contributed multiple activities and a wellness table at the 2025 Indigenous Theatre Festival.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Karen Fricker

Barry Freeman, “Stage Wright: a Celebration, a Critique, a Mourning”

On April 19, 2023, my friend and colleague Kevin Wright unexpectedly passed away. Kevin was the Technical Director of the Leigha Lee Browne Theatre at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where I have worked as an undergraduate student, staff member and now a professor for 30 years. His passing came at a terrible time: my mother had also passed away just three weeks earlier. She had been with me the day I met Kevin, arriving at the theatre for a tour during my first-year undergraduate orientation.

Kevin and I were collaborating on a new project: an archive of the campus’s theatre history dating back to 1966. We had a practical reason to do this: faculty were retiring and historical materials needed to be cared for. But there was a deeper reason for it, too: the pandemic had amplified our sense of dislocation, and this memory work reconnected us to place. When Kevin died, I onboarded students and collaborators and saw the project through. We launched the digital archive and physical exhibit Stage Wright, renamed in tribute, in March 2025, with a community celebration that brought out generations of students (see here).

In this paper, I reflect on my journey with this project within a broader inquiry into the values shaping post-secondary theatre education in Canada. As Critical University Studies scholars remind us, institutional memory is never neutral; it works maintain a benevolent self-image (Ferguson, Moten with Harney, Stein). Shifting perspective from the national surveys of my other research projects to the hyper-local of my daily work life, I explore the contradictions of activating intergenerational nostalgia at a time of heightened institutional critique. How can a project like this support continuity and foster a sense of place while also unsettling our institutions’ ideological investments?

Shabnam Sukhdev, “Re-embodying the Archive: Rehearsing Diasporic Inheritance in ‘Kill Mama'”

How do we rehearse what we inherit? What happens when the archive we inherit is fractured, intimate, and embodied? Approaching this paper through an autoethnographic lens, I turn to ‘Kill Mama’, a hybrid performance work co-created with my muse and mother, Kanta Sukhdev, as both subject and method. The project stages my own diasporic inheritance as a site of improvisation, vulnerability, and generative unruliness, asking how performance can function as a living archive that moves, breathes, and resists closure.

In dialogue with the conference theme, I treat diasporic memory not as a fixed repository but as a repertoire of embodied practices of gestures, ruptures, and improvisations that families repeatedly rehearse across generations. Through personal narrative, oral history, and devised performance, I explore how performing the mother becomes an act of counter-archival reclamation, one that unsettles gendered expectations and opens space for alternative modes of relationality.

‘Kill Mama’ engages critical fabulation (Hartman 2008) and improvisational openness (Goldman 2010) to reimagine the archive as something we can re-make rather than merely receive. In the studio, the autoethnographic body becomes both witness and instrument, navigating intergenerational trauma, tenderness, and the politics of care. Instead of seeking resolution, the work dwells in the instability of inheritance, using improvisation and refusal as tools for imagining new futures.

Ultimately, I argue that diasporic research-creation when rooted in autoethnography, performs a form of archival improvisation, generating new relationalities and rehearsing change as a creative, embodied practice.

Robin Whittaker, “What Remains? Drama in the Classroom “From Adaptation to Archive”

One inheritance constructed in academe in the mid-twentieth century, and arguably more pronounced today, is the disciplinary divide between the study of dramatic literature (traditionally in English departments) and theatre and performance studies (traditionally in theatre departments). Teaching English students and teaching theatre students can seem like different tasks entirely owing to differences in experience and expectations.

In STU’s English department, I teach dramatic literature and theatre studies to undergraduate students across liberal arts disciplines. My classes are comprised of students who have been in plays since middle school and students who have neither read nor seen a play. I realized I needed a strategy to introduce any student to the academic study of drama without alienating them.

I thus developed and refined the flexible assignment “From Adaptation to Archive: An In-Class Performance Creation Exercise.” Adjustable for dramatic literature, acting, and theatre archive courses, the goal of this 75-minute exercise is to familiarize students to the lifecycle of a play, from adapting a (very short) story into a (very short) play, to performing the play, to writing a (very short) review, to interviewing the cast and playwrights. We then ask, what remains of your performance to study in 200 years? And what does this mean for studying of drama and its archives? Students can collaborate on the creation, performance, and reception of a play regardless of their theatre background, ready to enter into the acts of reading plays and researching in archives with some firsthand knowledge of performance practice and reception.

In this paper, I introduce the elements of the exercise, describe how it has been adapted for 15 unique courses, and consider how students receive the exercise and refer back to it throughout their studies in relation to the principle “theory must always be practised, and practice must always be theorized” (Knowles 1998, 159).

Biographies:

Barry Freeman is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. His current research and writing is focused on developing new resources, partnerships, and visions for theatre education.

Shabnam Sukhdev is a multi-disciplinary artist, scholar and TDPS doctoral candidate at York University. Her research-creation practice uses autoethnography, devised theatre, and digital storytelling to explore identity, intergenerational memory, and diasporic healing. She creates participatory works bridging art and activism, including Kill Mama, a hybrid performance investigating agency and authorship.

Robin C. Whittaker is Associate Professor of Drama at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, NB where he teaches dramatic literature, dramatic theory, theatre archives, and research methods. His publications include Alumnae Theatre Company (UTP 2024), the verbatim play No White Picket Fence (Talonbooks 2019), and the edited anthology Hot Thespian Action! Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse (Athabasca UP 2009). He completes his second term as President of CATR in 2026.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Anthony Vickery

Kelsey Blair, “Rehearsing Empire in Canada: Ordinary Spectacles and Performance Venues”

From October to December of 2024, Centre Bell in Montreal hosted 19 Montreal Canadiens’ games, 15 performances of Ovo by Cirque de Soleil, and 3 stadium concerts by Justin Timberlake, Sabrina Carpenter, and Bruce Springsteen. Each of these performances attracted thousands of participants. This is indicative of a twenty-first century performance trend, wherein large-scale venues in major Canadian cities frequently host multiple genres of spectacle-scale performances throughout the year. Indeed, the regular occurrence of spectacle-scale performances is generally considered an ordinary part of urban life in Canada. What gets rehearsed—individually, collectively—in these regularly scheduled spectacles? What performance legacies are passed down in these venues? How, and to what ends, do multi-purpose large-scale performance venues host civic performances that connect with national and international cultural imaginaries?

This paper has a two-fold aim. First, drawing together formalist theories of spectacle (Kershaw, MacAloon, Schechner) with Guy Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle, I will introduce the concept of what I call ordinary spectacles—regularly scheduled, secular spectacles such as touring Broadway musical theatre shows, Cirque-de Soleil-style nouveau cirque shows, professional sporting contests, and arena-housed music concerts. I will briefly overview the emergence of this category of performance in the United States and Canada in the twentieth century. Second, through a combination of archival research and close reading, I will focus on one aspect of the history of ordinary spectacles post-1945 in Canada: the updating and building of spectacle-scale multi-purpose performance spaces such as large-scale theatres, arenas, and stadiums. In so doing, I aim to surface how these venues provide space to host ordinary spectacles and also function as hubs that connect civic performance to international cultural imaginaries, thereby becoming contemporary sites where logics of global capitalism and imperialism are repeatedly rehearsed and performed.

Works Cited
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Radical American Black & Red, 1994.
Kershaw, Baz. “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism.” Theatre Journal, vol. 55, no. 4, 2003, pp. 591–611.
MacAloon, John J., et al., editors. Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed, Routledge, 2006.

Martha Currie, “Enfranchised Audiences in Modern Theatre Programming”

The economics and expectations of modern theatre programming are dependent on a guaranteed, enfranchised audience willing to spend their money on a safe option with promised enjoyment subsequently drawing audiences to familiar narratives they’ve already experienced in film format. The proposed presentation will explore the influx of screen-to-stage adaptations in contemporary theatre programming with a focus on the productions that market to an audience member’s nostalgia of their beloved films from their youth. The purposeful development of narrative screenplays as musical theatre productions to appeal to established fandom practices of musical theatre fans will be examined through theatre and performance, fandom and film theory. The critical acclaim and profit of screen-to-stage adaptations are confirmed through Matthew Hodge’s study, “21st-Century Broadway Musicals and the ‘Best Musical’ Tony Award: Trends and Impact” (2020), with reports that 40% of all “Best Musical” winners of the 21st- century were adapted from films, which makes screen-to-stage adaptations the primary source material for “all 20 musicals awarded the ‘Best Musical’ Tony Award between the years 2000 and 2019” (Hodge, 2020, p. 7). However, how do enfranchised audiences drive the success of these recycled narratives? How dependent are theatre programmers on the guaranteed profit from fan audiences? The proposed presentation will examine the economic stability offered through the programming of screen-to-stage adaptations and the subsequent impact such predictable programming has on modern audiences.

Work Cited: Hodge, M. (2020). 21st-century Broadway musicals and the ‘best musical’ Tony award: Trends and impact. Arts, 9(2), 58. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9020058

Kristin Leahey, “A History of WP Theater – Excerpt from Chapter 2: WP Lab”

In 2028, New York’s Women’s Project Theater (WP) will celebrate its 50th anniversary, but to-date there is no extensive study recording its complicated history. As the oldest and largest U.S. theatre for women, there is no detailed analysis of its achievements in spearheading women’s art, as well as its failures. From its Upper West Side home, the organization still caters to wealth and elitism, under a traditional American neoliberal capitalist nonprofit free market model. Its fraught legacy has fallen in between the cracks of ‘malestream’ theatre history and feminist accounts of women-centred theatre. The WP has been relegated to the margins of feminist-theatre history due to the company’s neoliberal-feminist approach to challenging male-dominated theatre, as opposed to the radical, counter-cultural, materialist-feminist theatre making that was the focus of the first wave of U.S. feminist-theatre scholarship, as pioneered by Sue-Ellen Case, Elaine Aston, and Jill Dolan. Hence, a task of this paper, which is part of a monograph, is to undertake a feminist recovery and reassessment of the organization’s former years to the present. Where the company resides politically, artistically, and organizationally constitutes an important living history, one that is relevant to today’s ongoing struggles for equality, diversity, and inclusivity. The essay focuses on the WP Lab, which intends to serve emerging directors, producers, and writers. Since its 1992 founding, the Lab has had over 350 members. With an intersectional-feminist lens, I examine the lab’s pedagogy and pursuits for mentorship, lab projects, and members’ industry trajectories over time.

Biographies:

Kelsey Blair is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research interests include sport and performance studies, theatre audience studies, and affect in popular performance. She is also a co-director with the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and the author of Sport and Performance in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge).

Martha Currie (she/her) has a particular interest in nostalgia capitalism, fandom studies and screen-to-stage adaptations within reboot cinema. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Culture Studies with a specialization in Film and Media at Queen’s University as an Ontario Graduate funded scholar.

Kristin Leahey is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. She served as the Director of New Works at Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Literary Manager at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and the Associate Artistic Director of WP Theater. Her publications include articles in Theatre Topics, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and New England Theatre Journal. She is a recipient of a Fulbright.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Jill Carter

Claire Borody, “Backwards into the Future: Observation of Past Performance-making Practice as a Means Forward”

The conference theme Inheritance in Transition: Rehearsing Change for Theatre and Performance Futures aptly identifies the present as a time of shift and revision within the field of theatre and performance.If there were ever a time that new models and structures for studying and making theatre might take hold, that time is now.

In his book, The Compassionate Imagination, arts critic and commentator Max Wyman states that “we are at the end of the world as we knew it” and argues that the shared experience of art is integral to the rebuilding of community and communal spirit in a splintered world. He also argues that this restructuring must be defined by a vision and purposeful action.

Nothing is created in a vacuum. In a time of renewal and reconstruction perhaps examining and re-examining that which has come before provides the most viable means for strategizing the way forward. This is important for theatre organizations of all kinds, however, the focus of this study is small independent companies.

Where to start? In 1998, Primus Theatre, an independent theatre company based in Winnipeg, shuttered its doors after a nine year existence. Yet, more than twenty-five years laster, some of the most innovative and resilient theatre companies in Canada can be identified as part of the Primus legacy. What makes these companies so resilient within a constantly fluctuating theatrical landscape that has been even more challenging since pandemic lockouts? How do foundational influences serve to stabilize an evolving performance practice?

Aamna Rashid, “The Body as Archive: Embodied Performance and the Politics of Disappearance in Sambizanga (1972)

Considering an intervention between performance studies and decolonial cinema, my paper situates how bodies enact “embodied memory” (Taylor 30) and function as a counter-archive, or “repertoire: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing” (Taylor 22) against the silence of colonial archives. Drawing on Joseph Roach’s notion of “performance genealogies” as “mnemonic reserves” (Roach 26)—patterned, residual, and imagined movements that exceed textual record—and the repertoire’s position as “traditions of embodied practice” (Taylor 20) transmitting knowledge through gestures, orality, and presence, I argue that Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror, 1972) positions the female body as enacting resistance against the erasure of the disappeared. Maldoror emphasizes silencing and erasure as part of historical production (Trouillout 26) by showing an archive of the disappeared—no paperwork, no acknowledgment, no trace. In constructing a counter-archive, she turns to Maria’s (the wife of the disappeared) body as the site through which disappearance becomes visible. Her walking, waiting, questioning, and refusal to abandon the search constitute a “repertoire” (Taylor 22) of resistance, demonstrating the gendered labor of sustaining memory against erasure. Across the film, Maria’s movements produce expressive mnemonic reserves: patterned gestures remembered by bodies, residual movements embedded in images or silences, and imagined movements constitutive of thought (Roach 26). Thus, Sambizanga reveals how women’s embodied persistence operates as a decolonial counter-archive, transforming gendered labor into the primary means through which disappearance becomes visible and politically undeniable.

Manvendra (Noor) Singh Thakur, “Listening to What Is Missing: Hijra Archives, Refusal, and Rehearsed Futures”

This paper turns to the life and self-archiving practices of Mona Ahmed, a hijra person from Old Delhi whose friendship with photographer Dayanita Singh produced Myself Mona Ahmed, to think about what it means to inherit an archive marked by erasure, silence, and colonial violence. Much of what we know of hijra performance histories emerges through criminalizing colonial documentation or through fleeting ethnographic glimpses shaped by the Global North’s gaze. What happens, then, when the archive is partial, inaccessible, or shaped by those who sought to discipline the very subjects it records?

Drawing on Tina Campt’s methodology of “listening to images,” this paper reads Mona’s self-performances including her poses, gestures, humour, refusals, as low-frequency traces of a counter-archive. Her collaboration with Singh becomes a rehearsal of another future: one where hijra presence is neither specimen nor spectacle, but an act of world-making. By listening to these images, I suggest that Mona rehearses a future she was denied, imagining a home in a cemetery, dreaming of a palace, and insisting on kinship beyond heteronormative or genealogical forms.

This paper argues that hijra archives, precisely because they are missing, fragmented, or violently inherited, open up a method for rethinking performance historiography. Instead of asking only what is preserved, I ask how refusal, survival, and everyday gestures act as embodied inheritances that rehearse otherwise futures for trans and gender-diverse lives in the Global South. In attending to Mona’s echoes, I explore how counter-archival listening becomes a form of rehearsal, one that challenges inherited structures of exclusion and imagines more capacious performance futures.

Biographies:

Claire Borody is active in the Winnipeg theatre community as a director, playwright, production dramaturge and creative consultant working exclusively on independent experimental performance and dance projects. She recently wrote and directed Kateryna and Havrylo, a full-length play rooted in Ukrainian-Canadian culture. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg.

Aamna Rashid (she/her) is a PhD student in English at UBC, researching post-colonial and gender studies in the SWANA region. Her work examines the construction of “new archives” of resistance, transnational solidarity, and anticolonial aesthetics through art and performance. She has worked as a curator and oral historian, documenting Partition and war histories in Pakistan.

Manvendra (alias Noor) Singh Thakur is a performance artist and PhD student in Comparative Literature and Intermediality at the Université de Montréal. Their research explores queer and trans notions of home, missing archives, and performance in Delhi and Montréal. They work across writing, research-creation, and community-based artistic practices.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Yasmine Kandil

Emilia Hillyer, “The Fantasy of Antiseptic: Performing Rubbish Theory and Critiquing Monumental History via Community-Engaged Gender-Diverse Puppetry Practices”

The “negative privilege” of low art forms like puppetry call out to the scapegoats of the modern moment: gender-diverse people. At a time when community-engagement is in vogue, how can the disenfranchised transgender community best be served? This paper proposes that the inclusion of puppet bodies— objectified bodies made from trash— in such an endeavour is a successful accessibility measure, a generative aesthetic invitation, and a prompt to consider critical histories/rubbish theory. Working with garbage puppet bodies (cardboard, recycled plastics, etc) when transgender bodies are being ‘cleaned up from the streets’ is an effort the ensemble of The Fantasy of Antiseptic has undertaken. Through Boal’s Image Theatre, Schumann-informed aesthetics, and dance improvisation (Snelling’s Rewriting Distance/Zaporah’s Action Theater) the ensemble devised a puppet show, providing a community space for transgender people in a city with one gay bar and offering critical performative lenses to examine anti-trans fascism of the Albertan UCP and the USA. The politics of refusal/unwelcome as expounded upon by Dylan Robinson were integral to our creation process; how do we create without typical narratives of pain surrounding trans bodies? When are cisgender audiences consuming our representations of trans life welcome and when are they refused access? We found puppetry offered innovative ways to imagine queer utopias and manifest new communal/performative ecologies; the lens of rubbish theory clarified our positions in the political climate; and community-engaged work created a celebratory transgender community, flourishing in the face of a world which would prefer we didn’t exist.

Makayla and Mariah Madill, “Stepping Into Connection and Out of Patriarchy”

We inherit our family’s and society’s unspoken, unconscious, and sometimes overt patriarchal rules, beliefs, and ways of being. Our collective wellness requires that we assess these embedded values that may not serve individuals or communities. More specifically, patriarchy contributes to theatre hierarchy, which is a system of domination that gives the creative power to specific roles within the theatre world, like the director. While theatre does require a certain level of leadership, this workshop offers an alternative approach to theatre creation that disperses power amongst more people to encourage a collaborative and inclusive theatre space. The workshop will use applied theatre, which is a community-based approach with the goal of social change and education that can bring awareness to, and alleviate suffering around, the impact of patriarchy. This workshop will provide a supportive community for the participants to share about their experiences with patriarchy, while also offering them the tools, awareness, and confidence to disrupt patriarchal practices and values. In addition, this workshop will model an alternative way of disrupting patriarchy in theatre and provide a space to slow down, reflect, and question some of those inherited patriarchal influences on theatre creation. Theatre can, and should be, creating spaces for diverse opinions and perspectives to build towards more equality, collective thinking, and compassion so that societal and global issues can be addressed constructively.

Keren Zaiontz, “The ‘Extraordinary Gesture’ of Collectivity in Ukraine”

A Ukrainian theatre group dismantles their public art installation in a Düsseldorf city park, a simple A-frame structure used for gatherings, and travel from Germany to a Kyiv suburb, where they use the wood beam materials to rebuild a family home destroyed by Russian rocket fire. The theatre artists hand the original photographs, maps, and drawings of the 2022 reconstruction to another group—ist publishing—an art collective. The ist collective catalogues, and later curates the events in the park, reaching audiences in global art biennales even as they shelter from drone missiles in a war bent on reducing Ukraine to a Russian colony. This paper examines the emergence of networked artist groups and collectives in Ukraine as an antidote to Russia’s rapacious invasion and occupation. It focuses on performances, installations, and texts that emphasize democratic ways of being together in the face of war and threats to bodily and cultural sovereignty. Such groups have created their own artistic commons to address the collective traumas and ongoing crises they navigate both at home and as exiles and expatriates abroad. In the words of ist publishing and its collaborators: “Commonality and community become a trope of the struggle for simply being together—when bodies are in the same place they form an extraordinary gesture that possesses resistance” (Our Years 2023, 17). This paper will end with a consideration of Ukrainian-Canadian Maria Reva’s Booker nominated novel, Endling (2025)–a meta-fictional account of experiencing the 2022 full-scale war in Ukraine from Canada. It was this very distance that prompted Reva to imagine a feminist collectivity in the pages of her novel, offering her female protagonists a means of survival in a time of terror.

Biographies:

Originally from Massachusett and Wampanoag land, Emilia Hillyer is an Scottish/English/Irish/Italian first-generation settler in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan. She is a performer, puppeteer, facilitator, and member of Boston’s Fork & Shoe Theatre Cooperative. Emilia is currently pursuing her MFA in Theatre Practice at the University of Alberta.

Makayla Madill is an MA student at the University of Victoria studying the power of applied theatre for disrupting patriarchal hierarchy. She continues to engage in applied theatre projects and endeavors that inspire her craft and fuel her curiosity for people and their world views.

Mariah Madill is pursuing her MA at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on the experiences and challenges of immigrants and refugees and uses applied theatre to offer community, voice, and representation. She is driven by the endless possibilities of drama and pedagogy.

Keren Zaiontz is assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Theatre & Festivals and co-editor of Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas, winner of the ATHE Award for Excellence in Editing. Her current book project is a cultural examination of global north authoritarian power from the perspective of dissident artists who risk everything and model perseverance in the face of repressive rule.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Andy Houston

Kamrun Naher Liza, “Simple Theatre: A Space for Debate, Dialogue, Reflexivity, Dreaming the Impossible, and the Flight to Infinity”

This panel paper presents a study in which my mentor envisioned a “simple theatre” that “allows debate, dialogue, reflexivity, dreaming the impossible” (Ahmed 218). This project was my attempt to translate that vision into action, grounded by Freire’s principle that transformation emerges through dialogue rather than imposed ideas. Using a combined arts-based research (ABR) and reflexive ethnographic methodology, I worked with schoolgirls aged 12–18 in rural Bangladesh who were interested in sports through thirteen participatory workshops.

In Bangladesh, applied theatre has rarely engaged specific groups in participant-led creation, where participants perform their own stories with minimal facilitation. The absence of sustained, intensive workshop structures revealed a gap in both theory and practice. To address this, the project explored immersive, arts-based processes that integrated movement, local traditions, and theatre-in-education strategies to cultivate embodied learning without external funding. These approaches moved beyond top-down, donor-driven models toward practices that confronted internalized oppression, supported critical thinking, and empowered participants as “architects of [their] own liberation” (Shafeeullah 31).

This study argues that inherited social norms, cultural practices, and artistic traditions can be explored, questioned, and reimagined through applied theatre. The work shows how participants rehearsed new possibilities for movement, voice, and agency, transforming themselves from silent followers of social expectations into active agents of resistance. In performance, audiences also encounter hidden truths, turning post-show spaces into shared forums of dialogue and imagination. By working with inheritance as both a constraint and a creative resource, the project offers insights into how applied theatre can rehearse change for theatre and performance futures.

Rachel Rusonik, “Troubling an Inherited Catharsis: Spectatorship, Empty Gesture, and the Afterlife of Theatrical Devices”

This paper delves into how contemporary spectators navigate a long-standing inherited framing of theatre as a site of escapist entertainment, emotional resolution, and interpretive closure, rather than a catalyst of ethical or political activation. For instance, take the cultural phenomenon of Wicked—a production that trains audiences to equate decoding open allegory with a gratifying “aha, I get it moment”—an example of how fostering this spectatorial reflex is deeply praised and appreciated across modern performance. Yet, exploring pop-culture magazines and Reddit threads suggests that Elphaba’s green skin has stood in for myriad interpretations throughout the years; ranging from a metaphor for racial discrimination to a symbol for those who feel alone advocating on their student councils. This paper analyzes post-performance interviews conducted moments after a Toronto production, analyzing how spectators interpret aesthetic and literary devices like metaphor and symbolism in political productions. While these devices successfully invite audiences to decode meaning, they also act as what Kelsey Blair terms an ‘empty gesture’: an action that fosters a fleeting sense of political comprehension that soothes rather than inspires genuine action. By capturing audience responses precisely in the charged interval between applause and exit, this project traces when aesthetic strategies reinforce inherited expectations of closure versus when they interrupt them, encouraging a productive witnessing. Ultimately, this study argues that refusing vague aesthetic and literary devices in theatrical dramaturgy is central to cultivating more ethically generative and political theatre in so-called Canada.

Fraser Stevens, “Conspiracy and Paranoia: The Consequence of Performing Lies”

This paper explores the theatricality of deception, building on Els van Dongen’s positioning of lies as theatrical events, and examines how such undertakings reshape social realities. Drawing on sources such as Jonas Barish’s Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, Augusto Boal’s conception of theatre as a tool for social change, and Sissela Bok’s ethical analysis of lying, the study positions the lie as a theatrical act with profound societal consequences—corrosive legacies that persist beyond the initial performance. If, as Boal suggested, theatre can liberate and empower, so too can it corrupt and destabilize, engendering paranoia and conspiracy through duplicitous performance. Lies, like theatre, are defined by their artificiality and require staging, scripting, and an audience. Consequently, as Bok notes, lies often set in motion a “chain of deception” (Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life). This paper explores how such chains unfold through theatre and theatre-like practices, eroding trust and fostering systemic distrust. By mapping theatrical techniques—such as staging, scripting, and role-playing—onto the mechanics of deception, the study illuminates the ethical and political stakes of performative falsehoods in contemporary culture.

Biographies:

Kamrun Naher Liza, from Bangladesh, is an MA Applied Theatre student at the University of Victoria. Her work in applied theatre and community projects uses theatre as a tool for social change, fostering critical thinking, creative expression, education, and empowerment, particularly for women and marginalized communities.

Rachel Rusonik is an MA student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies researching dramaturgy and the politics of interpretation. Rusonik has directed multiple productions and worked as an Assistant Production Manager at Kingston’s Kick & Push Festival, inspiring her research in how audiences decode meaning.

Fraser Stevens is an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan in the School for the Arts–Drama. A performance historian, his research engages with duplicitous uses of theatre and performance or what he calls ‘bad theatre’. His practical work, produced most often through his company Almost Human, exists within the experimental world, using complex scenographic practice to explore contemporary issues.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Roberta Barker

Bridget Baldwin, “Rita Reconstructed: The Queer Feminist Legacies of Rita MacNeil”

Performer and songstress Rita MacNeil has long been dubbed “Cape Breton’s First Lady of Song”. Awarded both provincially and federally for her musical and cultural achievements, MacNeil’s performance career has tied her to both stage and screen. As a result, there are abundant examples of how she shaped—and was shaped—by media. MacNeil has become deeply ingrained in the East Coast imaginary as a figure of success and resilience, often aligned with folk and Gaelic musical movements. In recent years, the efforts of feminist and queer artists across Canada have invited rethinkings of MacNeil which highlight her involvement in the women’s movement and her queer identity. Drawing from auto/biographical materials, archival performances, and plays about the singer, my proposed paper seeks to explore these myriad re-imaginings of MacNeil and her legacy. My paper brings these performances into conversation with current representations and reinterpretations of MacNeil, from Lindsay Kyte’s musical biography Dear Rita (2022) to the utilization of her gowns in the Highland Arts Theatre’s production of Hairspray (2025). These performed Ritas expand upon and reveal a careful mediation of self-presentation that worked to avoid “cancellation”—obscuring her efforts in the women’s movement, ignoring the discovery that she had been surveilled by the RCMP, and rendering invisible her decades-long romantic relationship with a woman. I aim to examine the messy contentions with historical fact and with Ian McKay’s notion of Nova Scotian “Folk” required when re-locating facets of MacNeil’s identity—once stifled—to the forefront.

J. Paul Halferty, “A Queer Inheritance: The Life and Career of Maxim Mazumdar”

A Queer Inheritance: The Life and Career of Maxim Mazumdar

In this paper, I examine the work of Maxim Mazumdar, prolific actor, playwright and director, who was born in Bombay/Mumbai, India in 1952, and moved with his family to Montreal, Quebec, at the age of fourteen. In his short but prolific life, he founded the Phoenix Theatre in Montreal, and both the Provincial Drama Academy and the Stephenville Theatre Festival in Stephenville, Newfoundland. He wrote a number of plays (at least five, probably more, two of which are published), and toured his plays internationally. He worked with Quentin Crisp and Eric Bentley in New York, and with Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, New York, where he performed his last play, Lupercal, in 1988, and whose annual new play competition is named in his honour.

As an immigrant and a gay man of colour, Mazumdar’s career and biography provide a unique lens through which to examine forces shaping theatrical production in English Canada in the late 1970s and 1980s – including the early onset of the AIDS crisis, which ended Mazumdar’s prolific career at the age of thirty-six, 28 April 1988. In particular, I am interested in how Mazumdar’s plays – including Oscar Remembered (about Oscar Wilde), Dance for Gods (about Ancient Greek theatre), and Rimbaud (about the French poet Arthur Rimbaud) – all examine aspects of gay life and history – indeed queer inheritance – through invocations of “high art” and European culture. My paper will use Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry to analyse Mazumdar’s plays, all of which imbricate canonical European texts and gay figures in resolutely queer ways. Mazumdar’s plays seem to engage in the kind of mimicry that Bhabha describes when he writes, “Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power” (153). Early in my research, I will visit Boston University archives, where Mazumdar’s papers are deposited, in March 2026.

Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoller, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 152-60.

Avery McMichael, “Writing Gender Diverse Characters for the Stage” In recent years, the number of transgender and other gender diverse characters on stage and in film has been slowly creeping upwards (Myers). However, most of these come from film and television, and many of them cause more harm than good. Transgender, non-binary, intersex, and other gender diverse characters are still grossly underrepresented within published plays (Murphy; Rowen). As members of a diverse artistic community, we need to be comfortable writing these characters, and we need to do it well. Bad representation is worse, oftentimes, than no representation. This paper, currently in progress, seeks to be a guide to the writing of gender diverse characters for playwrights and other theatre makers. The piece draws on a practice of autoethnography, utilizing my own experiences as a gender diverse scholar, playwright, and performer as a pathway into this needed discussion. The proposed work will offer writers, theatre makers, and other artists an opportunity to engage in representation with confidence and care.

Bibliography
Murphy, Natalie Jessica. Representation in the UK Theatre Industry. 2023. Canterbury Christ Church University, Master’s.
Rowen, Bess. “The Trans Theatre Tipping Point.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 45, no. 3, Sept. 2023, pp. 117–21. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_r_00688.

Biographies:

Bridget Baldwin is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph. Her research considers the intersections of gender, class, and nation in Atlantic Canadian theatre. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation, If I Got to Leave, attends to the migrations of white settler Cape Breton women in contemporary performance.

J. Paul Halferty is Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, where he also serves as Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. He is a theatre historian and performance studies scholar whose research examines the intersection of theatre and identity, primarily sexual, gender, national, and racial in Canada and Ireland.

Avery McMichael is a Master’s candidate at the University of Victoria. They are a queer storyteller, focusing on memoir theatre. They received their BA in Applied Theatre from Pacific University, and their MFA in Playwriting from the University of Nebraska. From 2018-2023 they co-ran the queer theatre company, Theatre Viscera.

Location: Movement Room

Moderator: Marlis Schweitzer

Rebecca Harries, “A theatre tool for all: Boal’s Sculptures in Youth Engagement Settings”

The theatre methods and ideas of Augusto Boal provides community youth leaders with tools that support inclusive and egalitarian values even when participants don’t have the capacity or resources to develop forum theatre scenarios. From my experience of the last two years, as the theatre expert participant of the Hearing Unheard Moments Project, I would encourage theatre workers and academics to connect with community leaders and share their theater expertise as a way to build for inclusive, exploratory spaces. The proposed paper analyzes the sculpture exercise in the context of youth community groups.

The sculpture exercise is related to theater of images, and often used as a preliminary step to developing forum theater. In this exercise, there’s a prompt (e.g., “justice”), and then individuals shape their bodies in response to the prompt (i.e, a pose that models justice). Participants observe each other and offer modelling for the human sculptures to engage dialogue and expand our understanding of the experiences of other.

Three reasons why the sculpture exercise is interesting in a youth engagement setting: the entire group can engage as both participants and observers; sculptures allow for dialogue that isn’t dominated by individuals with the most verbal skill; the activity mitigates the potential harm of one narrative, sometimes the most traumatic, dominating the group. This paper will share approaches around how theatre scholars can collaborate and share for community benefit.

Katharine Low and Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, “Holding Each Other Up: Joy, Vulnerability, and the Future of Academic Mentorship”

This paper reimagines the possibility of mentorship through the lens of bell hooks’s pedagogy, with a focus on joy as a sustaining and transformative practice. Traditional mentorship models rely on hierarchies, framing knowledge as something passed down from the experienced to the novice. hooks, however, envisions education as a space of mutuality, care, and co-creation. This pedagogical model provides a radical principle for imagining where mentor and mentee learn with and from each other rather than through one-directional guidance. We argue that joy is central to this vision of mentorship.

Drawing on feminist scholarship on relationality and collective academic practice, we understand joy as a generative, embodied practice that emerges through collaboration and shared connection with each other as we navigate the minefield of the academy and the unique challenges experienced by performance and theatre practice and research. Joy not only fosters belonging but also challenges the alienation and harm often embedded in academic structures. By centering hooks’s pedagogy and the relational power of joy, this paper presents mentorship as a practice of care, presence, and mutual growth. It offers a model where mentorship is not about hierarchy or professional advancement but about sustaining relationships, nurturing intellectual and emotional flourishing, and creating transformative spaces within the academy, and especially so in the creative arts.

Stephanie Dotto, “Joyful Actors: Aging Futures and the Potential of Intergenerational Theatre”

By examining a verbatim theatre performance that brought together older (aged 60 and up) and younger (aged 18–25) adults, this paper finds that staging intergenerational theatre produced intergenerational joy: a collective, interdependent experience not devoid of struggle and challenge that prioritizes the here and now while also envisaging more promising futures. The actors in this project thus challenged normative neoliberal attitudes that suggest that the old have nothing to offer the future, and that the young have little to offer the present. Moreover, the play offered a structure through which actors could challenge societal norms isolating generations from each other and encouraging intergenerational antagonism. The stress involved in undertaking a community-based theatre project was not an obstacle but a gateway to joy, as it produced (and even demanded) a level of interdependence and solidarity not found in other intergenerational relationships commonly structured by hetero-normative family relations.

Biographies:

Stephanie Dotto is the McCain Postdoctoral Fellow in Drama and Screen Studies at Mount Allison University. She received her doctorate from the Frost Centre for Indigenous Studies and Canadian Studies at Trent University.

Rebecca Harries is a Full Professor of Drama at Bishop’s University. Her current research brings theatre performance and research to real world challenges. She is currently involved with the national Hearing Unheard Moments initiative, working with community youth-led groups.

Katharine Low is a practitioner-researcher and is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Medical Humanities at King’s College London. She has over 20 years’ experience in applied theatre practice and health, working in the fields of sexual health, gender equity and urban violence, in the UK and internationally. Her research is embedded in collaborations with arts and cultural organisations, medical practitioners and NGOs to co-facilitate participatory theatre and arts-based projects based around social concerns. Recent publications include: Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication: Apertures of Possibility (2020, Palgrave Macmillan). She currently hosts a podcast called Positively Women: Past and Present.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Robert Motum

Laurel Green and Derek Manderson, “The Assembly: A Game of Civic Decision-Making & Future Thinking for Young Audiences”

Would you rather raise the minimum wage, or build a new hospital? Allocate funding for a rooftop garden, or build new housing developments? If charged with making decisions for their city’s future, what would an audience of young people decide? The Assembly is a participatory performance designed by Toronto-based artists that uses collaborative structures from Legacy board games to invite young people into the shared act of civic decision-making. Donning colourful sashes, flashing voting paddles, and debating the best response to Toronto’s rapid resource fluctuations, the young audience becomes policymakers. Played over the course of eight fictional years, the game draws from real-world scenarios and integrates principles of doughnut economics to make balance, rather than limitless growth, the win condition. The young Assembly is tasked with co-designing a sustainable future wherein present-day needs must be weighed against the needs of future generations. Blending fact and fiction to scaffold participation inside a ‘magic circle’ of play, the performance creates space for young audience-players to grow a capacity for long-term Seventh Generation and ‘cathedral’ thinking. Moving into and out of the role of player and spectator, young participants interrogate, rehearse, and transform systems, relationships, and power structures. As scholars whose research interweaves games and participatory performance, our paper will analyze the dramaturgical implications of The Assembly’s structure to reveal how playing together inside this gameful performance prepares (and doesn’t prepare) young people to reshape the urban cities they are set to inherit. What vision of the future are we playing for?

Jacob Pittini, “Inherited Involvement: Current Trends of Participatory Theatre and Historical Precedents in Canada”

In Collective Encounters, Canadian theatre historian Alan Filewod observed how documentary theatre’s widespread popularity “has proven its premise that Canadian audiences welcome theatre that speaks in their idiom about the communal issues of their lives” (188). This paper will investigate how the endurance of forms of performance such as documentary and verbatim theatre and the current popularity of participatory theatre in Canada affirm this reality.

Conceiving of this enduring impulse to present the communal issues of audiences’ lives to them in ways which actively involve them as an inheritance of Canadian theatre, I will briefly examine the changing contexts fuelling historical and current trends of performance. Contextualizing theatre practices can help determine “virtues and values of theatre and performance that are, if not unique, at least especially important today” (Freeman and Gallagher 3). Contextualizing both past and present practices and comparing them can help demonstrate which virtues and values have been inherited, and how they have endured and evolved over time.

By focusing particularly on the current popularity of participatory performance, this paper will question whether and how audience involvement in the moment of performance may inherit prior national tendencies yet also be a way of rehearsing new futures. If theatre in Canada complicating boundaries between subjects, creators and receivers precedes the twenty-first-century phenomenon of participatory theatre, how do current performances in which participants “have agency to interact in a material manner, creating moments of rupture in the narrative telling or world” (Lewis 18) differ or align with their predecessors.

Filewod, Alan D. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada. University of Toronto Press, 1987.
Freeman, Barry, and Kathleen Gallagher. “Introduction: Taking a Step Back.” In Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions, edited by Barry Freeman and Kathleen Gallagher, University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 3-18.
Lewis, William W. Experiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization. Routledge, 2025.

Jenn Stephenson, “Episodic time in pandemic theatre at home: The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries”

In April 2020, in the very early days of the pandemic lockdown, Toronto-based theatre company Outside the March presented an at-home theatre experience called The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries. When you signed up online and bought your ticket, in addition to sharing your phone number, you were asked to submit to the inspectors at the Ministry your own mundane mystery, something simple and domestic. Mine was the mystery of the door that wouldn’t stay closed. The show then unfolds over the course of six episodes of ten minutes each. On the given week, each day at noon, Monday to Saturday, my phone rang. Each episode featured a different single character for a one-on-one conversation, focused on helping to solve my mystery.

Thinking about the participatory experience of time, what are the dramaturgical properties of serialization. Serialization has been a feature of fictional narratives in other media, notably written stories in newspapers and magazines in the nineteenth century and radio and television in the twentieth century. By contrast, there is no tradition of serial theatre. (Perhaps Angels in America part 1 and part 2 or Shakespeare’s historical tetralogies – but examples are rare.) Three questions: 1) Why doesn’t theatre (typically) serialize when other media do? 2) What does serialization make possible for the artist-creators? 3) What does serialization make possible for the audience, i.e., What are the meaning-making or experiential effects of a serial story? Bonus question: What does this all mean specifically for our experience of The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries?

Biographies:

Derek Manderson is a PhD Candidate in Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at York University. His research imbricates participatory performance and game studies to unpack the dramaturgical structures of play in audience-driven theatrical experiences. His writing has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, and Theater.

Laurel Green is a nationally regarded artist and doctoral scholar whose research-creation work bridges participatory performance and games for social transformation. She is a PhD Student in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at York University, supported by Connected Minds, an interdisciplinary research unit exploring the enmeshment of new technologies in communities.

Jacob Pittini (he/him) is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, developing methodologies for ethically co-theorizing with Canadian theatre audiences. Jacob is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and a Junior Fellow at Massey College.

Jenn Stephenson is a Professor at Queen’s University in the DAN School of Drama and Music. She is the author of three books on drama and performance in Canada. Her most recent book, co-authored with Mariah Horner is PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation (Playwrights Canada Press 2024).

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Jessica Riley

Selena Couture, “Guinness World Records: Dazzle Camouflage & British Imperial Inheritances”

If you search the Lək̓ʷəŋən , Xʷsepsəm and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples lands (aka Victoria, BC where CATR will be convening this year) in the Guinness World Records database, 20 entries pop up. These include: the oldest player to score his age in golf (103 yrs old in 1973); the tallest tower of Guinness World Records books (1000 books measuring 6m in 2019); the most rotating puzzle cubes solved one-handed while hula hooping (531 cubes in 2021) and the most recent female swimming speed records set in June 2025. This paper is a historiographic inquiry into Guinness World Records as a colonial artifact of soft power driven by a fascination with performativity. Now celebrating its 70th year, the book was first published in 1955 and compiled by twin brothers, journalists and right-wing libertarians Ross and Norris McWhirter. I argue this cultural phenomenon that continues to fascinate and repulse readers and viewers around the world, has its origins in the record keeping practices of the British empire which were accessed as it was collapsing post WWII. This seemingly frivolous categorizing of geographic formations and the extremity of human bodies and actions, was originally intended to settle disputes in pubs and was distributed by the Anglo-Irish Guinness beer corporation. That its popularity has never waned, and that it has rarely been the subject of critical analysis, underscores the cultural persistence of the British imperial structures and the success of what I term “dazzle camouflage” extending Laura Levin’s articulation of camouflage in Performing Ground (2014), as a spatial strategy for human identity formation (5) to include the disorientation caused by dazzle.

Tracy C. Davis, “Critical Media History: Fight, Fight, Fight”

The focus of a new book series “Critical Media Histories: Performances and Repertoires” (Bloomsbury) is to think differently about historical subjects by addressing how societies develop forms of aesthetic and media representation while centring performance within (not in opposition to) cultures’ media landscape. Considering performance among, and often integral to, other cultural products of the imagination (literary, visual, material, and corporeal), recognizing how embodied and mediated practices have always coexisted, and countering performance histories that privilege innovation and “breakthroughs” shows how performance is a vital technology for memory and knowledge that is intermittently independent, intermixed, and co-dependent with other formats. This paper draws from the inaugural book in the series to address the knowledge transfers between theatre and warfare. This implicates the training of cavalry for battles in tandem with tilts at arms and other courtly entertainments. Likewise, the history of gunpowder resonates through the histories of warfare and performance, for during the early modern period the same physical chemists who were mercenary consultants for armies’ battlefield tactics moonlighted, in peacetime, to stage spectacles for treaties, betrothals, and other milestones of empires. When later hybrid performance types of wild west shows, tattoos, battle reenactments, and film emerged as distinct media products, they continued the practice of using warfare’s historical technologies and employing pyrotechnics along with live human and equine co-performers, while leaning on the theatrical specialties of costume and prop construction, stage management, and choreography to confirm impressions of authenticity and enhance effects. Thinking of the long interdependent history of performance, martial skills, and production logistics denaturalizes separations between media while recentring performance as the intermediary.

Mariah (Mo) Horner, “Abolition Dramaturgy: The Normative or Liberatory Chorus”

Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s chorus in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, I consider the genealogies and methodologies of communities, collectives, and series’ of carcerality and of abolition. Through the lens of theatre and performance studies, I consider the chorus as both a normalizing presence (like the jury, the “law abiding public”) and as a liberatory, revolutionary body (like the abolitionist activists actively protesting police and prisons) This paper begins with a look at the history and function of theatrical chorus primarily from the perspective of Greek theatre, thinking through the ways the choruses enact control and surveillance. I consider Michel Foucault’s panopticon as another chorally performed normative voice, against his “Lives of Infamous Men” that tarries with the pleasures and dangers of a different sort of chorus. Alongside this theoretical universe, I consider two theatrical case studies. The first, Erin Shields’ play If We Were Birds, an adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis that features a chorus of women who embody victims of sexual violence in war. The second, Prison Dancer by Romeo Candido and Carmen Leilana de Jesus, based loosely on the viral YouTube dancers “the Dancing Inmates,” a group of incarcerated people who turned marching into dancing in a prison in Cebu, Philippines. In this paper, I consider the ways that the chorus can be both normalizing and liberatory as carceral theatricality and abolition dramaturgy.

Biographies:

Dr. Selena Couture (U of Alberta) is a settler scholar whose research deconstructs conceptions of settler colonial white possession while foregrounding the maintenance of Indigenous places through performance. Publications include: Against the Current and Into the Light (2020) and On this Patch of Grass (2018). She is a co-director of the Ecologies research cluster with Hemispheric Encounters.

Tracy C. Davis (Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Northwestern University) specializes in the historiography and methodologies of TaPS research, 19th-century theatre history, economics and business history of theatre, performance theory, and gender and theatre. Her most recent book, The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, won ATHE’s Edited Works Award in 2025.

Dr Mariah (Mo) Horner is theatre artist, musician, abolitionist, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. Along with Dr. Jenn Stephenson, Mo co-authored Play: Dramaturgies of Participation and co-edited Canadian Theatre Review 197: Participation. She currently co-facilitates a Philosophy and Creativity Discussion Group in Collins Bay Institution.

Location: Movement Room

Moderator: Julia Henderson

Chantal Bilodeau, “Daring to Be Solarpunks”

British philosopher Mark Fisher wrote, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In the theatre, this translates into a failure to envision a thriving post-capitalist, post-colonial, post-climate future; instead, offerings on our stages rehearse “capitalist realism.” Indeed, few plays tackle climate issues, and those that do are trapped in the imaginaries of our current systems and the false belief that we have no other options. As a result, they tend to depict dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds. However, in disciplines such as literature, architecture, design, and visual arts, solarpunk – an optimistic, forward-thinking movement that imagines what sustainable societies could look like – is gaining momentum. How might plays adopt the same aesthetic? How can we dare to be solarpunks and rehearse inclusive, decarbonized, decolonized, collaboration-driven, and flourishing futures? Looking at two plays written for Climate Change Theatre Action, a global festival of short plays presented by the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts – Jessica Huang’s Lifeday (2022) and my own Homo Sapiens (2017) – I identify narrative strategies, themes, and motifs that embody the values of the solarpunk movement. I show that there is a world of unexplored possibilities between utopias and dystopias, and argue that as artists, it is our responsibility to break down the self-imposed limits on our imaginary landscape.

Becky Low, “‘I don’t even remember making the conscious choice’ – what narratives of luck and passivity reveal about Vancouver professional theatre”

As part of my doctoral research examining Vancouver professional theatre through a social-relational economic lens, I have spent six months conducting semi-structured interviews with Vancouver theatre artists and arts workers. These interviews have focused on questions of how artists and arts workers evaluate compensation for their work, and by what metrics they determine success.

This paper presents preliminary findings from those interviews. Using the social relational theories of Becker, Ingham, Simmel, and Zelizer, I argue that first-person narratives of careers in theatre illuminate how negotiations of power and value operate within the sector, opening up the possibility for understanding the complex calculations involved in creating and maintaining theatre careers, theatre companies, and the theatre sector more broadly.

This presentation will explore and trouble two notable themes emerging in participant responses to-date: the relative lack of autonomy or desire expressed in theatre artists and arts workers’ narrations of their careers, and the near universal incidence of participants describing themselves as “lucky” when discussing positions of privilege, career advancement, or their access to forms of support like potential access to emergency housing. The template for my process is based on that used by Brook et al for their study of cultural workers in the UK, and builds upon work by Alacovska on relational labour in the arts.

This presentation provides a snapshot of the current state of the professional theatre sector. It is my hope that unveiling this information can serve as a building block towards informed and imaginative sectoral shifts.

Sara Schroeter, “Arresting Hierarchies: Applied Theatre’s Inherited Gifts, Curses, and the Quest for Ways Forward”

Applied Theatre has a rich history that is generally situated between two fields of practice and research: theatre and education. This means that researchers working in this area have also inherited debates about legitimate forms of research and academic rigour from both fields, as well as the cleavages between them. Taking seriously the call to think about Afro- and Indigenous Futurities and the limitations of anthropomorphism, on this 50th anniversary of CATR I would like to re-explore the often unnamed but ever-present hierarchies that exist in the fields that feed Applied Theatre and think about the work that these hierarchies do. Building on MacKey (2016), Busby (2023), and Gallagher’s (2020, 2022) work, I propose that, rather than being treated as second class scholars who are neither perceived as “real” theatre artists nor rigorous scholars, Applied Theatre practitioners and researchers might be viewed as visionaries. With methods that are often collaborative, process-oriented, situated in praxis, and attentive to the ethics of representation, Applied Theatre might offer the kinds of future-oriented practices necessary to meet this socio-political and ecological moment. However, this is not to suggest that Applied Theatre has arrived at perfect solutions or answers for the yet unwritten future. Through my exploration of disciplinary hierarchies, this paper will also examine the blind spots and “stuck places” (Lather, 1998) of Applied Theatre practice and research and imagine possibilities for the future.

Biographies:

Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright and the founding artistic director of the Arts & Climate Initiative, an organization that uses storytelling and live performance to foster dialogue about our global climate crisis. She is writing a series of plays about the social and environmental changes facing the eight Arctic states.

Becky Low is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre at UVic. Her research deals with how artists and arts workers experience, and make sense of, the realities of working in Canadian professional theatre. Becky has worked as a theatre producer and arts administrator. She holds a BA from University of Alberta, and an MA from SFU.

Sara Schroeter is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, where she teaches drama, literacy and anti-racist education classes in French and English. Her research in applied theatre explores youth discourses of race, multimodal literacies, francophone minority language schools, and social justice pedagogies.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Sara Schroeter

Islay Burgess, “(Trans)substantiation and Monstrosity: Consecrating Theatrical Liminality as Additional Liveness”

A longstanding investigatory fixation and debate of theatrical scholarship is that of the precise nature of “liveness” in its relation to theatre. This paper argues that if theatrical text is framed as living document, if theatrical language is “inescapably embodied,” and if there is no fixed definition of “liveness”—but that it can be understood as a simultaneous making and unmaking of theatre—then the fuzzy boundaries therein can be seen as site wherein transgender readings and play may be sought. Positioning a new live subjectivity at each stage of the communicative process—word forming in mind, moving from mind to tongue, word ambulating tongue, tongue giving life to word, word passing between lips, word heard by third parties—then in this precise transition of tongue-to-lips-to-sound it is consumed and thusly slain. This project analyzes the breath wherein the word is neither the liveness of being spoken and the liveness of being received, which gives additional life to myriad chimeric “monstrosities” which prepare for theatrical consumption and consummation. Following in the lineage of transgender scholars and artists’ appropriation of Frankenstein’s monster as embodied subjectivity wherein reclamation and self-authorship seek to circumvent and overwrite prescriptive narratives wrought by cisgender spectators, and borrowing Artaud’s resentment of the cycles of cruelty of both deity and humanity, this paper explores the potentialities of word made flesh and of claiming space within the liminality of the (trans)substantiative process wherein new understandings of “liveness,” “deathness,” and self-authored theatrical “monstrousness” may flourish.

Hannah Cheslock, “Staging Belief and Belonging: Metatheatre and Conservative Religious Identity in The Christians and Heroes of the Fourth Turning:

This presentation examines how contemporary American theatre uses metatheatrical staging practices to challenge inherited conservative religious authority by dramatizing contested religious realities. Focusing on Lucas Hnath’s The Christians (2015) and Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning (2019), I consider how both plays position the theatre as a space in which the entanglements of faith, identity, and politics are not only represented but actively interrogated. Each play embeds its audience within conservative religious environments and invites their implicit or explicit participation in live debates over belief and belonging.

In The Christians, spectators become congregants in a megachurch, listening as a pastor’s provocative sermon triggers a cascading theological and communal rupture. The play stages a searching inquiry into what sustains belief and the emotional and social costs of reexamining doctrines that structure one’s place within a religious community. Heroes of the Fourth Turning similarly foregrounds interior conflict, reuniting four young conservative Catholic friends in the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Through metatheatrical confessions spoken directly to the audience, the characters voice both their frustration with secular dismissal of their faith and their struggles to reconcile the faith they were raised with and the politics they align with.
By situating audiences within these unfolding debates, both plays cultivate reflective participation rather than detached observation. I argue that their nuanced depictions of conservative religious life, made possible through metatheatrical framing, ultimately equip audiences, regardless of their beliefs, with tools to engage more empathetically and sustainably in inter-religious dialogue.

Katharine Low, “Countering Epistemic Injustice with intergenerational Women taking spaces to connect”

Delivered between 2023-24, the Book of Knowledge was a collaborative participatory research project focused on creating space for women participants to reclaim authority about their own health experiences in London, UK. This paper considers the learnings of this co-led collaborative project, drawing attention to the need for more intergenerational spaces for womxn to share and exchange their knowledges and experiences, specifically around health concerns; it addresses the challenges of working co-collaboratively where the participants (the co-researchers) are at the heart of the development process, content and decision-making.

Bringing together an intergenerational group of women living and working in the London Bridge area, the project explored the theme: “What I’d Wish I’d Known and What I’d Like to Pass On”. Through monthly creative arts-based workshops involving conversation, food, and reflection, we explored new ways of thinking and talking about women’s health and wellbeing, exchanged knowledge, experiences and supported one another. Our collaborative research focus was on women’s health experiences, specifically how women’s health concerns tend to be dismissed and are disregarded. For us, this dismissal is a form of epistemic injustice and hermeneutic disregard of women’s health knowledges (c.f. Fricker 2007). This is particularly apposite for the community group we collaborated with, mainly older women from global majority and/or working-class backgrounds. Holding a space for women to reflect on and share their lived experiences of health, being centred as experts in a research context was fundamental to the practice-research.

Biographies:

Islay Burgess is a neuroqueer artist-scholar and PhD student in the University of British Columbia’s Theatre department. He is a playwright, actor, ardent lover of “bad” cinema, and someone deeply uncomfortable writing about himself in third person.

Hannah Cheslock is a PhD student at McGill University. Hannah’s doctoral research explores how religion is staged in contemporary drama as well as how faith and religious belief/non-belief is communicated through embodied performance. Her previous work has studied the politics of dramatic biblical adaptations in ‘secular’ performance settings.

Katharine Low is a practitioner-researcher and is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Medical Humanities at King’s College London. She has over 20 years’ experience in applied theatre practice and health, working in the fields of sexual health, gender equity and urban violence, in the UK and internationally. Her research is embedded in collaborations with arts and cultural organisations, medical practitioners and NGOs to co-facilitate participatory theatre and arts-based projects based around social concerns. Recent publications include: Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication: Apertures of Possibility (2020, Palgrave Macmillan). She currently hosts a podcast called Positively Women: Past and Present.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Jenny Salisbury

Kelsey Jacobson, “Theatre People: Constructions of Audiences as Consumers, Co-Creators, and Curators in Memory and Archive”

Recollections from audience members suggest that audiencing, and the personal archiving of theatrical experiences, can be a deeply impactful process of identity-creation, one that is rooted in strongly held beliefs around role and responsibility. Data collected during in-depth interviews with eighteen audience members across Canada between 2021 and 2025 suggest that for theatre fans, identification as a theatregoer involves deep adherence to expectations of behaviour, critical taste, and affective response. In addition to strong beliefs around the role of the audience as an integral co-creator of experience, those interviewed also frequently pointed to robust personal collections of material or other reminders of experience, ranging from collections of magnets and programmes to excel spreadsheets. Such personal archival practices mark audiences as nuanced curators of memorialization beyond the delineated time and space of performance. Finally, the practice of theatre-going inevitably invokes questions around the role of audiences as consumers and the potential of the ‘algorithmic audience’ whose desires to acquire material and enact preferences of taste drives capitalistic imperatives.

Drawing from studies in fandom, theatre and performance and affect theory, this presentation will analyze intersections of identity-creation with creative consumption, unpacking the ways in which self-identified ‘theatre fans’ operate as co-creators, curators, and consumers of theatre. Such analysis prompts wider consideration of the ways in which theatre may drive reification of hegemonic and capitalistic norms even as individuals find pleasure in identifying as ‘theatre people.’ Ultimately, it raises the question of what constitutes ‘theatre people’ and when do personal archives cross the boundary of capitalism standards?

Frédérique LeBel, “Ellen Terry’s Ophelia as Performance Repertoire”

On December 30, 1878, Ellen Terry performed the character of Ophelia for the first time at the Lyceum Theatre, London, to critical acclaim. After seeing her, Edward Gordon Craig recollects, “When the curtain came down, the thought left with us was not ‘That’s the way to do it’ but ‘It is the only way to do it’” (qtd. in Cockin 426). Evidently, her performance became a benchmark for stage portrayals of Ophelia: well into the 20th century, critics continue to compare other actresses to Terry, and to this day, her name frequently appears in studies on Ophelia.

My presentation examines the passing down of elements of performance from one actor playing Ophelia to the next—beginning with Terry. The performance elements I highlight include gestures and costumes, but also a period-appropriate adaptation of madness for the stage. Terry famously visited an asylum to prepare for her role; what she saw informed her performance, and remnants can still be observed in contemporary productions, despite an evolving understanding and conceptualizing of mental illness.

I consult 19th-century reviews and criticism, which offer precise descriptions of Terry’s performance, as well as her autobiographical writings, to demonstrate how her portrayal influenced stagings for almost 150 years, such as Muriel Hewitt in 1925 (Birmingham Repertory Theater), Frances Barber in 1984 (Royal Shakespeare Company), and Siân Brooke in 2015 (Barbican Centre). I trace specific elements of Terry’s 1878 portrayal to argue that contemporary Ophelias have inherited an embodied repertoire of past performances.

Biographies:

Kelsey Jacobson is an associate professor at the DAN School of Drama and Music and Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Queen’s University. She is also a co-founding director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research.

Frédérique LeBel is a PhD student in English at Université de Montréal. Their dissertation considers the two-way transaction between Ophelia’s onstage history and the history of madness in women throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. They worked as an English CÉGEP teacher and consistently hold TA positions in their department.

Location: Roger Bishop Theatre

Moderator: Carmen Alatorre

Yasmine Kandil and Jena Mailloux, “Reimagined Places of ‘Home’ through Newcomer Immigrant Queer Journeys”

Places, locations and experiences from the past are embodied and brought to life in places of the present, creating a reimagined hopeful future for newcomer queer immigrants and refugees. Celebratory theatre workshops and a devised applied theatre performance become the vehicles from which to create a bridge between the two worlds, bringing healing and a sense of belonging and increased self-worth for this participant group. The research team asks, what transformations take place when place of the past reconciles with place of the present, and how does that shift perspectives of racialized queer newcomers by settlers and non-queer immigrants?

Colby Mackenzie, “Rejecting Secular Inheritance: Belief in Kim Senklip Harvey’s Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story”

Secularization, the theory that modernity necessitates a decline in religious belief, has failed, with scholars such as Peter L. Berger and Mark C. Taylor arguing that the theory failed to account for the continued vitality of religious expressions in the modern world. However, the field of performance scholarship has maintained an attitude of secularization–reifying the staunch separation of the rational academy and the irrational church–despite its collapse. Scholars such as Dana Tanner-Kennedy and Sharon Aronson-Lehavi have pushed back against the academy’s tendency to cringe away from discussions of belief but these works do not examine Canada’s unique religious contexts. My paper addresses the issue of secular attitudes in performance studies with special attention to how Indigenous drama resists the colonial inheritance of secularism. Specifically in my essay I will look at Kim Senklip Harvey’s Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story in order to show how Harvey stages Indigenous resurgence through spirituality in response to the colonial imposition of “Christian secularism” (Pellegrini 2009). I argue that secularism is an inheritance we should not accept as it upholds Western narratives of colonialism that discount the embedded and embodied nature of Indigenous faith. When we set aside traditional secular views that diminish the affective potential of belief, we uncover the rich world of compassion and connection that exists within theatre that stages belief.

Biographies:

Yasmine Kandil is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria. Her research is in the area of applied theatre with special focus on celebratory theatre. In this presentation, she is collaborating with Carmen Aguirre and Carmen Alatorre to present papers on the topic of Race and Identity Politics in the Theatre profession and academic spaces.

Colby Mackenzie (they/them) is a white gender queer MA student in Drama at the University of Alberta in Treaty 6/Métis Region No. 4. Their research focuses on contemporary immigrant and Indigenous drama in Canada responding to secularization and the continued vitality of belief.

Jena Mailloux is a queer researcher who recently completed an Interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Education and Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria. Prior to her graduate studies, she lived and worked in Northern Canada. In 2018, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a specialization in Applied Theatre.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Jennifer Roberts-Smith

Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, “Playing Race Critically: Towards Exploring Embodied Negotiation of Racialized Theatrical Space”

At an existential level, I have been undone by the colonial inheritance we call Canadian theatre. As a working professional of colour, I have been made through innocuous and injurious ways to feel somehow smaller than even the physical boundary of my skin. But I am attempting now to remake myself and others through my dissertation project, Playing Race Critically: Embodied Negotiation of Racialized Theatrical Space. This dissertation uses a virtual reality (VR) game centered on my fifteen-year career (Phase 1) as an elicitation device to enrich conversations with other racialized minority performers regarding their accounts of negotiating racially hegemonic theatrical space throughout their careers. At stake in these conversations (and this dissertation broadly) is an expansion of the concept of “safety” in theatrical space, one that takes into account the ongoing parallel processes of phenomenological identity formation between racially hegemonic and non-hegemonic actors. This paper articulates both the process of arriving at this concern for existential safety, the work left in addressing it, and the tensions between phenomenology, theatricality, and game design that have accompanied me along the way.

Eddie Feng, “Computational Occult: Rehearsing the Post-Pandemic Future in Chinese AI Theatre”

This paper looks at a recent trend in Chinese experimental theatre: the use of artificial intelligence to address the transition into a post-pandemic society. From the virtual lockdown theatre to the hybrid pandemic-era performances, digital venues have provided vital alternatives for artists to navigate terrain that human writers often cannot approach due to its sensitivity. In a nation pursuing a techno-utopian future, their work paradoxically turns toward a form of computational occult, summoning the ghosts of social discontent and contested identity to make sense of an increasingly hollowed everyday life.

I unpack this practice through two case studies. In Lying Flat 2.0 (Wang Chong, 2024), ChatGPT, together with Suno, imagine an escape for the tang ping generation, manifesting their wish to retreat from a world that is always pushing for progress. In My Name Is Red (Zhong Haiqing, 2025), a chorus of LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc.) reconstructs the uproar of the TikTok‑refugee migration, blending scattered online voices into an echo chamber that drifts through endless noise, mimicry, and fragmentation.

Following Yuk Hui (2016), I argue that this human-AI assemblage in theatre presents a vernacular response to the inheritance of technological logic. Recast from technocratic instruments into nodes of a moral-aesthetic order, language machines are situated by Chinese artists within distinctive cultural and ethical imaginaries. This practice is more than a diagnosis a haunted present; it performs an exorcism of algorithmic blindness. It keeps China’s future open to question, rehearsing a change in how we relate to the machines that shape our lives.

Tailynn Smith-Vetter, “Fouettes Into Fascism: Online TradWives as Fascist Performance”

“I wanted to be a Ballerina. I was a good Ballerina.” – Hannah Neeleman

The paper explores the social media phenomenon of “TradWives” through a case study of TikTok creator Hannah Neeleman – founder of Ballerina Farm, mother of eight, and beauty pageant titleholder. By analyzing Neeleman and her performance of traditional gender roles for a large audience the I explore how the performance of digital femininity, Mormon ideology, and the aestheticization of domestic labour contribute to a soft pipeline toward far-right political principle

Despite fashioning her online brand as apolitical homesteading, Neeleman’s content participates in the broader online resurgence of mid century domestic ideals that have been on the rise since 2020 in Western social media. Through close analysis of her media coverage, pageant discourse, the doctrine of The Church of Latter Day Saints, and her own curated digital presence, I argue that Ballerina Farm constructs a seductive visual fantasy of traditional motherhood, made possible only through significant wealth, an unseen labour force, and social media monetization.

Where social media has often been a platform for left-leaning discourse, Neeleman’s content aesthetic is firmly situated in the long history of gendered marketing and the authoritarian family structure discussed by theorists like Wilhelmin Reich and Betty Friedan. By glamorizing strict gender roles in online spaces like TikTok, Neeleman repackages the restrictive norms women have historically resisted, making them palatable through the performative nature of social media.

Biographies:

Shawn DeSouza-Coelho is an award-winning artist, author and magician. He has performed across Canada, written two books, and contributed to numerous academic journals. He is also currently a SSHRC-funded PhD candidate at York University, studying the phenomenology of racialized performers in hegemonic theatrical spaces within the Southern Ontario theatre industry.

Eddie Hanchen Feng is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga. With over ten years of experience in theatre, his work broadly examines the impact emerging technologies have on human subjectivity and artistic sovereignty. In 2023, he co‑produced China’s first AI‑written play, AI: Offending the audience.

Tailynn Smith-Vetter is a recent Masters graduate from the University of Toronto, she is a Stage Manager by trade and a social media scholar by circumstance. As someone who became involved in online spaces at a young age, Tailynn is interested in the ways that social media influences us, and we influence it.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Alex Ferrone

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, “Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder”

Drawing on my book, Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder, this paper examines performance ethnography and autofiction as political sites for imagining alternative futures, more-than-human ethics, and practices of worldmaking. I focus on dramatic storytelling sessions with Randia, a talented Romani storyteller and performer, which aimed to document her life as an elderly and disabled woman in post-EU accession migration-era Poland. Randia, the mother of eight, saw many of her children move to England, and when old age and disability prevented her from fortune-telling, she became a “prisoner of the fourth floor”—a condition defined by loneliness, lack of basic amenities, silence, and the absence of “quiet care.” In our dramatic storytelling sessions, Randia stepped into her characters, and the roved—between the past, the present, and the future, between different locations, and between the world of the living and the world of the spirits. Through performance, her characters changed history and the lives of others. They could even undo death. I argue that Randia’s performances were a form of quiet activism—a mode of listening and being present—that rehearsed alternative lives, worlds, and futures for herself and her loved ones. She articulated an ethics of care among individuals, communities, and spirits. Ultimately, I examine the potential of performance ethnography as a means of intergenerational knowledge-sharing that imagines a world where elderly can live dignified lives.

Heunjung Lee and Julia Henderson, “Dementia in Opera: Analyzing Dementia Narratives through a Citizenship Lens”

In recent years, a small but significant number of opera productions have centred on aging characters living with dementia as protagonists. This paper analyzes the emergence of new dementia narratives in two contemporary operas: Bluebeard’s Castle (2025), produced by Edmonton Opera, and Sky on Swings (2018) by Opera Philadelphia, written by Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch. Both productions foreground love stories—Bluebeard’s Castle explores enduring and evolving forms of care between a couple married for over forty years, while Sky on Swings traces the new connection between two older women at different stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Through our analysis, we argue that these operas challenge the dominant, stigmatizing narrative of dementia as a story solely of decline and loss. They portray the struggles faced by characters living with dementia, and at the same time, foreground dementia as a condition that can foster deep love. Bluebeard’s Castle stages a couple’s enduring mutual love across time; however, aspects of its composition, design, and staging mean it does not fully escape conventional dementia narratives. Sky on Swings, on the other hand, stages a more radical narrative of connection, as love emerges not despite memory loss but through it, and characters are “released” from conventional identities and rational selves.

Zhuohao Li, “From Body to Embodiment: Chinese Calligraphy as Methodology in Somatic Practice”

This paper investigates how Chinese calligraphy provides a methodology for dancers in somatic practice through the exploration of character imagery, metaphorical meaning, and writing principles. Scholars such as Barbara Clark and Nancy Topf have developed approaches to cultivating bodily awareness by visualizing anatomical structures and attuning the body to language sounds. While Clark and Topf emphasize phonetic engagement in developing somatic awareness, this study turns to the pictographic features of Chinese characters as an alternative modality of somatic imagination. As a logographic system that retains its pictorial legacies, Chinese writing offers dancers a visual and conceptual resource for reimagining the body through the act of inscription.

This framework finds choreographic realization in Lin Hwai-min’s Cursive trilogy (2001–2005) with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Here, the gestural dynamics of calligraphy—its rhythm, pressure, and release—are translated into choreographic principles guiding movement and spatial composition. Lin reimagines the brushstroke as a kinetic impulse arising from breath and internal energy, transforming the stage into a living scroll where ink becomes movement and inscription becomes embodiment. Calligraphy thus functions not merely as an aesthetic motif but as a somatic methodology that cultivates ecological awareness by revealing interrelations encoded in pictographic character formation, categorization, and writing principles. By tracing the perception of the body in calligraphic practice, this paper demonstrates how Chinese calligraphy, as a living legacy, reframes contemporary dance in the Sinophone world and explores its potential application in somatic practice beyond Chinese-language speakers.

Biographies:

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University. Her research interests lie in performance ethnography, autofiction, and research-creation. Her recent book Randia’s Quiet Theater (2025) was awarded the Association for Women in Slavic Studies 2025 Heldt Prize for Best Book Introducing New, Innovative, and/or Underrepresented Perspectives into any Area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies.

Dr. Heunjung Lee is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary. Her project, Cultural Dance for Dementia, investigates how a culturally tailored dance program can support the identities and creativity of Korean older adults with dementia.

Dr. Julia Henderson is assistant professor in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD in theatre.

Zhuohao Li is a PhD candidate in Performance and Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta. Her research investigates the saturation of Lyricism in Chinese calligraphy and contemporary dance in terms of performers’ training methods, choreography, and mise en scène. She is also a dramaturg, performer, calligraphy practitioner, editor, and Chinese- English translator.

Location: Design Room

Moderator: Kelsey Jacobson

Tracy Ross, “ART/IF/ACTS: Rehearsing Embodied Futures in University Space”

From my overlapping positions as lecturer, doctoral student, artist, and parent, I trace the worn paths of a corporate university where exhaustion, disconnection, and “hope circuits” are frayed. My doctoral work asks: how might we re-map these spaces so that educators and students can inhabit them differently, through Body, Space, and Image?

In this paper, I rehearse a not-yet-complete inquiry into a framework I am calling ART/IF/ACTS. Inspired by theatre-based pedagogy, 4E cognition, and Lefebvre’s spatial triad, ART/IF/ACTS imagines pedagogy as something we live through the body rather than simply apply to it. ART names the imaginative, creative potential of learning; IF marks the liminal “as if” threshold where other futures become momentarily possible; ACTS are the embodied practices that leave traces in classrooms, corridors, and meeting rooms.

I outline a three-phase a/r/tographical research design—solo explorations, an immersive event entitled ART/IF/ACTS: A Research Experience (gallery + Long Table), and artistic translations—knowing that by the time of this conference, I will still be in the midst of the work. Rather than presenting findings, I offer this project as a methodology-in-motion, a way of rehearsing futures for university teaching that attends to nervous systems, relational space, and metaphor as tools for repair.

In sharing maps-in-progress, I invite conversation about how we might collectively reimagine institutional practices: not as fixed routes, but as evolving routes and waypoints—places to pause, notice, and reorient—through which more livable academic futures might be rehearsed.

Jenny Salisbury, “When Audiences Build Performance: Inheriting stories and expectations in Nassim Soleimanpour’s BL_NK”

War, armed conflict, and displacement reshape our world, our inheritances, and our expectations of the future. While art and performance are included in the list of casualties, human beings often turn to aesthetic experience as a survival tactic, as we nurture beauty, community, and hope in the midst of war (Howell 2024). Where violence is a means of severing connection and community, performance can often rebuild or reach out past or through the conflict. This is the premise of Nassim Soleimanpour’s play BL_NK, staged at Ottawa’s GCTC in March, 2026.

Soleimanpour is an Iranian theatre artist who uses storytelling and performance participation to combat the isolation of violent regimes and human displacement. Finding himself unable to travel, he created a stagecraft to build community across distance. In BL_NK, a new performance is created each night between audiences and actors encountering prompts and scripts from Soleimanpour for the first time. “This collaboration transforms the script into a story machine to share the life of the playwright, the performer, and an audience member who sees their future determined by the imagination of others” (GCTC). This paper examines the audience aesthetic labour within the bounds of the play, and the remembered legacies and futures described after.

Building on my previous research into aesthetic trust and community-care webs, BL_NK becomes a case study in audience care and creation in aesthetic experiences that combat war.

Works Cited
GCTC. (2025). BL_NK – GCTC: Great Canadian Theatre Company. https://www.gctc.ca/shows/blnk
Howell, G. (2024). RESTORING ARTS PRACTICES AFTER ARMED CONFLICT: The Critical Junctures that Support Collaborative Arts-Based Interventions. In Routledge Handbook of Arts and Global Development (pp. 163–175).

Atefeh Zargarzadeh, “Rehearsing Belonging, Administrative Inheritance, and the Politics of Legibility: A Case Study of Nowadays Theatre”

Canadian theatre institutions often frame equity and multicultural inclusion as settled inheritances of the field. Yet the mechanisms that allocate legitimacy—grant eligibility, juried assessment, presenter networks, and data categories—still reproduce uneven access. This paper argues that emergence can function as an administrative inheritance: a classification produced through institutional design that can re-position established immigrant artists as “emerging” after migration. I read this not as a personal career reset but as a field effect shaped by what Bourdieu names symbolic power: the authority to define value, professionalism, and “fit,” and to convert those definitions into material outcomes.

The paper centres on Nowadays Theatre through oral histories with its co-founder Mohammad Yaghoubi, an Iranian-Canadian artist whose prior cultural capital in his home country was substantial, yet whose Canadian trajectory required rebuilding networks, eligibility, and institutional recognition. I place their testimony in conversation with Canadian cultural policy documents, Canada Council strategy materials, and census- and survey-based evidence on arts labour, participation, and belonging. I will argue that these data sources are not background; they are governance tools that shape identities and equity priorities through what they measure, aggregate, and omit. I show how “arms-length” arts funding—often presented as neutral distance from the state—can still operate as a proximate form of governance when status assumptions, category design, and support programs differentially enable access.

Using Bhabha’s liminality to name the in-between position immigrant artists inhabit, I trace how “intercultural legibility” pressures (what must be explained, translated, or made saleable) intersect with administrative filters to stall/shape capital conversion. In closing, I outline practical shifts in eligibility design, applicant support, and data tracking that would better align equity commitments with the realities of immigrant theatre-making.

Biographies:

Tracy Ross is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, where she has taught for the past seven years, and a doctoral student in Educational Leadership. A multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theatre artist, her work explores embodied pedagogy, a/r/tography, and arts-based approaches to reimagining university learning.

Jenny Salisbury is a director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and a lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her work is published in Theatre Research in Canada, Qualitative Inquiry, Arts, McGill Journal of Education and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Atefeh (Aati) Zargarzadeh is a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies at the University of Victoria. Her doctoral research historicizes nuanced narratives of dislocation and identity negotiation within minoritized communities, focusing on less-represented Middle Eastern immigrant artists. It examines how these diverse exilic identities intersect with the politics of theatre production, cultural appropriation, and identity representations within Canada’s intercultural theatre spaces.

Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre

Moderator: Stephen Johnson

Claire Fogal, “Relational Performance Pedagogy as Creative Inheritance”

This paper shares the key findings of my 2024 UBC dissertation “Relational Performance Pedagogy: Decroux and Grotowski based innovations in Western Canada.” The project was personal, investigating the entwined training inheritance I’ve received from my father Dean Fogal, a first-generation creative descendant of Etienne Decroux, as well as three primary physical theatre mentors from the lineage of Jerzy Grotowski: first-generation teacher Linda Putnam, and second-generation artists Kathleen Weiss and David MacMurray Smith. MacMurray Smith is also a second-generation “Decrouvian” as a student of Decroux’s assistants Jean Asselin and Denise Boulanger. I see the pedagogical developments of my four teachers as laterally hierarchal “diagonal transmissions” within their respective lineages – honouring their sources with integrity while extending in new directions. Within their collective innovations I identify what I term “relational performance pedagogy.” Techniques developed by these teachers promote the relationality, autonomy and wellbeing of the actor by cultivating a capacity for what I call portable “grounded belonging.” The productive intersection between the Grotowski lineage and Indigenous theatre development in Canada is traced through Saskatchewan Cree theatre artist and theorist Floyd Favel’s appreciation for Grotowski’s non-racist teachings and encouragement, as well as MacMurray Smith’s twelve-year service as Core Trainer for Margo Kane and Full Circle First Nations Performance’s Ensemble Training Program which nurtured some of the most prominent Indigenous theatre makers working today. Through their comprehensive relationality, the practices of Fogal, Putnam, Weiss and MacMurray Smith are valuable contributors to a forward-facing embodied performance pedagogy integrating both personal agency and ensemble wellbeing.

Jill Carter and Kathleen Gallagher, “‘And what remains for the two-leggeds to do’?: AI, teaching, and the change we never asked for”

Theatre scholars and teachers Jill Carter and Kathleen Gallagher recently attended a keynote talk by a Nobel prize-winning scholar who argued that AI teachers are already better than human ones. These AI teachers have ‘inherited’ language and teaching skills from their human trainers, already surpassing our teaching value; they do what we do more efficiently and effectively, so said the expert.

As we transition into the greater presence of AI in classrooms, rehearsal spaces, and artistic practices, our paper will seriously consider what this move means for the social relations of teaching and learning and for the long traditions– Indigenous, western, eastern—and human inheritances of teaching. Carter and Gallagher will present on reflexive fieldwork they have undertaken on the matter of teaching that is not AI-driven, taking account of what is happening in these relations and contexts of questioning and collaboration that technological innovation might never learn. If storytelling is a ceremonial act, how will the ceremonial encounter (in spaces of teaching and learning, within the research endeavor, or on the public stage) shift and transform with the introduction of an other-than-human conductor? Proceeding from an honest, undefensive exploration of what teaching is/does/means, we consider in this paper what is left for the two-leggeds of now to do, and to ‘pass down’, to future generations.

We take seriously bell hooks’ assertion that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” and have asked ourselves what role teachers must play in this complicated moment of passage.

Andy Houston and Reina C. Nuefeldt, “Dialogic + Relational Aesthetics: Engaging Difference on Campus through Performance and Pedagogy”

How do we reconceive pedagogies to support new directions in theatre and performance that at the same time address problems of difference and division within a university setting? This paper presents insights from a co-taught course called “Relational Aesthetics Towards Dialogue” in which we brought together pedagogies from Theatre and Performance with Peace and Conflict Studies to address issues of difference and polarization on campus.

Relational aesthetics, drawing on Bourriaud, Kester, Bishop, and O’Donnell immerses students in collaborative artistic creation with the broader campus community, in pursuit of a platform of engagement which challenges traditional representations of identity, language, the body, and place in contemporary discourse and media. Critical dialogue, drawing on Gurin, Nagda and Zuñiga, emphasizes building relationships and understanding through storytelling, empathic listening, perspective-taking while attending to constitutive effects of power and privilege.

The combination of these two approaches was our attempt to engage difference with care and creativity, building ‘architectures’ of co-reliance, trust, and respect amongst students.

In the paper we discuss how these pedagogies worked in practise, and how this process was reflected in the students’ projects.

Biographies:

SSHRC supported UBC Public Scholar Claire Fogal’s 2024 dissertation examines the pedagogy of her father Dean Fogal and other senior Grotowski and Decroux-based mentors. A Vancouver director, teacher and theatre creator, Claire contributed to The Mime Handbook and Research and Reconciliation, and published in TDPT, Percées, and upcoming Embodied Action.

Jill Carter (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi), theatre-maker and faculty member at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (CDTPS) at the University of Toronto, applies Indigenous aesthetic principles and traditional knowledge systems to contemporary performance.

Kathleen Gallagher is Director of the CDTPS and studies theatre pedagogy and global social issues and relations.

Andy Houston (he/him/they) is an associate professor in the Theatre and Performance program at the University of Waterloo.

Reina C. Nuefeldt (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies.