CATR Conference 2023

Performing Shores / The Shores of Performance

Whale painting by Mi'kmaq artist Alan Syliboy

Keynote Speakers

shalan joudry

Mi’kmaw poet and storyteller

shalan joudry is a Mi’kmaw poet, storyteller, podcast producer, playwright, actor and singer. She is also an ecologist and cultural interpreter.

Mike and Mique’l Dangeli

Git Hayetsk Dancers

Shauntay Grant

Poet and playwright

Plenary Address: Irresistible Practices

Katrina Dunn (Leader, Course Correction Working Group), Hope McIntyre and Kimberley Skye Richards (Leaders, Environmental Stewardship Working Group)

Irresistible Practices is a shared plenary session profiling the thematic overlap of two of CATR’s Working Groups: Environmental Stewardship in Theatre and Performance Education and Course Correction: Reorienting Approaches to Space in Theatre and Performance. The Environmental Stewardship working group has a mission to re-imagine how we teach, document, and prepare students for sustainable practices in theatre and performance that respond to the unfolding climate crisis. Course Correction builds on the legacy of the spatial turn by defining and exploring new directions for spatial perspectives on theatre and performance, including environmental ethics, feminist and queer spatial theory, and the decolonization of spatial methodologies. With a determination to make change “irresistible,” this plenary exhibits the multifaceted practices of the two groups and offers attendees an opportunity to share in the discussion.

Conference Outline

The shore has been a key site of performance from time immemorial. Mi’kmaw Elder Stephen Augustine describes how, in Mi’kma’ki–the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, where much of this conference will take place—spring gatherings in which the community exchanged songs and stories historically occurred “at the mouth of the river, on the coastline.” Many of Asia’s and Europe’s most celebrated theatres took root on riverbanks. In her 2019 book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Tiffany Lethabo King underlines the decolonizing potential of thinking with shoals and shores, advancing a theoretical approach that “disrupts colonial geographies” and “forecloses settlement and permanent landing on its always shifting and dissolving terrains.” In an age when many shorelines are threatened by climate change, acknowledging their importance to performance cultures seems especially vital. Hence, CATR’s 2023 conference, “Performing Shores / The Shores of Performance,” invites theatre scholars and artist to gather on literal and theoretical shorelines in order to discuss and re-imagine the future shores of theatre, drama, dance, and performance studies in Turtle Island and beyond.

Dear CATR 2023 Delegates,

Welcome from across Turtle Island, the land, waters, and shores called “Canada,” and beyond! At CATR 2023: Performing Shores / The Shores of Performance, two hundred drama, theatre, and performance scholars and practitioners will gather online and in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. Ça fait exactement vingt ans que le colloque de l'ACRT se tient à Halifax et nous sommes ravis d’y revenir en 2023!

The Canadian Association for Theatre Research is constitutive of its members. Since 1976 we have gathered as a unique advocacy group to share our research, our practices, and our perspectives through the multi-pronged medium of the annual conference. Chaque année il y a eu de grands défis, surtout ces dernières années lorsque que nous sommes passés en ligne et puis en format hybride. Mais depuis 47 ans nous n'avons jamais échoué, nous avons toujours prospéré. We owe a true debt to Roberta Barker, Kailin Wright, Heather Davis-Fisch and their team of volunteers and staff who have made CATR 2023 possible. Merci à Roberta Barker, Kailin Wright, Heather Davis-Fisch et à leur équipe de bénévoles et d'employés qui ont rendu possible le colloque de l’ACRT 2023. I speak from experience when I say that chairing our conference brings great rewards of collaboration, learning, and discovery. Je tiens également à remercier nos commanditaires, les agences académiques et artistiques, les éditeurs et les donateurs individuels qui ont fourni des fonds pour cet événement.

I’ll conclude with my President’s Challenge to you: Attend the sessions that best sync with your own research and praxis, but also, please, step outside your usual focus and attend sessions on topics with which you’re less familiar, featuring scholars and artists whose work is new to you. L'étendue des activités de nos membres est vraiment inspirante. This breadth has opened up new horizons as we perform our shores, and shore up our performances at CATR 2023!

Robin C. Whittaker
CATR President / Président de l’ACRT

Saturday, June 10

11:15 – 12:45 ADT

Performing Space and Indigenous Stories

Moderator: Michelle MacArthur

Transatlantic dialogues between Indigenous theatre artists, theorists and scholars from Canada and Upper Silesia, Poland.

The paper reflects first on the developments in scholarship and educational activities in the last two decades at the University of Silesia (Poland), which resulted from transatlantic encounters between Indigenous and Upper Silesian writers/scholars/artists. These were diverse embodied physical, as well as online and textual contacts, via workshops, lectures, conferences and many educational projects which created spaces for exchanging ideas focusing on Indigenous cultures and theatre in Canada. They eventually developed into the exploration of theatrical practices of Upper Silesians, who represent the biggest unrecognized minority by the Polish state, with its own distinct language and culture.

I discuss the impact of these encounters both on research methodologies and teaching on Indigenous cultures and theatre at the University of Silesia, as well as on the analysis of the Upper Silesian Cultural Awakening, particularly the developments in Upper Silesian theatre. The Indigenous critical paradigms turn out to be conducive not only to reading the developments in the Upper Silesian minority theatre in Poland but also have the potential to foster the development of Upper Silesian theatrical sovereignty by foregrounding the importance of staging plays that challenge the mainstream efforts of polonizing the region, and which foreground Silesian perspectives. The politicized dialogues of Indigenous and minoritized East European theatre scholars/artists, who are indigenous to their specific cultural locations (e.g. Favel points out the indigeneity of Grotowski and of Polish scholars collaborating with him), show the importance of performance as a form of agency in the face of dominant cultures, and its role in the re-indigenization of the world.

Eugenia Sojka, Ph.D., D. Litt., Associate Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, and Institute of Culture, University of Silesia Poland, Adjunct Professor at the Department of English, University of the Fraser Valley, Canada.

Bio: Her interests focus on Canadian Indigenous and Diasporic literatures and cultures, specifically on Indigenous drama, theatre and performance. She is the author of numerous publications in the area of Canadian Studies. Her recent co-edited monograph Piszący z ziemi. Teatr Indygenny Floyda Favela [Writing from the Earth. Indigenous theatre of Floyd Favel and other essays], includes her critical text and co-translations of Favel’s theoretical essays, play and poetry.

Performance as a tool for the reappropriation of urban public spaces by Indigenous people: the relationship to the St. Lawrence River

Public spaces in Montreal are increasingly inhabited by performances by Indigenous members, often featuring dances from the pan-Indianist movement and pow-wows, these large annual gatherings of the various Indigenous Nations combining dances, songs and the wearing of traditional clothing. The body of the dancer or actor is at the center of creation in the performing arts, and theatre and dance have the unique quality of bringing together actors and spectators in a common space to witness an event at a given time.

One of the objectives of my thesis was, through a performative approach, to produce a collaborative methodology anchored in collective action. An approach to research that is in tune with Indigenous realities can allow for implementing a method of co-creating spatial knowledge connected to performance. Thus, after gaining a better understanding of what an Indigenous perception of space might be through pow-wows and nurturing a reflection on the indigenization of the city with key actors, I assembled a team to set up collaborative laboratories, referred to here as “collaboratories.” These “collaboratories” led to meetings with the whole group and to sensory explorations of public spaces with the dancers. This process allowed us to grasp how performance, and more particularly dance, can become a tool for rethinking urban public space according to a perception of space that reflects the Indigenous worldviews.

In this presentation, I will discuss the theme of water, present in the celebration of pow-wows through the recurring reference to motherhood. I will also discuss the relationship to the St. Lawrence River of the urban Indigenous community of Montreal, revealed through the “collaboratories”.

Cassandre Chatonnier – Theatre Designer and Researcher

Cassandre Chatonnier has a diploma from the École Boulle in Interior Design, Landscape Design and Exhibition Design in France. She graduated from Concordia University in Design for the Theatre in January 2011. Since graduation, she has designed sets, props and costumes for plays in English and French. She is also teaching at l’École de théâtre du Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe. Having worked in interior design, Cassandre Chatonnier’s work is largely influenced by architecture. She is also interested in the relationship between the actor and the space and how it can feed her practice. She holds a master’s degree in theatre from UQAM on this subject, which she obtained with honours. She has just finished her PhD in Urban Studies at INRS, where she is interested in the relationship between Indigenous performance and appropriation of space and in co-creating a methodology for rethinking urban public spaces through dance.

11:15 – 12:15 ADT

Hosting Your 2023-24 Event on Theatre Agora (1-Hour Session)

Presenters: Jordana Cox, Katrina Dunn, Meysam Khavari, Jake Nevins, Sima Sheybani

More info

Come find out how to use our newly-designed virtual venue for your next workshop, seminar, teach-in or performance. Curator Jordana Cox and other members of the Theatreagora.ca team will offer an overview of the site’s guiding principles and features, as well as sharing tips, resources, and sample events.

Resources Links:

https://www.koumbit.org/en
https://www.artoffestivals.com/

Break – 15 minutes

13:00 – 15:00 ADT

shalan joudry – KOQM and Talkback

Moderators: Roberta Barker, Heather Davis-Fisch, and Kailin Wright

shalan joudry

shalan joudry is a Mi’kmaw poet, storyteller, podcast producer, playwright, actor and singer. She is also an ecologist and cultural interpreter. www.shalanjoudry.com.

shalan joudry est poète, conteuse, productrice de balados, dramaturge, actrice et chanteuse micmaque. Elle est également une écologiste et une interprète culturelle. www.shalanjoudry.com.

Break – 15 minutes

15:15 – 16:45 ADT

Immersive Eco-Cultural Belonging

Moderator: Kailin Wright

Helen Gilbert, “Sea Country and Saltwater Dramaturguies in Australia”

Natalie Doonan, “Attuning to the St. Lawrence Shoreline Through Multimedia Performance”

More info

Sea Country and Saltwater Dramaturgies in Australia

In this presentation, I turn to the remote town of Broome in north-western Australia to analyze a vital and growing body of Indigenous and intercultural performance in which local seascapes manifest as complex multispecies communities and enduring sites of eco-cultural belonging. Until very recently, performance-making in Australia has paid little attention to marine environments, despite the persistent popularity of beach culture in national self-fashioning and the rich tradition of sea-centred iconography in literature and visual arts since the early days of European settlement. Mainstream theatre has been particularly slow to approach seascapes as ecological sites rather than merely suggestive backdrops to human dramas. However, some breakthrough works have been staged in festivals and state theatres in the last decade, prompted by widening concerns about climate change and sea level rise. That shift constitutes just one part of an increasingly diverse repertoire of embodied arts that are finding ways to convey Australian shorelines’ material character and complexity as distinctive sites shaped by myriad human and non-human actors in the context of settler colonialism. My primary case examples are works by Marrugeku and Theatre Kimberley, each anchored in distinct ways to the Indigenous concept of ‘Sea Country,’ which I will explore in performative and ecological terms. Broadly, my paper aims to sketch the contours of an emergent practice of saltwater dramaturgy adapted to the pluricultural societies of Australia’s ‘top end’ while also connecting with urgent global debates about human stewardship of the earth’s ecosystems.

Helen Gilbert

Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London and author or editor of several volumes in postcolonial theatre and performance studies, including, most recently, Marrugeku: Telling That Story (2021) and In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization (2017). Her research explores embodied arts and activism in marginalized societies in Australia, the Americas, South Africa and the Pacific, with a current focus on environmental issues, notably climate change and associated changes to ocean habitats. In 2015, she was awarded a Humboldt Prize for career achievements in international theatre and performance scholarship.

Attuning to the St. Lawrence Shoreline Through Multimedia Performance

Scholarship on immersion in simulated environments often emphasizes cognitive immersion or the suspension of disbelief in an illusionistic space that simulates reality, making the fact of mediation disappear in the experience. Grounded in post-dramatic multimedia performance, this paper will focus instead on immersive storytelling that activates the senses in a physiological experience. Rather than transporting the spectator into a fictional imaginary space, the post-dramatic multimedia performance aims to make participants aware of their presence in the here and now (Klich and Scheer, 128).1

This paper describes an immersive experience that integrates virtual reality (VR) play into a live participatory performance that takes place outdoors. This game is played in a park on the shores of the St. Lawrence River and, at key moments, inside VR environments that simulate that same park. The game aims to attune participants to the species in that waterfront ecosystem.

This paper asks: (how) can immersive and interactive games produce sensory, embodied knowledge and increase environmental awareness? It proposes that in current urbanized cultures, immersive storytelling can allow us to reimagine relationships between humans and other species and develop deeper connections with natural environments.

Natalie Doonan, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Université de Montréal

BIO: Natalie Doonan is an artist, writer and educator. Her research focuses on embodiment, food and place. Natalie’s work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally. Her writing has appeared in professional and peer-reviewed art and food culture publications. She is Assistant Professor in digital creation at l’Université de Montréal.

15:15 – 16:45 ADT

Moving Together to Reclaim and Resist (Part One)

Co-Convenors: Jenn Cole and Melissa Poll

Working Group Members: Nazli Akhtari, Kelsey Blair, Julie Burelle, Jill Carter, Selena Couture, Leah Decter, Virginie Magnat, Kimberley Richards, Alana Gerecke, Elan Marchinko, Emma Morgan-Thorpe, Jimena Ortuzar, Annie Smith

More info

Moving Together to Reclaim and Resist (Part One)

Co-Convenors: Jenn Cole and Melissa Poll

Break – 15 minutes

117:00 – 18:30 ADT

Moving Together to Reclaim and Resist (Part Two)

Co-Convenors: Jenn Cole and Melissa Poll

Working Group Members: Nazli Akhtari, Kelsey Blair, Julie Burelle, Jill Carter, Selena Couture, Leah Decter, Virginie Magnat, Kimberley Richards, Alana Gerecke, Elan Marchinko, Emma Morgan-Thorpe, Jimena Ortuzar, Annie Smith

More info

Moving Together to Reclaim and Resist (Part Two)

Co-Convenors: Jenn Cole and Melissa Poll

17:00 – 18:30 ADT

Shoring Up Age: Performing Against the Grain of Memory, Time, and the Aging Body in Contemporary Performance

Panel Description:

This curated panel explores diverse theatrical performances of age and aging in different geographical and temporal contexts that push against the supposed “shores” (or boundaries) of Theatre and Performance Studies, thereby exposing an undertheorized, intersectional identity category central to live performance. We are concerned with how both theatre and performance have the power to counter ageism as well as stigmas surrounding sexuality, gender, older bodies, memory loss, and dementia, exposing unique performance aesthetics, dramaturgical structures, intergenerational communities, cross-age casting, and embodied difference. How can we “shore up” age a salient marker of socially constructed differences in our research by showing how intergenerational performers engage in complex performances both on and offstage? How might we challenge linear representations of aging in the field of Theatre and Performance Studies? How might we highlight the complex performance of sexuality and gender alongside aging subjectivity and the older body? This panel approaches these questions by exploring three performances that foreground themes of aging, memory, and sexuality/gender: Raising the Curtain on the Lived Experience of Dementia (RTC), a collaborative theatre project with persons with dementia; Lois Weaver’s performance as her alter-ego “Tammy WhyNot” in What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex; and the performance of vulnerability and countering ageism in All the Sex I’ve Ever Had by Mammalian Diving Reflex. These papers reflect the growing field of age studies and different perspectives that might enliven studies of age in Theatre and Performance Studies in diverse ways.

Abstracts and Participant Bios

Paper Title: “Weaving Acts of Care: Staging Age and Sexuality in the Performance Work of Lois Weaver”

Name: Benjamin Gillespie, PhD

Description: Lois Weaver (73) has been a leading contemporary theatre-maker, performer, director, and teacher for the last forty years. As co-founder of Split Britches, she has continuously challenged traditional gender roles, confronted patriarchal values, and defied heterosexual imperatives, most notably through the contrast of butch/femme lesbian roleplay on stage. Now in her seventies, Weaver pushes the perceived boundaries of being an elder artist by advocating for older communities and engaging with her own sexual identity as an aging femme woman as part of her public performance practices. Using her alter-ego Tammy WhyNot (based on country singer Tammy Wynette), Weaver engages in difficult topics with audiences and collaborators that might otherwise feel too uncomfortable to engage with, such as senior sexuality and cultural ageism. Tammy has “accompanied” Weaver since 1977 as a method of participatory research in older communities. This paper details Weaver’s engagement with older communities as well as her ability to confront ageist stereotypes through radical acts of queer performance, most explicitly in her performance What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex (2015). I will explore how Weaver engages intimately with her audiences by performing public acts of care, employing Tammy WhyNot to aid in supplanting her own anxieties about getting older and her own shifting sexual identity as a woman in her seventies while also doing so for her collaborators. Through her performance as Tammy, she disrupts ageist tropes about the supposed burden of older, queer populations by making them a part of the creative process and the performance itself, thus enacting a performance of care that retro-activates the desires of her older participants to engage in debate and discussion about diverse experiences of sexuality and aging—subjects which might otherwise remain taboo and undiscussed in public forums.

Bio: Benjamin Gillespie is Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College where he specializes in gender and media studies, performance and theatre studies, and professional communication. He completed his PhD in Theatre & Performance Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2022. His dissertation was awarded the 2022 Paul Monette-Roger Horwitz Dissertation Prize from CLAGS: Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. His research explores the intersection of aging, gender, and sexual identity in modern and contemporary theatre and drama. He is currently editing a critical anthology of the New York-based, feminist theatre company Split Britches’ later works based on his dissertation research and an edited collection on age and performance entitled Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging with Cindy Rosenthal. He co-edited the special issue of Theatre Research in Canada on “Age and Performance: Expanding Intersectionality” with Julia Henderson and Nuria Casado-Gual published in 2021. He is Associate Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. His articles and reviews have appeared in Performance Research, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, PAJ, Theatre Research in Canada, and Canadian Theatre Review, along with a number of edited anthologies.

Paper Title: “Dramaturgies of Assistance and Care: Using performance to counter the stigma of dementia”

Name: Julia Henderson, PhD

Description: Raising the Curtain (RTC) was a five-year partnership that used community-based, arts-engaged, participatory research to explore the question: “In what ways does the collaborative involvement of older adults with lived experience of dementia in community-engaged arts foster engagement and social inclusion?” This paper focuses on the author’s postdoctoral research with RTC which involved interviews and focus groups with the project’s hired Artist Facilitators (AFs) for the purpose of describing the processes, strategies, and techniques of the project’s collaborative creation approach. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed emergent themes that described 10 project values, each with supporting practices. This paper focusses in one value: “Performance has unique value in counter [dementia-related] stigma .” It outlines practices that supported performers living with dementia to participate in live performances (both face-to-face and digital) for public audiences. Practices included: “Disrupting theatrical conventions,” “Choosing presence over memory,” “Ensuring comfort,” “Thoughtfully choosing form/style,” “Emphasizing authenticity,” “Using and showing relational supports,” “Comfort with slowness and silence,” and “Foregrounding peer collaborator voices.” These findings offer new perspectives on how collaborative creation, and especially performance, can disrupt stigmatizing representations of age-related memory loss, and promote inclusion of persons living with dementia.

Bio: Julia Henderson is an Assistant Professor in Department of Occupational Science and

Occupational Therapy with a background as an OT and a professional actor. Her research focusses on redressing ageism in North American culture. She uses qualitative and mostly arts- based methods, especially theatre, to work with older adults on projects that range from collaborative creative engagement with people with lived experience of dementia, to older adult activism, to developing creative accessibility strategies for older adult performers. Julia is also Vice Chair of the North American Network in Aging Studies, a member of UBC’s Edwin S.H. Leong Health Aging Program, and Creative Accessibilities Facilitator with Western Gold Theatre, a professional senior theatre company in Vancouver, BC. Her research is published in TRiC, ATDS, CTR, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Age Culture Humanities, and Thornton Wilder Journal. In 2021, she co-edited the special issue of Theatre Research in Canada on “Age and Performance: expanding Intersectionality.”

Paper Title: “En/Countering Ageism Together: All the Sex I’ve Ever Had by Mammalian Diving Reflex”

Name: Heunjung Lee, PhD Candidate

Description: This paper discusses how the performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had (shortened as AtS) by the Toronto-based Canadian theatre group Mammalian Diving Reflex reveals and counters ageism and the stigma around sexuality of older adults by analysing its relational aesthetics and dramaturgy among older community performers, younger creative team members, and the audience. Mammalian Diving Reflex has produced various city editions all around the world from 2010 to present; they staged AtS-International Edition (2014) in Toronto and AtS-Quebec will be performed in 2023. Analyzing one of the city-editions, AtS-Gwangmyeong (2021) in South Korea, a live performance to which the author had access, this paper argues that AtS demonstrates the performative power of aged citizens on stage to document, remember, and combat the ageist perspectives that are deeply rooted in many cultures, including Canada. Mammalian Diving Reflex has defined their community-based works as “relational aesthetics” (Whyte 2013), generating new relationships and making a “social acupuncture” (O’Donnell 2008) in society. This paper investigates how AtS creates new encounters and relationships between people of different ages and backgrounds through a relational and accessible dramaturgy. This paper also suggests a new term to reframe non-professional older performers as experts of age/ing, drawing on the notion of “experts of everyday” which describes non-professional performers in Reality Theatre. Through this new term, this paper illuminates the generosity, vulnerability, and power of the older performers who (en)counter ageist perceptions and assumptions against old age by sharing their unique experience and view of ageing, sex, and life.

Bio: Heunjung Lee is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies in the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta, and she also teaches drama courses in the department. Her doctoral research investigates the cultural constructions that demarcate normal aging and minds in contrast to the abnormal aging and minds. Bridging Age Studies, Disability Studies, and Performance Studies, she explores the potential of performance practices and theories in intervening on the ableist and ageist preconceptions regarding older adults living with dementia.

Break – 15 minutes

18:45 – 20:15 ADT

Launch: Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada (TRiC/RTaC) 43.2 and 44.1

Naila Keleta-Mae, Co-Editor, TRiC/RTaC, with contributors to TRiC/RTaC 43.2 and 44.1

Heather Davis-Fisch, Editor, CTR, with Yasmine Kandil and Taiwo Afolabi, co-editors of CTR 191

More info

Naila Keleta-Mae, Co-Editor, TRiC/RTaC, with contributors to TRiC/RTaC 43.2 and 44.1

Heather Davis-Fisch, Editor, CTR, with Yasmine Kandil and Taiwo Afolabi, co-editors of CTR 191

Sunday, June 11

10:00 – 11:30 ADT

Task Force on Precarity – Unpacking the Heavy Backpack: Mental Health for Precarious Scholars

Workshop Leader: Ali Joy Richardson, RCTC

Task Force Co-Convenors: Jacquey Taucar & Neil Silcox

Presented by the CATR Task Force on Precarity

More info

In this 90-minute virtual workshop, psychotherapist and theatre artist Ali Joy Richardson will introduce creative and comforting perspectives on mental health for freelancers and precarious scholars. The session will provide a mix of education, discussion, and self-reflection activities geared towards helping participants:

Dismantle cultural narratives that celebrate martyrdom (at the cost of our wellbeing)
Learn to bring a self-caring approach to what’s already in the (busy!) calendar
Discover how to use resentment as a compass in decision-making
Tap into the motivating power of self-compassion vs. self-punishing

Snacks, pets, and dark humour are welcome.

10:00 – 11:30 ADT

Shorelines of Health, Accessibility, and Theatre

Moderator: Roberta Barker

Michaela Hill and Hartley Jafine, “Breaking Down the Boundaries Between Health and Law through Theatre: A Research-Based Play on Medical Assistance in Dying”

Jenn Boulay, “Accessibility is Communication: Embedding Accessibility into the Script”

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Breaking Down the Boundaries Between Health and Law through Theatre: A Research-Based Play on Medical Assistance in Dying

Drama has long been used to explore contested social issues. By evoking solid emotional connections and helping audiences visualize complex problems, theatre bridges boundaries between disciplines and allows difficult conversations to play out in an accessible way.

In 2015, the Canadian criminal code was amended to legalize physician-assisted suicide, opening the door to a huge bioethical debate. Included in the new legislation was a clause indicating that people with mental illness will be eligible for MAiD in 2023. With MAiD itself still highly contested, allowing people with suicidal ideation and various mental illnesses to qualify
presents an even greater moral dilemma.

This paper presentation will describe the process of writing an original research-based theatre piece on Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) in Canada, exploring the boundaries between health and law through theatre. The play combines realistic and absurdist elements intending to leave audiences without concrete answers to this highly debated topic. The aim is to educate, spark deep reflection, and possibly change beliefs. This presentation will outline the research process and current context of MAiD legislation in Canada. Details of the playwriting process and a script sample will be shared to illustrate how research-based theatre effectively engages with difficult conversations that bridge multiple disciplines. Ultimately, the presentation will engage people in a theatrical exploration of one of our time’s most pressing bioethical issues, leaving attendees, just like an audience watching this play, uncertain about our future reality.

Michaela Hill (Dalhousie University – Law Student) & Hartley Jafine (McMaster University – Professor)

Bio: Michaela is a McMaster alumni and first-year law student at Dalhousie. She is interested in using theatre to explore the intersection between health and law. Michaela’s undergraduate thesis, supported by Hartley Jafine, culminated in a research-based play about Medical Assistance in Dying Legislation in Canada.

Accessibility is Communication: Embedding Accessibility into the Script

This presentation is a research-creation project that examines non-dominant modes of communication that serve as tools of access/accessibility for audience members in theatre and performance spaces. The non-dominant modes of communication I will bring forward are audio description, American Sign Language (ASL), Live Captioning, Textile Props, etc.

I intend to both challenge and examine the power relations and claimed authority that dominant/normative modes of communication have had over those that have been historically oppressed. Throughout my presentation, I plan to share an excerpt of my play-in-progress, which embeds accessibility into the script and production design; and will serve as an example of how it can be done. This research-creation aims to illustrate the infinite possibilities while breaking down barriers that tend to exclude disabled bodies from the theatre. I will invite artists and scholars to think about their practices and how they do or do not engage with accessibility in their work. As accessibility has been historically ignored, I want to encourage people to bring it to the forefront of their work. While much effort was put into making online events accessible to audiences during the pandemic and shown to be effective, why not continue these practices while we return to in-person theatre. It is to be hopeful about the future of the theatre industry, which needs to be challenged and pushed forward, as theatre is meant to be a place to bring people together, not tear them apart.

Jenn Boulay, Concordia University

Bio: Jenn is an emerging interdisciplinary performance artist, creator, and scholar. She is a graduate student at Concordia University in Communication Studies and received her BA from the University of Toronto in 2022. Her current research project maps the terrain of D/deaf and Disability Arts in Montréal, Québec. In both her academic and artistic practice, Jenn is interested in finding ways to make the theatre more accessible to performers and audiences. Jenn’s academic and creative work has been published in Feminist Space Camp, Knots: An Undergraduate Journal of Disability Studies, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and UC Magazine, and she is the current editor for Knots.

Break – 15 minutes

11:45 – 13:15 ADT

Digital Performance (Part One)

Co-Convenors: Shana MacDonald and Kim McLeod

Working Group Members: Naomi Bennett, Michael Bergmann, David Bobier, Taylor Graham, Tara Harris, Peter Kuling, Laura Levin, Mark Lipton, Jayna Mees, Catherine Quirk, Sebastian Samur, Michael Wheeler

More info

Co-Convenors: Shana MacDonald and Kim McLeod

Working Group Members: Naomi Bennett, Michael Bergmann, David Bobier, Taylor Graham, Tara Harris, Peter Kuling, Laura Levin, Mark Lipton, Jayna Mees, Catherine Quirk, Sebastian Samur, Michael Wheeler

11:45 – 13:15 ADT

Tuning Across Distant Shores

Presenters: Natalie Doonan, Misha Myers, and Laura Nanni

More info

Tuning Across Distant Shores

Tuning Across Distant Shores is a participatory performance in which participants from around the world are invited to tune in via Zoom or other conferencing software while physically situated on the shores of the body of water nearest them.

This piece interprets the 1991 “World Wide Tuning Meditation” by composer Pauline Oliveros. In this performance, participants sing a tone with each out-breath, alternating between matching the pitch of a distant singer and introducing a new tone to the group. In the proposed iteration of this piece, participants will tune alternately to others via Zoom (or other platforms) and to the shoreline where they find themselves. An improvisational, communal performance will ring out for a few brief moments along distributed waterways. The intention is to become attuned to the environments in which we are each located while tuning in to each other across the globe.

This work was initiated during a residency organized by The Museum of Loss and Renewal and The Walking Library in October 2022. Natalie, Laura, and Misha participated in a performance of the “World Wide Tuning Meditation” in the Abruzzo mountains of Collemachia, Italy. We were inspired by the resonances created by this embodied encounter. We will begin by introducing this context and explaining the score for the performance.

Natalie Doonan, Assistant Professor, Digital Creation, l’Université de Montréal

Bio: Natalie Doonan is an artist, writer and educator. Her research focuses on embodiment, food and place. Natalie’s work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally. In addition, her writing has appeared in professional and peer-reviewed art and food culture publications.

Laura Nanni, Artistic & Managing Director, SummerWork

Bio: Laura Nanni is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and producer. Her research considers the process of walking and aspects of mapping and navigation. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed performance publications, as well as conferences, festivals and exhibitions across the
globe. In addition, she is the former Artistic & Managing Director of SummerWorks, presenting an annual performance festival (2016-2023).

Misha Myers, Professor of Contemporary Performance at the School of Stage and Screen, University of Greenwich

Bio: Misha Myers works across an interdisciplinary field of applied and digital performance, socially engaged practice, digital humanities and cultural studies of migration, belonging and place. She has created international place-based performances and artworks that move between physical and digital environments.

Break – 15 minutes

13:30 – 15:00 ADT

Seaside Words for the Disappearing Girl

Convenor / Creator: Christine Mazumdar

Performers: Christine Mazumdar and Jenn Cole

More info

Seaside Words from the Disappearing Girl

A work-in-progress visual poetry anthology by Dr. Christine Mazumdar which examines testimonies of solitude in nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of this research, Mazumdar performs a series of impromptu choreographies in nature across the four seasons. “Snow Etudes,” which takes place in winter, archives the body via snow prints; “Climbing Trees,” the summer iteration, honours a tree and Mazumdar’s family treehouse felled by a great windstorm; “Rock Waltz Etude,” performed on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in Fall 2022 examines the rhythmical pattern of waves, as Mazumdar ponders the question “will the rocks remember me when I’m gone?”

13:30 – 15:00 ADT

Digital Performance (Part Two)

Co-Convenors: Shana MacDonald and Kim McLeod

Working Group Members: Naomi Bennett, Michael Bergmann, David Bobier, Taylor Graham, Tara Harris, Peter Kuling, Laura Levin, Mark Lipton, Jayna Mees, Catherine Quirk, Sebastian Samur, Michael Wheeler

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Co-Convenors: Shana MacDonald and Kim McLeod

Break – 15 minutes

15:15 – 16:45 ADT

Curating Safe Spaces (Affinity Groups)

CATR Conduct Committee (Convenors): Jill Carter, Selena Couture, Andrew Houston, and Signy Lynch

More info

CATR Conduct Committee (Convenors): Jill Carter, Selena Couture, Andrew Houston, and Signy Lynch

15:15 – 16:45 ADT

Methodologies for a Shifting World

Moderator: Kailin Wright

Virginie Magnat, “Shifting Shores: Learning from the Teachings of the Pandemic and the Climate Crisis”

Sami Wymes, “Stranded Between the Shores of Gender: Performing Nonbinary Identities Beyond Resignification”

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Shifting Shores: Learning from the Teachings of the Pandemic and the Climate Crisis

The teachings of the pandemic and the climate crisis challenge us to develop alternatives to extractive research methodologies that legitimize colonial and neoliberal knowledge systems privileged in the academy and fueled by the desire to know, name, own, and control. This will to power manifests even in new materialist and posthumanist theories that espouse non-anthropocentric conceptions of agency while continuing to reproduce enduring racist representations of Indigenous peoples.

For example, in their 2022 manifesto Mémo sur la nouvelle classes écologique [Memo on the New Ecological Class], Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz relate the experience of the pandemic in Western societies to a troublesome inability to respond constructively to the environmental crisis and who asserts: “We are as helpless as the ancient ‘savages’ overwhelmed by the modernization that devastated their world. From now on, we are the maladjusted and underdeveloped ‘savages’ incapable of reacting to the shock of this ‘demodernization’!” (Mémo 52; my trans.). While calling for the emergence of a new ecological consciousness fueled by transnational coalitions inclusive of the North American Indigenous communities who resist hydraulic fracturing practices (11), Latour and Schultz make only a single mention of Indigenous knowledge in this 95-page volume: “When seeking to dishabituate ourselves from solely focusing on relations of production, it is also in our interest to rekindle new connections with so-called Indigenous peoples ̶ one quarter of a billion inhabitants, no less! ̶ who […] point to wholly contemporary usages of the practices of engendering that will need to be invented. This is a bitter lesson, when the ancient ‘savages’ must teach the new ones how to resist modernization!” (57-58; my trans.).

Postcolonial studies scholar Alison Ravenscroft provides a counter-narrative to this “bitter lesson” when referring to Indigenous anthropologist Zoe Todd (Métis/otipemisiw), who recounts her experience of a talk by Latour in which he failed to acknowledge contributions made by Indigenous scholars. Ravenscroft argues that such a refusal of indebtedness enacts “colonialism’s elision of Indigenous intellectual labors” that surreptitiously re-instates “the Western subject assuming […] the sovereign’s mantle even in those new materialist writings that sustain some of the most profound critiques of this very centrism” (356–57). In response to the ongoing racism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric colonial thinking that continue to be reproduced within the academy, the US-based collective Red Nation ingeniously reclaims the word “savage” for the purpose of decolonial activism: “In the grammar of capitalism, the savage is the antonym of the
obedient worker. In the grammar of nationalism, the savage is the opposite of the dutiful citizen or settler. […T]he continued usage of the word demonstrates the abject failure of settler colonialism’s primary goal ̶ the elimination of the Native” (28).

How can performance research and pedagogy acknowledge the interrelation of colonial history, environmental degradation, and the unsustainable neoliberal model of global capitalism, honour and engage with the work of Indigenous scholars and activists, and offer decolonial, non-anthropocentric, and eco-critical alternatives?

Virginie Magnat, University of British Columbia

“Stranded Between the Shores of Gender: Performing Nonbinary Identities Beyond Resignification”

In the final chapter of their canonical text, Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explains that performative acts obtain power through citationality (171) and that, through processes of “discursive resignification,” (175) performativity holds queering capacities. This queering of gender citations can be useful in the conscious identity expression of those whose genders fall along the spectrum of “woman” to “man.” But where does the citationality of gender
performance leave those who understand their genders not as falling somewhere along this spectrum but as existing completely outside of its bounds? Although nonbinary identities are considered by some as exemplary of gender performativity – leaving nonbinary individuals
vulnerable to the ruthless scrutiny of which of their choices reference “man” versus which reference “woman” – some humans who claim these genders become stranded, searching for sources to cite like lifeboats that will express their nuanced gender identities and be recognized across social groups. Through the examination of my 2019 performance “Shave Me SamiTM,” as well as works from other nonbinary drag and performance artists, including Sin Wai Kin, I will investigate how contemporary, nonbinary artists are using citationality to express their genders. My paper will ask: What sources are being cited in the performance of the nonbinary?

What are the limits of citationality and resignification in expressing nonbinary genders? And what practices beyond citationality are being used to articulate nonbinary identities? Through this analysis, I will explore whether gender performativity can effectively encompass identities
that do not align with the binary concept of the gender spectrum.

Sami Wymes – University of Oxford

Sami Wymes is stardust, dreaming and building performance beyond binaries. Sami has received institutional accreditations: a BAH in drama from queen’s university; a MA in performance from york university; and soon a MSt in gender from the university of Oxford, where their dissertation will propose a phenomenology of nonbinary performance.

Break – 15 minutes

17:00 – 18:30 ADT

Creating a Conference Abstract

Workshop Leaders: Marlis Schweitzer, Jenn Stephenson

More info

Why do conferences ask for abstracts? What is an abstract anyway? Come chat with Jenn Stephenson and Marlis Schweitzer about how to craft an elegant abstract for future conferences, including but not limited to CATR.

Break – 15 minutes

18:45 – 20:15 ADT

Unsettling Power

Moderator: Robin Whittaker

(Un)settler Ecologies: interrogating contemporary settler site-based praxis through immersive improvisatory performance strategies

As a recent migrant from Wales to Turtle Island, I have found it increasingly pertinent to focus on processes that call into question the Eurocentric assumptions inherent in my performance studies training and walking-arts practices. Accompanying this critical drive is a desire to understand better, articulate, and position my understandings of placement, home, and belonging as routes toward understanding the complexities surrounding settler and Indigenous relationships with the land in North America.

This paper details an ongoing practice-as-research investigation into embodied settler methodologies, namely the attempted hybridization of the Situationist Deirve (Debord 1958) with the participatory theatre exercises of contemplative walking developed by Nicolás Núñez (2019) and the Taller de Investigación Teatral (Theatre Research Workshop, Mexico). Both perambulatory-based practices affect in participants a deeper understanding of what Lavery and Whitehead refer to as an ‘ecology of place’; the experience of encountering the places one inhabits with a renewed attention and sense of intimacy; and a palpable sense of the responsibilities and reciprocities that exist between the animate, inanimate, human and non-human agents, past and present worldviews that surround one and constitute the world (Lavery, Whitehead, p. 155).

Steve Donnelly, Ph.D. Student, Critical Studies in Improvisation, University of Guelph. ON.

Bio: Steve Donnelly’s work combines his interests in improvised play, performance studies, popular culture, belief, and the commons. Steve spent most of his life in the Welsh city of Abertawe, which translates to English as “the mouth of the Tawe River.” Now Living in Guelph, he looks forward to the rain and has come to accept the forms water takes there. Steve is a Ph.D. Student in Critical Studies in Improvisation.

A Home for Our Migrations: Remapping the Routes of Hemispheric Collaborations

A Home for Our Migrations symposium, which took place in Toronto last fall, was a collaboration between the RUTAS Festival and Nuit Blanche as well as two partnership projects: Hemispheric Encounters (focused on hemispheric performance as a collaborative mode of knowledge production) and The Space Between US (focused on connections and collaborations within Indigenous, Circumpolar, and Pacific places). For both RUTAS and Nuit Blanche, the return of in-person gatherings offered an opportunity to explore the possibilities of collaboration between international and local festivals whose communities share aesthetic and political aims across cultural, geographic, and linguistic borders. While RUTAS invited audiences to ‘remap our routes’ through performances from the Americas, Nuit Blanche urged viewers to consider ‘the space between us’ as a potential site for sharing knowledge through connections to place that forge new relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

In this paper, I explore two theoretical considerations prompted by this collaboration with the aim of rethinking co-production as a strategy for gathering and collaborating within and beyond national borders. The first is a reorientation of hemispheric approaches to performance brought about by these projects. Hemispheric thought has played a key role in shifting performance research and practice away from Euro-American paradigms that have long dominated the field of theatre and performance, but its limits were brought to light in dialogues that moved beyond a North-South/South-North orientation. The second is what scholars have referred to as the ‘immigration-Indigenous parallax gap,’ a disconnection in public and academic discourses between immigration politics and Indigenous sovereignty, which became particularly evident during dialogues focused on mobility and migration. I examine efforts to close (or bridge) this gap to think about future opportunities for knowledge exchange among people with shared political struggles but who are situated differently in relation to the colonial project in Canada, in the Americas, and beyond.

Jimena Ortuzar, York University

Bio: Jimena Ortuzar is a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design. Her research explores labour and migration through the lens of performance and gender studies. Her writing can be found in international journals and edited collections on art and activism, contemporary theatre, and Latino/a/x performance.

Shakespeare in Guantánamo

Last February, US President Joe Biden pledged to close the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by the end of his term. The prison, which still holds 35 terror suspects, has stubbornly remained open for decades, a living (or perhaps undead) archive of the now abandoned US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The prison has managed to outlive the wars it was built to serve the party because of its existence as a nebulous legal entity existing at or beyond the border of various legal jurisdictions. Neither part of the contiguous United States nor administered by Cuba, the small offshore American exclave is sometimes described as a “legal black hole” (Barelli, 2002) for the way that it flouts domestic US law as well as international treaties to protect prisoners of war.

Although Guantánamo Bay is shrouded in official secrecy, it is also a highly theatrical site. In 2006, when Navy medical staff force-fed hunger strikers in prison, they opted not to use their real names. Strangely, the medics’ pseudonyms were taken from Shakespeare’s plays. Strikers were strapped into restraint chairs by Nurses Valeria (Coriolanus) and Lucentio (The Taming of the Shrew) and supervised by Senior Medical Officer Leonato (Much Ado about Nothing) as their stomachs were pumped full of meal-replacement milkshakes. In this paper, I analyze this incident as a metonym for how imperial power fastens itself to cultural knowledge.

Matt Jones, Toronto Metropolitan University

Bio: Matt Jones (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is working on a book about performance in the Deathscapes of the War on Terror.

18:45 – 20:15 ADT

CANCELLED – Ghosts of Theatre’s Past, Present, and Future

Moderator: Selena Couture

Abhimanyu Acharya, “Supernaturalism and Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century theatre in Western India”

Matt Jones, “Shakespeare in Guantánamo”

More info

Supernaturalism and Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century theatre in Western India

In nineteenth-century colonial Western India, the reformist sphere was interested in foregrounding ‘rationality’ as the exalted faculty to battle the existing superstitious/supernatural elements in society. As a result, the reformist theatre prohibited supernatural elements on stage. At the same time, Shakespeare was imposed as a colonial cultural symbol of the superiority of the West. Adapting Shakespeare made the reformers awkward since his plays consisted profoundly of supernatural elements. This paper is interested in examining the strategies the reformers employed in the adaptations of Shakespeare to skirt supernaturalism.

To that end, the chapter is structured as follows: first, I provide a general idea of how the reformers cast theatre as ‘rational entertainment’ where supernatural elements were prohibited and were a symptom of an immoral mindset. Then, after reviewing scholarship on Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations in the context of the supernatural in Western India, I analyze Gujarati adaptations of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Macbeth to show how reformist playwrights dealt with the supernatural aesthetic in their adaptations of these plays, showing the entanglement of the supernatural aesthetics with women’s reform.

Abhimanyu Acharya, The University of Western Ontario, Year: Ph.D. 5th Year

Bio: Abhimanyu Acharya is a multilingual writer and translator currently undertaking his doctoral studies on theatre in colonial India at the University of Western Ontario. His plays have been performed at the Mississauga Fringe Festival and London Fringe Festival. He has been published in creative and academic journals such as Modern Drama, Hakara, Out of Print, and Feminist Studies.

Shakespeare in Guantánamo

Matt Jones, Toronto Metropolitan University

Monday, June 12

10:00 – 11:30 ADT

Somatic Engagement | Engagement Somatique (Part One – Online): “Somatics and Community”

Co-Convenors: Christine (cricri) Bellerose & Ursula (Ulla) Neuerburg-Denzer

Working Group Members: Naomi Bennett, Jenn Boulay, Eury Chang (†), Stephen Donnelly Tracey Guptill, Mark Lipton, Virginie Magnat, Gabriel (Gabi) Petrov

More info

Year 3 working group discussion led by Christine (cricri) Bellerose and Ursula (Ulla) Neuerburg-Denzer.

10:00 – 11:30 ADT

Puppet Theory

Co-Convenors: Dawn Brandes and Gabriel Levine

Participants: Kate Sloan Fiffer, Amanda Petefish-Schrag, Larry Switzky, Marilo Nunez

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Puppet Theory

On the margins of theatre scholarship, often treated as a critical sideshow, puppetry continues to experience a long-running resurgence in theatre practice. Over the past decades, notable puppet companies and artists have found success on stages in Canada and around the world (including mainstream successes by Ronnie Burkett and Handspring Puppet Company, opera and theatre work by Improbable Theatre/Phelim McDermott/Julian Crouch, and musicals from The Lion King to Shrek). Meanwhile, a small community of scholars has paid increasing attention to puppetry, with new anthologies (Routledge), monographs, and encyclopedias (UNIMA). However, despite this increased artistic and scholarly attention, there have been only a few concerted attempts to theorize contemporary puppetry following the groundbreaking 20th-century work of the Prague School and subsequent efforts in the semiotic tradition (Tillis). Nevertheless, puppet practitioners, including South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, along with practitioner-scholars such as Cariad Astles, have generated keen insights into their practice, and critics have sketched evocative thoughts about puppetry’s “uncanny life” (Gross). Yet given puppetry’s unique position in the landscape of material performance, it is surprising that it has not produced a strong and coherent body of theory to date. Perhaps this is a result of puppetry’s anti-systematic bent: as a discipline, puppetry is often abjected, lumped in with children’s entertainment, or viewed as a minor curiosity in relation to major theatrical genres. In our view, however, the marginal position of puppetry—like other marginal positions—can give rise to acute theoretical insights that could help shift our understanding of key concepts of agency, materiality, embodiment, and animacy.

This panel gathers scholars and scholar-practitioners who seek to theorize the form and practice of puppetry from within. Contributions could be in dialogue with contemporary theoretical currents—including work in phenomenology, “new materialism,” or “thing theory.” They could also engage with Indigenous understandings of material and embodied being-in-relation. The panel’s aim, however, is not to import theory into a discussion of puppetry but rather to generate theory out of puppetry’s practical knowledge, historical permutations, and contemporary efflorescence. Cast aside, thrown into a heap, and left on the shores by cultural gatekeepers, puppetry persists and reinvents itself. Listening to puppeteers, scholars of puppetry, and puppets themselves, what new insights could emerge?

Topics could include (to be elaborated in the CFP):

Theoretical explorations of themes like animacy, agency, or embodiment generated through puppet practice or spectatorship
Puppet performance and the construction of identity, including race, gender and sexuality
Indigenous puppet performance
Theories of puppet spectatorship
Investigations of puppet materiality
Theorizing puppetry’s political, ethical, epistemological, or ontological contributions
Relationships between puppet and puppeteer, puppet and environment, puppet and non-puppet objects

Co-Convenors:

Dawn Tracey Brandes, Dalhousie University) & Gabriel Levine, Glendon Campus of York University

Bio: Dawn Tracey Brandes is an Instructor at the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University. Her work considers the theoretical implications of contemporary puppet performance, particularly phenomenological concerns. She has contributed chapters to edited collections like The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance and Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation and articles to Canadian Theatre Review and Puppetry International.

Bio: Gabriel Levine is the author of Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings (MIT Press 2020). He co-edited Practice (MIT/Whitechapel 2018), and his writing has appeared in publications including Performance Research, Liminalities, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Canadian Theatre Review. He has released numerous musical recordings on various labels, and his puppet-theatre projects have toured internationally. He is a Sessional Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Drama and Creative Arts Program at Glendon Campus, York University, co-curator of Toronto’s Concrete Cabaret and OBJECTO Festival. www.gabriellevine.net

Break – 15 minutes

11:45 – 13:15 ADT

Audiences and Affective Shorelines

Moderator: Natalie Rewa

Marcia Blumberg, “The Island: Performing The Trial of Antigone at a Robben Island Prison Concert”

Dennis D. Gupa, “Fishing Method as a Framework of Community-Based-Performance Creation: Applied Theatre in the Aftermath of Climate Disaster”

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The Island: Performing The Trial of Antigone at a Robben Island Prison Concert

Robben Island constitutes a circular shoreline in the Atlantic10 km from Cape Town. After various uses, it housed 1961–1991, a maximum-security prison for male political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. No one ever escaped from Robben Island since heavy currents impeded attempts to swim to the mainland. These natural currents are metaphorized in the play, The Island, created in 1973 by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. Oppressive, constraining regulations of invisible vicious warders inflict futile tasks and humiliation on two lawbreakers, John and Winston. The opening consists of 10 minutes of interminable mimed digging of sand into an unseen wheelbarrow and then dumping it onto the bare stage.

The inmates share a cell, recount stories, and enact metatheatrical games to survive the blurring of boundaries through loss of identity, isolation from family, and confinement from the world. The play ends with their performance of The Trial of Antigone at the prison concert. John represents Creon, and Winston acts as Antigone, a difficult role for a black man impersonating a young white princess, who has become a paradigm for civil disobedience over the millennia. At the climax, Winston removes his simple costuming to challenge unjust prison restrictions with dangerous defiance to utter Antigone’s Sophoclean speech as she is led to her death for burying her brother: “I honoured those things to which honour belongs.”

Una Chaudhuri believes that “Who one is and who one can be . . . are a function of WHERE one is and HOW one experiences that place.” Her citation is apposite for this hybrid theatre that fuses African traditions and South African dialect with Western forms like ‘poor’ theatre and absurdism. My paper explores how the play deconstructs boundaries in theatre, in political and philosophical issues, and positions spectators on this theatrical shoreline as complicitous with the prison warders.

Marcia Blumberg, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of English, York University

Fishing Method as a Framework of Community-Based-Performance Creation: Applied Theatre in the Aftermath of Climate Disaster

In this paper, I will foreground local elders’ epistemology in practicing traditional fishing methods in an island community in Tubabao Island, Eastern Samar, Philippines, while using it as a performance approach in scaffolding a process of creating a community-based performance. Using autoethnographic narrative exposition, I argue that community-based theatre performances informed by local creativity can mobilize world-making in the aftermath of a disaster. Within the complexity of local to international post-disaster reconstruction and recovery programming, after Super Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) struck Tubabao Island, I formulated an applied theatre performance method that draws on the epistemological orientation on people’s oceanic creativity. Through this gesture, I argue that an effective and agentic mode of performance creation recenters people’s imagination that underscores Indigenous ways of knowing. I build this argument by asking: To what extent does applied theatre become a living archive of post-disaster mitigation and acts of recovery from memories and traumas of devastation? Lastly, I aim to offer an ethical inquiry and practice of applied theatre that tackles climate crises in sites with a long history of disaster that highlights the agency of community members and the persistence of Indigenous knowledge, social relationality, and local creativity amidst climate change.

Dennis D. Gupa, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Film, University of Winnipeg

Bio: He has an MA in Theatre Arts degree (University of the Philippines), an MFA in Theatre (University of British Columbia), and a PhD in Applied Theatre (University of Victoria). As a former Vanier scholar, Dr. Gupa wrote his dissertation on sea rituals, climate change, and Indigenous ecological knowledge in island communities in the Philippines impacted by climate crises.

11:45 – 13:15 ADT

CATR Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression Session

The convenors invite you to take a moment to download the PowerPoint slides for this session.

Workshop: CATR Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression Committee

Committee Chair & Convenor: Robin Whittaker

More info

CATR’s Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression (ARAO) Committee discusses CATR’s recent ARAO actions and seeks input on future activities.

Break – 15 minutes

13:30 – 15:00 ADT

Mike and Mique’l Dangeli – Dancing Sovereignty

Mike Dangeli Affiliation: Git Hayetsk Dancers

Mique’l Dangeli Affiliation: Git Hayetsk Dancers/University of the Fraser Valley

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Dancing Sovereignty

In this keynote presentation, Mike and Mique’l Dangeli will show examples of Git Hayetsk Dancers’ performances. They will discuss the history and current practices of Indigenous dance groups in the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on research for her book project, Mique’l will engage with issues around the local and global interpretations of culture, rights, knowledge, and sovereignty, and argue that Indigenous dance group processes are strategic acts of self-determination that are both deeply rooted in protocol, ancient law practices, that address contemporary First Nations issues.

Justification:

Mike Dangeli is of the Nisga’a, Tlingit, Tsetsaut, and Tsimshian Nations. He grew up in his people’s traditional territory in Southeast Alaska and Northern British Columbia. Mike is a renowned artist, carver, singer, composer, dancer, and educator. Mike is in line to be a hereditary chief and has trained under the chiefs and matriarchs since his childhood to become one. He began studying and creating his people’s art at an early age through traditional apprenticeship within his family. For the past 20 years, he and his wife Mique’l Dangeli have shared the leadership of Git Hayetsk, an internationally renowned dance group specializing in ancient and newly created songs and mask dances. Mike’s work is collected and exhibited throughout the world. He has also carved hundreds of masks and headdress use in the performances of Git Hayetsk as well as by many Nations along the Northwest Coast.

Born and raised on the Annette Island Indian Reserve, Dr. Mique’l Dangeli is of the Tsimshian Nation of Metlakatla, Alaska. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Her work focuses on Indigenous visual and performing arts, protocol, cultural resurgence, sovereignty, decolonization, and language revitalization. Mique’l is a dancer, choreographer, educator, curator, and activist. As one of the youngest advanced speakers and teachers of her people’s language, she is dedicated to teaching Sm’algya̱x in community-based and university-accredited classes as well as mentoring educational staff in their process of language acquisition and curriculum development for all ages.

Mike et Mique’l Dangeli

Affiliation de Mike : Git Hayetsk Dancers

Affiliation de Mique’l : Git Hayetsk Dancers/Université de la vallée du Fraser

Danser la souveraineté

Dans cette allocution principale, Mike et Mique’l Dangeli présenteront des exemples de spectacles des Git Hayetsk Dancers. Ils examineront l’histoire et les pratiques actuelles des troupes de danse autochtones dans le Nord-ouest Pacifique. S’appuyant sur les recherches effectuées dans le cadre de son projet de livre, Mique’l abordera les questions relatives aux interprétations locales et mondiales de la culture, des droits, du savoir et de la souveraineté. Elle croit que les façons de faire des troupes de danse autochtones constituent des actes stratégiques d’autodétermination profondément enracinés dans le protocole et les traditions juridiques anciennes, qui abordent les questions contemporaines des Premières Nations.

Mike Dangeli appartient aux nations Nisga’a, Tlingit, Tsetsaut et Tsimshian. Il a grandi sur le territoire traditionnel de son peuple dans le sud-est de l’Alaska et le nord de la Colombie-Britannique. Mike est un artiste, un sculpteur, un chanteur, un compositeur, un danseur et un éducateur de renom. Il se prépare depuis son enfance à devenir chef héréditaire auprès des chefs et des matriarches. Il a commencé à étudier et à créer l’art de son peuple dès son plus jeune âge par le biais de l’apprentissage traditionnel au sein de sa famille. Depuis 20 ans, il partage avec son épouse Mique’l Dangeli la direction des Git Hayetsk, un troupe de danse de renommée internationale spécialisée dans les chants anciens et nouveaux et les danses masquées. Les œuvres de Mike sont collectionnées et exposées dans le monde entier. Il a également sculpté des centaines de masques et de coiffes utilisés dans les spectacles de Git Hayetsk ainsi que par de nombreuses nations le long de la côte nord-ouest.

Mique’l Dangeli (Ph. D.) est née et a grandi dans la réserve indienne de l’île Annette. Elle appartient à la nation Tsimshian de Metlakatla, en Alaska. Elle est professeure adjointe à l’École des arts créatifs de l’Université de la vallée du Fraser à Abbotsford, en Colombie-Britannique. Son travail porte sur les arts visuels et les arts de la scène autochtones, le protocole, la résurgence culturelle, la souveraineté, la décolonisation et la revitalisation des langues. Mique’l est danseuse, chorégraphe, professeure, conservatrice et activiste. Une des plus jeunes et des plus perfectionnées locutrices et enseignantes de la langue de son peuple, elle enseigne la langue Sm’algya̱x dans des classes communautaires et universitaires accréditées, en plus de faire du mentorat auprès du personnel enseignant dans l’apprentissage de la langue et dans le développement de programmes d’études pour tous les âges.

Break – 15 minutes

15:15 – 16:45 ADT

The Development and Ongoing Work of Edmonton’s Script Salon – The Shore Between the Work of Playwrights and the Production of Their Plays

Edmonton’s Script Salon is in its 9th year. This venture of presenting readings of plays, close to production-ready, by professional actors, to enthusiastic audiences for exposure and feedback has proven a winning formula leading to productions of more than 50% of the plays presented. Curator and founder Katherine Koller, also a playwright and author, likens the role of Script Salon to someone reaching a hand to a swimmer and pulling them out of the water onto the shore, where their creative work can find its feet. Script Salon follows in the footsteps of many Albertan script development projects over the decades, from the University of Alberta to CKUA, to ScriptLab, to the Springboards Festival, to Banff School of the Arts. The value of Script Salon and other play development programs across Canada begs more attention from theatre scholars.

Issues:

Canada, in particular, provides opportunities for playwrights to workshop their plays around the table with actors but fewer opportunities to present plays-in-process to audiences. This is an important step for playwrights: to hear professional actors read, see how audiences and invited artistic directors respond to their work, and receive constructive feedback.
Theatre audiences crave involvement in the creation of theatre; they are not passive viewers and can be part of the dramaturgical process
Theatre scholars need to be paying attention to dramaturgy because knowledge of dramaturgical processes can enrich theatre scholarship and pedagogy
Thanks to a growing interest in performance studies, contemporary theatre culture in Canada needs to move beyond the silos of traditional theatre structures to understand the inter-relationships and inter-dependencies of theatre creators and designers, theatre makers and technicians, audiences, performers, reviewers, and scholars

Goals:

To introduce theatre scholars, practitioners, and students to the work of Edmonton’s
Script Salon – its history, goals, programs, partnerships, impacts, and vision for the future
Learning from the experiences of the Script Salon playwrights, directors, administrators
Understanding how play development showcases dramaturgical processes that contribute to the culture of theatre in Canada
Opening a door to an inclusive modality for creating and exploring theatre and performance – there is room on the shore for everyone

Annie Smith is a freelance theatre practitioner and scholar. Her research and teaching encompasses audience participatory performance, community-engaged arts, Indigenous theatre and performance and Canadian women playwrights. She has contributed reviews, articles, forums, and interviews to TRIC/RTAC, Canadian Theatre Review, SETC Journal, UofT Quarterly, alt.theatre and Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage.

Katherine Koller is the Script Salon Founder and Curator, Playwright, and Producer.

Conni Massing is a contributing Playwright to Edmonton’s Script Salon.

Moira Day is a scholar of Prairie theatre and editor of west-words: Celebrating Western Canadian Theatre and Playwriting, and a supporting audience member of Script Salon.

Tracy Carroll is a Director, Dramaturge, and former Co-Producer at Script Salon.

Anne Nothof is a Scholar of Alberta Theatre, the Editor of the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia, Plays Editor at NeWest Press and AUP.

Jen Taylor is the Managing Director of Alberta Playwrights Network.

15:15 – 16:45 ADT

Journal Editors’ Online Office Hours

Nicole Nolette

Selena Couture

Heather Davis-Fisch

More info

Nicole Nolette, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada, 15:15-16:45 AT / 11:15-12:00 PT, joined by…

Selena Couture, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada, 15:30-16:00 AT / 11:30-12:00 PT

then,

Heather Davis-Fisch, Canadian Theatre Review, 16:00 – 16:45 AT / 12:00-12:45 PT

All interested in submitting to or learning more about the leading journals in Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada (TRiC/RTaC)and Canadian Theatre Review (CTR), are very welcome to drop in to talk to members of their editorial teams!

Please also feel free to contact Selena Couture (couture2@ualberta.ca), Associate Outreach Editor, TRiC/RTaC, or Heather Davis Fisch (Heather.DavisFisch@ufv.ca), Editor, CTR, to discuss ideas or questions.

Break – 15 minutes

17:00 – 18:30 ADT

Curating Safe Spaces (Plenary Session Part One)

ALL CATR conference attendees warmly invited to participate

More info

ALL CATR conference attendees warmly invited to participate

Break – 15 minutes

18:45 – 20:15 ADT

Curating Safe Spaces (Plenary Session Part Two)

ALL CATR conference attendees warmly invited to participate

More info

ALL CATR conference attendees warmly invited to participate

Wednesday, June 14

18:00 – 22:00 ADT

CATR Welcome Pub Night

Location: East of Grafton Tavern, 1580 Argyle Street, Halifax, NS

Time: 6:00pm-10:00pm

Website: www.rcr.ca/restaurants/east-of-grafton-tavern/

More info

The conference will kick off with CATR’s traditional pre-conference pub night, which will be held at the East of Grafton Tavern at 1580 Argyle Street, opposite Neptune Theatre in downtown Halifax, from 18:00-22:00 on June 14. East of Grafton is a 20-minute walk or a 6-minute cab ride from the Dalhousie Arts Centre and residences. If you are in town on June 14, please do drop into the pub at any point in the evening to meet up with old friends from CATR and to be introduced to new friends from the Halifax theatre community. A limited menu and a range of beverages will be available.

19:00 – 20:15 ADT

Frequencies – HEIST (First Performance)

Location: Large Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

More info

HEIST is presenting their critically acclaimed performance work Frequencies at the Dalhousie Arts Centre (the main conference venue), exclusively for members of CATR. The show will take place from 19:00-20:15 on each night. There will be approximately 40 tickets available per show, free to registered conference attendees.

You can find out more about this innovative and exciting show here.

If you are interested in attending a performance, please sign up for the evening of your choice here by Friday, June 9.

Thursday, June 15

08:30 – 09:00 ADT

Land Acknowledgment and Welcoming Remarks

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Hybrid Session

More info

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Hybrid Session

Break – 15 minutes

09:15 – 10:45 ADT

Performance Art as Critically Transformative Dreaming

Location: Large Rehearsal Room, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Convenors: Leah Decter, Erin Sutherland, Carla Taunton

Panelists: Shauntay Grant, Vie Jones, Colleen MacIsaac, Tyshan Wright

More info

This roundtable situates the conference theme of shores as liminal spaces that can simultaneously encompass the geographical, the conceptual, the theoretical, the methodological, and the relational. As a space between, the liminal can be a site for critically transformative dreaming, the kind of dreaming scholar and cultural worker Leigh Patel suggests is necessary for acting outside the bounds of settler colonialism and white supremacy to envision and “build on wholly different terms.” 1 In considering how performance can advance these vital shifts, this roundtable prioritizes practices that critically encounter, disturb, unsettle, resist and/or reject settler colonial and white supremacist ways of thinking and being in the context of the lands referred to as Canada. The roundtable participants will share knowledge using various approaches, including short papers and performances and poetic, audio, and gestural activations. Working from their distinct cultural perspectives and experiences, they each engage with performance through careful activation of the body in conjunction with the specificities of place and/or material culture, all of which are situated as historicized and politicized sites for mobilizing knowledge. The goal of this roundtable is to experientially and intellectually explore the capacity for performance as a “complex, rhizomic network of… practices,” 2 to destabilize entrenched patterns and mobilize interventions into the past, present, and future through dreaming that generates radical remembering and refusals to forget. Before the conference, each participant will circulate a document proving the background for their roundtable presentation.

Dr. Leah Decter, Canada Research Chair /Assistant Professor, Media Arts, NSCAD University

Bio: Leah Decter is a white settler scholar, inter-media/performance artist, and educator based between Treaty 1 territory and K’jipuktuk/Halifax, where she holds a Canada Research Chair at NSCAD University. Decter’s artwork has been presented internationally, and her recent publications include papers in Qualitative Inquiry and Performance Matters and an issue of PUBLIC Journal co-edited with Dr. Carla Taunton.

09:15 – 10:45 ADT

At the Edges of Visible: Practice-Based Research, Scholarly Recognition, and the Challenge of Ethics

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Co-convenors: Natalie Alvarez and Kim Solga

Panelists: Yasmine Agocs, Thea Fitz-James, Kelsey Jacobson, Cyrus Sundar Singh

More info

Rationale:

Our roundtable is organized around two questions:

What are the creative ways in which performance practitioner-researchers are making their work legible and visible within post-secondary research contexts;
How is the ethics review process impacting, or even shaping, the way that work is born out in practice?

Many researchers in our community identify as practice-based. In the course of our work, we routinely experience the need to communicate that work’s value to those familiar with more traditional, positivist, scholarly modes. We also often struggle to justify our work’s logic, goals, and methods to our institutional research ethics boards (REBs) as we navigate their social science-driven protocols to be allowed to begin our work.

Neither of these issues is new; PbR (or PaR) has been a part of theatre and performance research for decades now. What is, perhaps, new is an increasingly institutional drive toward equity, inclusion, and decolonization. Could such a turn, perhaps, make space for practice-based researchers to begin to shift the dial on what kind of work is seen, heard, measured, enabled, and institutionally recognized?

The goal of this roundtable is to gather current perspectives on the ways in which scholar-artist and other practice-based researchers communicate the nature, value, and impact of their work to university administrators and where and how they find creative ways to navigate the research ethics process. Our hope for this session is to share ideas and resources and take practical tactics and potential strategies back to our home institutions. Therefore, we intend to circulate a CFP (below) that expressly welcomes practitioner-researchers and scholars with administrative appointments so that we might think together toward productive change.

Natalie Alvarez, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and Associate Dean, Scholarly, Research, and Creative Activities, Toronto Metropolitan University

Bio: Her current research interests centre on creative impact in post-secondary institutions and the cultural sector and using performance as a nexus for research across the humanities and social sciences.

Kim Solga, Professor of Theatre Studies and Arts and Humanities Teaching, Western University

Bio: Her current research involves performance ethnography with trans, racialized, and Deaf women theatre makers and research into the links between creativity and wellness on Canadian university campuses. She is a member of Western’s Non-Medical Research Ethics Board.

09:15 – 10:45 ADT

Task Force on Precarity: Connections, Mentorship, and Skills for Precarious Folk

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Task Force Co-Convenors: Jacquey Taucar & Neil Silcox

More info

This hands-on session invites precarious teachers and scholars to connect with one-another and develop our ability to better understand and communicate the skills we bring to the many kinds of work we float between. Working with colleagues and friends new and old, this session will help you to recognize and articulate the many skills that theatre and academia have given you, and how the value they have in the academy and in the world outside. This session seeks to re-humanize precarious teachers and researchers, and to strengthen our community of support.

Break – 15 minutes

11:00 – 12:30 ADT

Shauntay Grant: “Finding Her”: On Womnhood, Blackness, and the Solo Play

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Sponsored by the University of Toronto, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies

More info

“Finding her”: On Wom❤️nhood, Blackness, and the solo play

In this performative keynote, playwright and performance artist Shauntay Grant moves between monologue and memory, poetry and prose to examine narratives of Black wom❤️nhood in solo theatre and performance. What happens when core narratives of Blackness conflict with roles Black wom❤️n have been made to assume? How can the poetic process of erasure support an amplifying of Black wom❤️n’s stories and voices in Canadian theatre and performance? Reflecting on her personal experiences writing, witnessing, and embodying Black wom❤️n at centre stage, Grant considers the multifaceted roles Black wom❤️n have played—both knowingly and unwittingly—on the journey to finding, trusting, activating and amplifying their creative voices.

Presenter:

Shauntay Grant is a poet, playwright, interdisciplinary artist and children’s author who lives and works in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia). As an artist with ancestral ties to the arrival of Black Loyalists, Jamaican Maroons, and Black Refugees to Nova Scotia in the late 1700s and early 1800s, creating art that illuminates African Nova Scotian and African diasporic histories and experiences is a vital part of her work. A former poet laureate for the City of Halifax, she “creates artworks that are engaging and accessible, but also challenging, rigorous, and informed by deep research (The Royal Society of Canada).” Her stage play The Bridge (Playwrights Canada Press, 2021) premiered in 2019 at Neptune Theatre’s Fountain Hall, a co-production between 2b theatre and Neptune in Association with Obsidian Theatre. Set in a rural Black Nova Scotian community, this multilayered story of a family torn apart by betrayal received eleven 2020 Robert Merritt Award nominations, winning four including the prize for Outstanding New Play by a Nova Scotian. Grant’s TYA play Colonial Park toured with Neptune Theatre’s Tour Company in 2023, and her play KK premiered as part of Boca Del Lupo’s Red Phone Project at the 2022 Prismatic Arts Festival. Other recent works include the solo play Beyere (2021), presented as part of Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures project, and Passing (2021), part of Eastern Front Theatre’s Micro Digitals project.

An associate professor of creative writing at Dalhousie University, Grant holds professional degrees in creative writing, music, and journalism. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology From The Ashes: Six Solo Plays (Playwrights Canada Press, 2023) which collects groundbreaking solo plays from the past decade by Black Canadian women and womxn. Her own solo play—a collaboration with Zimbabwean mbira player Hope Masike—is in development with 2b theatre. Other work in development includes Identity: A Song Cycle, a collaboration with composer Dinuk Wijeratne and baritone Elliot Madore that explores one’s journey towards embracing multiple and shifting identities; developed by Against The Grain Theatre, Identity will premiere in Fall 2023. Grant is a founding member of the interdisciplinary arts group Erasure Art Collective, and she has exhibited at Canadian galleries and museums including the Dalhousie Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. She is the author of nine books for children including My Fade Is Fresh (Penguin, 2022), Sandy Toes (Abrams, 2023), When I Wrap My Hair (HarperCollins, 2024), and Africville (Groundwood, 2018) which won a Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

LA RÉALITÉ FÉMININE, LA RÉALITÉ NOIRE ET LA PIÈCE EN SOLO

RÉSUMÉ DE LA PRÉSENTATION :

Dans cette présentation-performance, la dramaturge et artiste Shauntay Grant passe du monologue aux souvenirs, de la poésie à la prose pour étudier le fait féminin dans le théâtre et la performance en solo. Que se passe-t-il quand le récit sur la réalité noire entre en conflit avec les rôles que les femmes noires sont censées assumer ? Comment le processus poétique de l’effacement peut-il favoriser l’amplification des récits et des voix des femmes noires dans la performance et le théâtre canadiens ? En partant de ses expériences personnelles d’écriture, de ses observations et de ses rôles de femmes noires sur scène, Grant examine les rôles multidimensionnels que les femmes noires ont joués, sciemment et involontairement, sur le chemin de la découverte, de la confiance, de l’activation et de l’amplification de leurs voix créatives.

CONFÉRENCIÈRE :

Shauntay Grant est une poète, une dramaturge, une artiste interdisciplinaire et une auteure pour enfants qui vit et travaille à Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nouvelle-Écosse). En tant qu’artiste ayant des liens ancestraux avec l’arrivée des Loyalistes noirs, des Marrons jamaïcains et des réfugiés noirs en Nouvelle-Écosse à la fin des années 1700 et au début des années 1800, une partie essentielle de son travail consiste à créer des œuvres d’art qui mettent en lumière les récits et les expériences des Néo-Écossais africains et des diasporas africaines. Poétesse lauréate de la ville d’Halifax, elle « crée des œuvres d’art engageantes et accessibles, mais aussi stimulantes, rigoureuses et fondées sur des recherches approfondies (Société royale du Canada) ». Sa pièce de théâtre The Bridge (Playwrights Canada Press, 2021) a été créée en 2019 au Fountain Hall du Théâtre Neptune, une coproduction entre le théâtre 2 b et Neptune, en association avec le Théâtre Obsidian. Située dans une communauté noire rurale de la Nouvelle-Écosse, cette histoire à plusieurs niveaux d’une famille déchirée par la trahison a reçu onze nominations pour le prix Robert Merritt 2020 et en a remporté quatre, y compris le prix de la meilleure nouvelle pièce jouée par un Néo-Écossais. La pièce pour la jeunesse de Grant, Colonial Park, a fait l’objet d’une tournée du Théâtre Neptune en 2023, et sa pièce KK a été créée dans le cadre du Projet Red Phone de Boca Del Lupo au Festival Prismatic Arts de 2022. Parmi ses autres œuvres récentes, citons la pièce solo Beyere (2021), présentée dans le cadre du projet 21 Black Futures du Théâtre Obsidian, et Passing (2021), qui fait partie du projet Micro Digitals du Théâtre Eastern Front.

Professeure agrégée de création littéraire à l’Université Dalhousie, Grant est titulaire de diplômes professionnels en création littéraire, en musique et en journalisme. Elle assume la direction de l’anthologie à paraître From The Ashes : Six Solo Plays (Playwrights Canada Press, 2023), qui rassemble des spectacles solos avant-gardistes de la dernière décennie écrits par des femmes et des fxmmes noires canadiennes. Sa propre pièce solo, une collaboration avec la joueuse de mbira zimbabwéenne Hope Masike, est en préparation au théâtre 2 b. Elle travaille également sur d’autres pièces, dont Identity : A Song Cycle, une collaboration avec le compositeur Dinuk Wijeratne et le baryton Elliot Madore, qui explore le cheminement d’une personne vers l’acceptation d’identités multiples et changeantes. Développée par le Théâtre Against The Grain, Identity sera présentée pour la première fois à l’automne 2023. Grant est parmi les membres fondateurs du groupe artistique interdisciplinaire Erasure Art Collective, et elle a exposé dans des galeries et des musées canadiens, notamment à la galerie d’art de l’Université Dalhousie, au Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario et au Musée canadien de l’immigration du Quai 21. Elle est l’auteure de neuf livres pour enfants, dont My Fade Is Fresh (Penguin, 2022), Sandy Toes (Abrams, 2023), When I Wrap My Hair (HarperCollins, 2024) et Africville (Groundwood, 2018), qui a remporté le prix du livre illustré Marilyn Baillie et elle a été finaliste des Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général.

Break – 15 minutes

12:45 – 14:15 ADT

Lunch and Launch – Hosted by Playwrights Canada Press

Location: Fifth Floor Atrium, Dalhousie Arts Centre

More info

Vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free options will be available for each lunch.

Please go here by Friday, June 9 to let us know of any dietary requirements or preferences you may have for your lunches, and we will strive to make sure they are in place for you.

Break – 15 minutes

14:30 – 16:00 ADT

Channeling Indigenous Stories Onstage

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Heather Davis-Fisch

Remapping Blyth in 2017: Indigenous Performance Confronts Canada 150

My dissertation-in-process is a rural feminist and decolonial historical analysis of the Blyth Festival Theatre. Since 1975, Blyth has produced an entire summer season of Canadian plays (except in 2020), emphasizing new work. Throughout this history, important productions challenged past representations of the “imagined community” of Canada found on Blyth’s stage (Anderson 8).

At CATR’s 2023 conference, I propose discussing two Indigenous-led productions at the Blyth Festival in 2017, when many Canadians celebrated the nation’s so-called 150th birthday. The two plays include Curve Lake First Nation playwright Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Berlin Blues and Mohawk and Tuscarora playwright Falen Johnson and Abénaki/Euro playwright Jessica Carmichael’s play Ipperwash. These plays not only call attention to the existence of Indigenous people who have been stewards of this land for much longer than 150 years but also reframes the history of the physical site of the Blyth Festival Theatre through what decolonial theorist and historian Lisa Brooks calls Native Space. Within the first few seasons of Blyth’s performance history, troubling caricatures of Indigenous people are present in three works. Throughout the remaining decades, there has been a complete lack of Indigenous representation on Blyth’s stage. The performances of The Berlin Blues and Ipperwash in Canada’s bicentennial year confront Blyth’s past performance history while prompting more general questions about Canadian identity. Blyth artists and audiences are asked to reflect on questions similar to those offered at the end of an article by Falen Johnson for Intermission Magazine:

I wait and wonder what will happen next. Mostly I wonder how Canada will react the next time there is an uprising. Because next time will happen, it’s just a matter of when. In this post–Canada 150 world, will you stand with us, Canada? Or will you just remain quietly, politely silent?

– Johnson

Taylor Marie Graham, Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) University of Guelph, Sessional Professor at University of Waterloo & Western University

Bio: Taylor Marie Graham (she/her) is an award-winning theatre artist and educator living in Cambridge, Ontario / Haldimand Tract. Her creative and scholarly work often explores rural feminist identities and the decolonization of bodies in space.

To learn more about Taylor’s work, please visit: www.taylormariegraham.com

Decolonizing Canadian Theatre Through Indigenous Collaboration

Extractivism is the logical corollary of capitalism, itself a distillation of Western colonial values underpinning the imperial occupation of Turtle Island. These values are evidenced in the Doctrine of Discovery and the invocation of Terra Nullius as a justification for seizing Indigenous lands precisely because these lands were not used in ways that European colonizers recognized as productive. While contemporary theatre artists aim to embrace Truth and Reconciliation and make space for Indigenous artists in productions and programming, extractivist ideologies continue to make our theatres into dangerous spaces for these artists. From the idealization of rigid hierarchy to mantras like “the show must go on,” along with the real financial limitations theatres face, contemporary Canadian theatre risks harm to all its participants, not just Indigenous artists. Unsurprisingly, many Indigenous artists (and potential artists) do not see themselves interpellated by audition calls or welcomed by existing theatre companies. To change who works in our theatres and performs on our stages, we must radically change how we do theatre.

In my paper, I will discuss three recent projects that have allowed me to work with Indigenous artists: a CBU course-based student production of Joseph Dandurand’s Please Do Not Touch the ~~Indians~~ Mik’maq, a professional production of shalan joudrey’s KOQM, and another course-based experiment with students in Listuguj, QC, based on a new adaptation of Stephen Augustine’s Mi’kmaw creation story. I will describe how these projects sought to alter traditional theatrical hierarchy and process by adopting more collaborative and relational models and prioritizing multi-disciplinary engagement. I will also discuss points of tension between this approach and the temporal and fiscal needs of theatre as an industry and describe how we addressed these challenges. Finally, I will consider how spiritual ritual grounds Indigenous-led theatre, paralleling the spiritual aspects of Western performance that motivated its development and preservation in the classical and medieval periods, leading us back to the potential for theatre to resist – or at the least, not re-enact – the values of colonialism.

Sheila Christie, Associate Professor of English and Drama Chair, Department of Literature, Folklore, and The Arts Cape Breton University, Unama’ki (Cape Breton), Nova Scotia

Reanimating Loss Itself in Tapestry Opera’s Shawnadithit

In 1823, on the northeast shore of the island known to the Mi’kmaq people today as K’taqmkuk (Newfoundland), the Beothuk woman Shawnadithit was kidnapped by colonists. After spending five years as a household servant in the residence of John Peyton Jr on Exploits Island, Shawnadithit was brought to St. John’s to meet with William Epps Cormack, an anthropologist intent on documenting something of her people’s language, life and customs. Their encounter—between one of the last surviving Beothuk and a so-called “salvage ethnographer”—has since accrued mythical status, becoming the subject of poems, plays and novels, including a major treatment in Michael Crummey’s 2001 novel River Thieves.

The overdetermination of Shawnadithit’s story—and the colonial historiography of the Beothuk genocide by extension—has been challenged and re-enlivened in a new treatment by Tapestry Opera led by Algonquin theatre artist Yvette Nolan. Gathering Indigenous artists from across Turtle Island and collaborating with Newfoundland-born composer Dean Burry, Nolan saw in Shawnadithit and Cormack’s encounter an opportunity to revisit Shawnadithit’s story from an Indigenous perspective. Left with no words from Shawnadithit, Nolan and Burry drew inspiration from the drawings Shawnadithit made in her meetings with Cormack. Their new “Canadian-Indigenous Opera,” Shawnadithit, premiered in May 2019. Drawing on insights from the artists, and my knowledge growing up as a settler in this area with direct ancestral connections to the late history of the Beothuk people, I will consider how the opera newly places Shawnadithit’s story in live relationship to the unique circumstances of truth and reconciliation in Newfoundland.

Barry Freeman, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies with a cross-appointment to the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning OISE/UofT

Bio: He is the author of Staging Strangers: Theatre & Global Ethics (2017), co-editor with Kathleen Gallagher of In Defence of Theatre: Practices and Social Interventions (2016) and served from 2011-22 as Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review. During that time, he co/edited 8 special issues and co/authored 15 articles on issues of importance to contemporary Canadian theatre and performance.

14:30 – 16:00 ADT

Performance, Pedagogy, and the Politics of a ‘Difficult Return’

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Kathleen Gallagher, “Site-Specific Creation and Difficult Assembly: Becoming the Bridge in Times of Loss”

Nancy Cardwell and Munia Debleena Tripathi, “Waves and Retreats: Dis/harmonies of Being and ‘Be’-ing Together in Toronto and Lucknow”

Celeste Kirsh, “‘Dear Neighbours with Sharpies:’ Hidden Histories, Public Art, and the Drama Classroom”

More info

Performance, Pedagogy, and the Politics of a ‘Difficult Return’ Examining the Rocky Shoals of Creative Collaboration in Times of Endemic Crisis

This curated panel grapples with the destabilizing effects of ‘endemic crisis’ – both local and global, intimate and planetary – on the creative collaborative work between researchers, artists, teachers and students in the study Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019-2024). This multi-sited, drama-based ethnographic project, unfolding in Toronto Canada, Lucknow India; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Thessaloniki, Greece; Coventry, England and Bogotá, Colombia, harnesses theatre as a methodology for understanding and enacting global climate justice. This panel charts our struggles with the (dis)connections of the past two years of the study as we navigated the COVID pandemic – among other political and ecological upheavals – to find ways to be and create together. Our necessary turn to online drama in light of COVID surfaced shared creative impulses and desires in cross-cultural creative exchange, but also digital divides, varying understandings of, and relationships to, the climate crisis, and materially varying experiences of the pandemic. In the fourth year of the study, in-person resumed, but our ‘return’ to one another proved elusive as changed by the pandemic, we found ourselves floundering in the waters of creative collaboration, struggling locally with the challenge of how to ‘be with each other’ again; it produced what we are calling ‘pedagogies of disharmony’. This panel roots itself in the concept of ‘the difficult return’ – to ourselves, to each other, and to the land, location and history – as we reckon with what Gallagher et al. (2010) see as the ‘melancholia’ that arises when the aesthetic and social goals of drama are affected by the shifting stakes of a changing world.

Site-Specific Creation and Difficult Assembly: Becoming the Bridge in Times of Loss

The primary ambition of the project, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019-2024), is to respond to the need for new ways of thinking about and responding to pressing environmental and social crises by asking if theatre can lead to alternative ways of seeing the world that can account for the ‘inextricable entanglements’ of the environment, society, subjectivity and our own actions (Neimanis, Åsberg and Hedrén 2015, 68). This paper first provides a brief overview of the project, engaging with the drama pedagogies and theatre genres that are put to work in a far-ranging Global North-South arts-led, youth-driven performance ecology. Then, the paper turns to ‘history’ and the in-person work conducted in the fourth year of the research study in our Toronto site, which took the form of a mini-unit in land-based, site-specific performance, carried out with a class of 28 Grade 9 and 10 students in a Toronto high school drama classroom and its surrounding neighbourhood. In preparation for this unit, entitled Land, History, Presence: Performing a Land Acknowledgement for Now through Mobile Site-Specific Performance, our Toronto team and Indigenous knowledge-keeper Amanda Buffalo engaged in a long conversation about how to facilitate a land-centred drama pedagogy amid the backdrop of the historic and ongoing traumas of settler-colonial violence, pandemic, public (un)health, an Ontario education system under siege, and the failures of COP 27. The author asks what grief and trauma can teach us about how to proceed with community-based, justice-oriented work with youth and what new modes of listening and creative resistance these times of profound damage demand of us.

Kathleen Gallagher, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies/University of Toronto

Bio: A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, Dr. Kathleen Gallagher studies theatre as a powerful medium for expression by young people of their experiences and understandings. Her current SSHRC ethnographic project explores youth theatre-making and its relationship to socio-ecological justice.

Waves and Retreats: Dis/harmonies of Being and ‘Be’-ing Together in Toronto and Lucknow

Over the last two years of the pandemic, both nation-wide and the world over, school closures and attempts to return to in-person schooling have been immediately followed by renewed COVID-19 threats and fluctuating retreats to online classes. This incredible precarity has made us approach our ‘return’ to research inside drama classrooms with deep caution, finding ourselves in spaces that pose unfamiliar challenges. In this paper we explore these new ‘disharmonies’ in two of our sites – Toronto and Lucknow – but we also situate them in the broader contexts of the underlying social and political disharmonies heightened by the pandemic and by the escalating populist pressures gaining momentum ‘under the cover’ of COVID. Given this climate, this paper looks at our experiences of ‘presence’ and the shock and dissonance we encountered as we felt our way towards being together again. Using site-specific theatre-making to explore how we ‘acknowledge land’ and what that might mean for climate justice, this paper uses empirical examples from theatre-making with young people as it unfolded in Toronto and Lucknow, highlighting the complex relationships each site holds to “land” and its storied histories. We will explore how, like the pandemic itself, we experienced both waves and retreats from youth and ourselves, as we came to recognize this not as a longed-for ‘return’ but as something else. We hone in on the affective consequences of these critical and creative theatre-making encounters in a destabilized world and in the very local contexts of Toronto and Lucknow, where our land-based pedagogies could only go so far to ground us (Boler in Bozalek et al., 2014).

Nancy Cardwell, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, & Munia Debleena Tripathi, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies/University of Toronto

Bio: Nancy Cardwell is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on arts in education through the lens of critical literacy studies and feminist theory in school settings. A Dora Mavor Moore and a Gemini award-winning dancer and choreographer, Nancy is an established artist on the Canadian dance scene.

Bio: Munia Debleena Tripathi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. Her research interests include contemporary Bangla theatre, Applied theatre and audience research. She works as a playwright, theatre director, trainer and workshop facilitator and lives between Toronto and Kolkata. She is passionate about stories and loves making beautiful things together.

‘Dear Neighbours with Sharpies:’ Hidden Histories, Public Art, and the Drama Classroom”

This paper focuses on ‘the difficult return’ to creation in shared local space through our in-person land-based performance work in Toronto. In particular, the paper grapples with the ‘affects’ of our pedagogical and artistic (re)engagement with public and institutional spaces. Departing from Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (2005) suggestion that embodied knowledge is heavily shaped by the influence of the affective, somatic movements of “forces, sensations, stories, invitations, habits, media, time, space, ideas, language, objects, images, and sounds” as pedagogy, we look to the learnings that arose in our two sites of learning: Bickford Park (in Toronto’s west end) and its public murals, and a drama studio in a Toronto public high school (p. 24). We grapple with the coalescences of effect and graffiti at the Bickford site as the researchers, teacher and students learned of the defacement and subsequent restoration of one of the public murals depicting red dresses commemorating Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit peoples. We draw from Nayak’s (2010) concept of “emotional-laden landscapes” to consider what the ‘performances’ of public art and defacement brought to bear on students’ own ‘covered up’ histories with everyday places and spaces bearing the traces of misogynistic violence. We then turn to the ‘affects’ of the drama classroom, observing students’ changed relationships to institutional space after the return to in-person schooling. Problematizing assumptions of drama classrooms as ‘safe spaces’, we ask what new place-making practices artists and teachers need to employ to revivify the community among youth in drama spaces.

Celeste Kirsh, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto

Bio: Celeste Kirsh is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Curriculum and Pedagogy Program at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at The University of Toronto. She holds a BA in Drama from The University of Waterloo and a Master of Teaching Degree from OISE / U of T. Her research interests include digital multimodal writing, journalism, and teacher learning.

Dr. Christine Balt, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies/University of Toronto

Bio: Christine Balt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include applied theatre, drama education, and arts-based research. She has published articles in Theatre Research in Canada, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance and The International Journal for Qualitative Studies in Education.

14:30 – 16:00 ADT

Echoes from the Shoals of Academe: Podcasting as Life raft, as Lighthouse, and as Anchor

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Ashley Williamson & Timothy Youker

More info

Echoes from the Shoals of Academe: Podcasting as Life Raft, as Lighthouse, and as Anchor

We will perform a live episode of “Let’s Unpack That”, our podcast about public history and heritage performance, nested within a meta-discussion about the podcast as a performance genre and academic genre. This presentation will build on previous discussions of podcasting in literary studies by Hannah McGregor and others while also addressing advantages and challenges specific to theatre and performance studies. The “Let’s Unpack That” episode addresses various topics, including cross-dressing War of 1812 re-enactors, fraudulent Viking relics, the dangers of corporate museum sponsorship, and what it means to have “a historical chocolate experience.” We focus instead on the wacky, horrible, inspiring, and sometimes sexy (okay, rarely sexy) facts behind how communities preserve and perform their histories. Our visits to historical sites and participation in living history re-enactments inform many of these discussions.

Podcasts evoke live conversation’s intimacy and occupy a fluid, conceptual space where research and teaching, liveness and mediation, and intimacy and commerce mingle. Podcasting has also become a refuge for precarious and unemployed scholars who lack access to more traditional means of public engagement. We’ll discuss all this and then open the floor to practical and conceptual questions.

Bio: Dr. Ashley Williamson is an expert on museums and living history performance, with a resumé including the University of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Stratford Festival.

Bio: Dr. Tim Youker has taught drama at NYU and Columbia University and is the author of a book on documentary arts.

Break – 15 minutes

16:15 – 17:45 ADT

Community Submerged Art

Location: Small Rehearsal Room, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Moderator: Barry Freeman

Moira Day, “Exploring Canadian ‘Authenticity’ in Early Twentieth-Century Documentary Film and Folk Drama”

Kimber Sider, “Moving Histories: Multimodal Storytelling and Community Impact”

Sarah Robbins, “‘Local Jazz Musicians Left Out of Local Jazz Festival’: Researching Community Musical Performance Through the Family Archive”

More info

Exploring Canadian ‘Authenticity’ in Early Twentieth-Century Documentary Film and Folk Drama, presented and written by Moira Day

This presentation builds on a 2019 paper that examined W.S. Milne’s reviews in the University of Toronto Quarterly (1935-40) as key to understanding the nexus of Canadian, Irish, and related international currents that contributed to the surprising national success of Minnie Bicknell’s 1936 folk play Relief as an “authentic voice” of the Canadian prairies.

Milne’s reviews implicitly connect the rise of the folk play movement as an alternative to the commercial, professional urban voice of Broadway with the rise of the documentary film, which similarly featured real people speaking and performing everyday functions in their natural environment. Noting the documentary’s impact both in Canada and internationally, Milne credited Robert Flaherty for producing “notable films of regional civilization, such as Nanook of the North, [and] Man of Aran (1939)” and noted the arrival of John Grierson to establish the National Film Board of Canada.

This paper, focusing more on John Grierson, continues to explore (1) the complex intertwining of the extension drama movement in Canada that produced Relief and Grierson’s own ambitions to promote the documentary film as a new national, educational grassroots movement in Canada (2) the NFB’s own early (and problematic) attempts to find and create a more authentic Indigenous voice than Flaherty’s Nanook consistent with Grierson’s own documentary practice and (3) some of the factors in the post-war world that brought both the early documentary and folk play movements to an end after 1945.

Moira Day, University of Saskatchewan

A former book editor and co-editor of Theatre Research in Canada, she has edited two anthologies The Hungry Spirit, by Elsie Park Gowan, an important pioneer in the early western Canadian theatre and The West of All Possible Worlds, an anthology of contemporary Prairie playwrights. She has also contributed chapters on Jamie Portman to Crossing the Boundaries, a major study on English-language Canadian Theatre criticism, and on theatre in translation in to Les Théâtres Professionel du Canada Francophone; her other articles have appeared in Prairie Forum, Theatre Research in Canada, Essays in Theatre, Theatre InSight, Canadian Theatre Review and NeWest Review. She has also spoken at conferences both within Canada and internationally in Ireland and China. She has also lectured on Canadian Drama in the Czech Republic.

Moving Histories: Multimodal Storytelling and Community Impact

Rea Dennis writes, “Stories are imbued with the cultural, social, political, and historical truths and provide a bridge between our sense of self and our sense of other” (186). Within story and performance exists the potential to connect cultures and communities and to speak across differences. These possibilities expand, alter, and shift as different performance mediums come into play, creating new opportunities and limits with each added modality, as each medium holds its own implications and impacts.

From 2018 to 2022, I led a multimodal community storytelling project called Moving Histories. In this project, we worked with community story advocate Jenny Mitchell to foster relationships within three of Guelph’s most underrepresented neighbourhoods to support individuals across generations in telling their own stories of their communities. These storytellers then came together to share their experiences in a 1.5 hr bus tour of their community. These performance events were filmed and edited into 20-minute documentaries that became the foundation of a six-month exhibit at the Guelph Civic Museum. The exhibit interwove these living histories with the museum’s archived documentation of the neighbourhoods. The entwining of live performance, edited video documentation, and curated exhibit created a multitude of framings and retellings of these stories, impacted by time, audience, and location. This paper explores how multimodal approaches to creating and disseminating community-created stories can impact how these stories are claimed, received, and communicated beyond the initial telling. Different modalities of creation wash over the shores of performance and impact the experience of the telling by shifting the contours. Within these exchange shifts exists the possibility of reinforcing problematic power dynamics while dissolving limiting notions about artistic expression and building community.

Kimber Sider, Queen’s University

Bio: Kimber Sider is a multimodal storyteller working predominantly in performance and documentary film. Sider is the Artistic Director of the Guelph Film Festival, holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of Guelph, and is a Lecturer in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.

Local Jazz Musicians Left Out of Local Jazz Festival’: Researching Community Musical Performance Through the Family Archive, presented and written by Sarah Robbins

My maternal grandfather, Vic Hill, was a jazz pianist. Emigrating from Glasgow, Scotland, to Oakville, Ontario, Canada, in 1958, he was a prolific performer in local Southern Ontario bars and public festivals, and his Vic Hill Trio was scheduled to perform in the annual Oakville Jazz Festival the weekend before his death in August 2002.

In my work with Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance, I have begun researching my grandfather’s vocation through archival and oral history methods: from local newspaper articles dating back to 1971, his own clippings and homemade publicity materials, his audio recordings and demo tapes, and through conversations with my 86-year-old grandmother. Initial research uncovered a 1994 open letter by my grandfather in The Oakville Beaver titled “Local jazz musicians left out of local jazz festival,” wherein he voices his disappointment in the dramaturgical choices of that year’s Oakville Jazz Festival, of which he was a regular act. His letter raises questions about the vocational and the professional, the local and the international. A bench dedicated to him located at Lakeshore Rd and Trafalgar Rd (the site of the annual event) points to the intersection of the personal and the public, the temporary and the permanent, of the evidence left behind by the local community artist.

Thinking about my grandfather’s long music career as on the shores of the professional, I consider the role the family archive plays in generating a legacy for the vocational performer.

Dr. Sarah Robbins

Bio: Dr. Sarah Robbins is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, and is currently the Project Manager for the Gatherings Partnership. She studies the relationship between gender and performance in theatrical institutional culture, and the pedagogy of actor training. Her paper at this year’s CATR conference* about her grandfather’s performance practice is her first attempt at archival research. Her work has been published in alt.theatre magazine and HowlRound Theatre Commons.

16:15 – 17:45 ADT

Performance in a Stormy Age

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Moderator: Natalie Alvarez

Megan Johnson, “Performances of ‘Shoring up’: Infrastructural Imaginings of an Uncertain Future”

Claire Borody, “The Performativity of an Artifact: How Covid Masks Illustrated the Trajectory of Pandemic Protocol”

Robin Witt, “The Great North Road: Boundaries and Borders in Simon Stephens’ Light Falls”

More info

Performances of ‘Shoring up’: Infrastructural Imaginings of an Uncertain Future

This presentation takes the “performing shores” prompt as an opening to explore how performance represents and engages with the infrastructural forms that “shore up” or support contemporary life. Performance, as an artistic product and a social form, variously relies on, represents, interrogates, resists, and reimagines material and immaterial infrastructure. This has been demonstrated by the ways that artists have relied on performance tactics to reveal the “backstage” mechanisms that support artistic production and by scholarship, which shows how performance is a mode for revealing the structures that support social life. Building on this work, I argue that in this particular moment, there is an urgent need to attend to the performance of infrastructural forms, given that the threat of climate collapse, the implementation of extreme austerity measures, and widening social and economic inequalities have encroached upon every facet of contemporary life.

In this presentation, I bring together an assortment of artistic and social performances that reveal differing aspects of “shoring up” through their infrastructural engagements. Thinking across a range of cultural objects—including a digital opera on disability benefit schemes, Alberta’s unevenly deployed Critical Infrastructure Defence Act, and Hollywood disaster films—I show how such infrastructural performances represent the precariousness of contemporary life. Though these performances work to different political ends, I argue that they each contribute to “forg[ing] an imaginary for managing the meanwhile within damaged life’s perdurance” (Berlant 2022) and in so doing, offer different paths towards shoring up a perilously uncertain future.

Dr. Megan A. Johnson, Research Associate University of Guelph

Bio: Dr. Megan A. Johnson (she/her) is a performance scholar, singer, arts administrator, and dramaturg. She is currently a Research Associate with Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. Megan holds a Ph.D. in Theatre & Performance Studies from York University. Her research centers on disability art and performance, critical access studies, infrastructural politics, and environmental studies. Her writing has been published in Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, and PUBLIC.

The Performativity of an Artifact: How Covid Masks Illustrated the Trajectory of Pandemic Protocol

The conference theme, Performing Shores/The Shores of Performance, aptly identifies the shifting boundaries that can be identified in the action of creating performance art and in the study of theatre, performance and culture. Due to the pandemic, this activity has seen a period of increased fluctuation. After exhausting the notion of running archival footage online, performance companies and artists began to get creative using formats and platforms, the power of interdisciplinarity and emerging technology. During this unprecedented event, the face mask emerged as a defining artifact: an artifact that illustrated the progression of the pandemic.

At the beginning of the pandemic, mask-wearing was a visual indication that life as we knew it had changed and that we were all doing our part to overcome the viral attack. However, as the pandemic continued, mask use became increasingly politicized and shifted from a sign of the times to a symbol of the times. Although this shift from masks as saving grace to instruments of oppression has been given substantial media coverage, this is not the masking dynamic that will be focused on in this paper.

When the Covid Pandemic has become medical history and reaches an endemic stage, the paper, cloth and plastic artifacts/face masks left behind will reveal the trajectory of human reactions to the event. How did the culture of mask-wearing evolve? What do the varying characteristics of masks worn in various pandemic stages tell us about collective general knowledge of the virus transmission? This paper is structured as a photo essay exploring the pandemic through the performative qualities of the face mask: an examination of the shifting aesthetics and mask construction as new information about Covid 19 was discovered and made public.

Dr. Claire Borody, The University of Winnipeg

The Great North Road: Boundaries and Borders in Simon Stephens’ Light Falls

In playmaking, what separates the possible from the impossible is a tenuous border that, on one side, lives the artists’ belief in the collaborative imagination and, on the other, resides their acquiescence to fear. Theatre producers in a fragile, post-Covid society are experiencing an abundance of challenges while emerging from the dark days of the pandemic, which seem insurmountable. Closed theatre spaces, the rise in producing costs, the exodus of artists, and the decline of theatre criticism in both print media and online are but a few of the obstacles facing theatre artists and organizations at this moment. Yet, it is the conviction in the power of shared mental mapping and adherence to the ideal of cooperative responsibility that can push aside the duo plagues of anxiety and doubt while embarking on the creative process. In this paper, I will discuss the process of directing Simon Stephens’ Light Falls for Chicago’s Steep Theatre, an itinerant storefront, in the summer of 2022. The play examines the lives of a family who are scattered across the north of England and the spiritual force that binds them together—a force that transcends death. Featured prominently are references to the postindustrial landscape of this island nation, its rivers, oceans, and modes of transportation—the routes, roads, and boundaries that both separate and unite this family. In a review of the production, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune states, “…there was a long break before Light Falls, the latest Steep production of a Stephens play…. Steep took a two-year pause…. It is unspeakably wonderful to experience this writer, this director and this essential Chicago theater company all back together again.”

This detailed narrative will outline the determined effort of a group of designers, technicians, and actors who persevered in their creation of Light Falls through a belief in the work, the strength of collective will, and the power of collaborative imagination.

Robin Witt, Professor of Directing UNC Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

16:15 – 17:45 ADT

Performance in the Pacific Northwest

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Sponsored by the University of Victoria, Department of Theatre

Heather Davis-Fisch, “Tracing Performances Across Archives”

Laurel Green, “This Chair is a Mountain”

Matthew Tomkinson, “Opera by Telephone”

Sasha Kovacs, “Working with Archivists: A Costume in the Museum of Vancouver”

More info

Performance in the Pacific Northwest

This panel arises from Sasha and Heather’s current research project investigating the critical role performance practices played in how newcomers and settlers understood their relationship to land and settlement and the evolving relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century. At this stage, the project is focused on two objectives. First, to explore galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) at two pilot locations (Vancouver Island and the Fraser Valley) to locate, document, and analyze key
pre-twentieth-century performance artifacts, texts, and sources. Second, to develop a methodology for performance historiography responsive to these two sites’ historical and geographic contingencies and could be expanded for application to the greater Pacific Northwest region. Ultimately, the investigation will explicate the role performance played in the colonization of the province and suggest how performance practices also created space for potential resistance from Indigenous peoples and people of colour as processes of settler colonialism proceeded. The project forges connections with museums and archives, enhancing research practices concerning performance history within the region, transforming the archive/museum’s practices of performance description/curation, equipping researchers with tools in digital humanities, and developing public debate surrounding the important role performance plays in history, culture and society.

The panel will introduce the critical frame for the project, present select examples and analysis of the Performance objects/materials/documents we are working with, and outline our preliminary methodology for analysis, which integrates place-based methodologies and performance historiography. The panel engages with the conference theme geographically and spatially: our project is focused on the role performance played in the reformulation of shores from Indigenous spaces to settler-colonial spaces that could be explored, exchanged, and commodified. It also
addresses the theme disciplinarily: while some of the examples we will explore fit into typical categories of performance/Theatre’s material remains, other examples are of material remains that have not (yet) been considered theatrical and are thus on the metaphoric “shores” or boundaries of performance historiography. Finally, the panel engages with the conference theme methodologically in considering the relationship between performance historiography and GLAM practices.

Heather Davis-Fisch, “Tracing Performances Across Archives”

In this paper, I will introduce the project’s scope in terms of the questions it explores, its objectives, and its significance (as outlined in the first paragraph above). To outline some of the archival/documentary challenges that led to this project, I will outline the case study of Christian pageant plays and passion plays performed for Indigenous audiences in and around Chilliwack, BC, around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Bio: Heather Davis-Fisch is an Associate Professor of Theatre and the Director of the School of Creative Arts at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Laurel Green, “This Chair is a Mountain (Working Title)”

The journey of a performance artifact on Vancouver Island begins with an Opera Chair in a display case at the Nanaimo Museum. It travels through the history of touring Cantonese Opera performances in the early 1900s. When coal mining settlements in Nanaimo and Cumberland were among the largest rural North American Chinese populations of the early 20th century, bustling Chinatowns featured 400-seat Opera Houses on their main streets. For immigrant coal miners who faced racism, segregation, and harsh working conditions, touring Cantonese Opera productions became the most popular form of entertainment. It constituted the community’s sense of cultural self. They relied on community infrastructure, were a business opportunity and—for some performers—became a pathway to immigration. Compelled by the story of Cumberland’s Chinatown, now abandoned swampland, author and historian Paul Yee wrote Jade in the Coal, which premiered in 2011. Depicting the lives of immigrant coal miners and those who performed in the Operas, Jade in the Coal blends traditional music and storytelling with contemporary physical Theatre. In Cantonese Opera, chairs are a multifunctional prop, changing coverings as a function of how they areng used in a scene. A warrior can leap over it when it’s a mountain. It can evoke the interior of a royal palace. Looking at this performance artifact in a new context, I will explore how it becomes more than simply a Chair. It was a prop used by Cantonese Opera performers travelling to Vancouver Island from China, observed by immigrant coal miners carving their destinies in a new country. It inspired a new play performed a century later; it is a Chair that survived when so many other artifacts from lost Chinatowns have not. The story of our culture is told through what has been collected, catalogued, and retained by memory institutions on Vancouver Island, from big museums to small community archives. How are they treating performance materials, and what stories from our region’s performance history have been excluded?

Bio: Laurel Green (she/her) is a nationally recognized dramaturg and creative producer of new work, from the world premiere of over a dozen new Canadian plays to performance events, video games, participatory installations, and secret backyard shows; she creates invitations to participate and provocations for change. Laurel is a research associate for the SSHRC-funded project Performance in the Pacific Northwest: Pilot Project, developing new methodologies for performance historiography with Dr. Sasha Kovacs at the University of Victoria. Her primary research recovered early Canadian feminist playwright Louise Carter-Broun for Dr. Kym Bird’s anthology Blowing Up the Skirt of History: Recovered and Reanimated Plays by Early Canadian Women Dramatists, 1876-1920 (MCUP, 2020). She was an artistic advisor for the inaugural Dramaturgies of Participation Summit at Queens University, with an article forthcoming in Canadian Theatre Review. Laurel holds a Master’s degree in Drama from the University of Toronto and is a frequent guest lecturer at York University. She currently lives on the traditional unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples, colonially known as Victoria, BC.

Matthew Tomkinson, “Opera by Telephone”

Matthew will present a case study from his research assistant position on the project.

Bio: Matthew is a writer, composer, and researcher based in Vancouver. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. His doctoral dissertation, “Mad Auralities: Sound and Sense in Contemporary Performance,” examines auditory representations of mental health differences. Working across various disciplines, including text, Performance, installation, sound design, and new media, Matthew’s artistic practice shows a recurring interest in unruly eclecticism and constraint-based compositional approaches. His work explores the limited states of genre, texture, and technology while testing the thresholds of sensory perception.

Sasha Kovacs, “Working with Archivists: A Costume in the Museum of Vancouver”

Prompted by fieldwork undertaken for two related performance history projects (Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance (gatheringspartnership.com) and Performance in the Pacific Northwest: Pilot Project), this paper introduces the museological staging of one costume worn by the E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake, an artist now recognized as a “culture bearer” and “Grandmother” of “Native theatre and performance” (Darby, Mohler, Stanlake, 42). The paper discusses the complex histories of the costume’s bequest before attending to the shifts in descriptive language at the time of the museum’s accession to this important performance heritage artifact. I then critically reflect on the costume’s exhibition history, addressing how this afterlife shapes and informs problematic understanding of this complex figure. Finally, the paper concludes by advocating for and imagining a museological approach to reconnect Johnson’s dress to its costume histories and performative contexts. This research aims not only to better inform future connections with Johnson’s costume that could precipitate new historiographies of this influential Indigenous performer but also to inspire further methodological reflection on the key questions theatre historians must ask when analysing performance artifacts (inclusive of costume) that are often re-staged, and in the process altered, within the museum.

Bio: Sasha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria.

16:15 – 17:45 ADT

CANCELLED – Describing Queer Identities

CANCELLED

More info

Co-Convenors: Kat Germain and Jennifer Brethour

Describing Queer Identities: Exploratory Discussions about Ethics, Access and Language in Described Video Practices

For those unfamiliar, Described Video (DV) is the science and art of describing visual content audibly to people who are Blind, partially sighted, don’t/ can’t look at a screen, or otherwise find it helpful. Our basic directives are “Say what you see,” attempt to offer as close as possible experience as those watching the event, and do not editorialize.

For this roundtable discussion, Jennifer Brethour and Kat Germain invite a mixed group of 2Spirit/Queer/Trans Description Users and Performers to a discussion on Ethics, Access and Language in Described Video Practices.

The general go-to in DV is only to describe characteristics of physical identities when the information is perceived to be relevant to the plot or character.

Brethour and Germain ask: If we do describe visual characteristics of 2Spirit/Queer/Trans performers, how do we do it?

And if we don’t, aren’t we further silencing and erasing 2Spirit/Queer/Trans representation from our stories?

We believe that DV users should be allowed to understand who is and, potentially, who is not represented on screens. People need the same access to information as others do. In addition, V users, especially young ones exploring their identities, need various resources to draw upon.

While Brethour and Germain advocate for performers to describe themselves using their own words, this is not always possible.

So how do we do this? What words do we use? Are we outing people by mentioning they are, for example, wearing a chest binder? Are we excluding people from critical and potentially affirming information in their own lives?

What responsibility does the Audio Describer have? Who is that responsibility to? Is an equilibrium possible? Is it desired?

In “Describing Queer Identities,” Brethour, with the support of Germain, works to offer a space where 2Spirit/Queer/Trans folx are centred so the complicated conversations about description and identity can continue and, hopefully, be amplified.

Jennifer Brethour & Kat Germain

Bio: Jennifer Brethour and Kat Germain are Described as Video (DV) Professionals. Their work is grounded in Disability Justice, Anti-Oppression and Equity. Their combined identities include Queer, Hetro, Cis, Female, Neurodivergent, and white. They have a breadth of experience which includes work on projects with TQFF, Tangled Art + Disability, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, OUTtv, APTN & TVO, Roseneath, Native Earth Performing Arts, Indigeneity and Disability Summit, CBC, British Council, and several universities.

Break – 15 minutes

17:45 – 19:00 ADT

Precarious Scholar Pizza Party

A PWYC pizza dinner where you can meet with other precarious scholars, contract teachers, and other people navigating the challenging world of non-full-time academia.

More info

Hosted by the CATR Task Force on Precarity.
Come for as long or as short a time as you’d like!

Feel free to reach out to the organizers if you have any thoughts or questions:

Neil Silcox (416-629-4400)
Jacquey Taucar (905-717-7301‬)

18:00 – 22:00 ADT

Dinner on your own

More info

Dinner on your own

19:00 – 20:15 ADT

Frequencies – HEIST (Second Performance)

Location: Large Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

More info

You can find out more about this innovative and exciting show here.

Friday, June 16

08:30 – 09:15 ADT

Coffee

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall Lobby, Dalhousie Arts Centre

More info

Strug Concert Hall Lobby, Dalhousie Arts Centre

08:30 – 09:15 ADT

Somatic Engagement | Engagement Somatique (Part Two – In-Person/Online) – “performance-lecture & thinking-moving”

Location: Small Rehearsal Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre and Zoom Room A

Hybrid Session

Co-Convenors: Christine (cricri) Bellerose & Ursula (Ulla) Neuerburg-Denzer

Working Group Members: Naomi Bennett, Jenn Boulay, Eury Chang (†), Stephen Donnelly Tracey Guptill, Mark Lipton, Virginie Magnat, Gabriel (Gabi) Petrov

More info

Led by Christine (cricri) Bellerose and Mark Lipton. Come as you are, coffee in hand or in pajamas from your online space, to observe in silence / take part in gentle moving-thinking activities. Walk-ins welcome.

Break – 15 minutes

09:15 – 10:45 ADT

Experiment: Physical Vocabularies of Stroke

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Convenor: Anne Wessels

More info

Pure Research is Nightswimming’s program that provides dramaturgical and financial support for inquiries into theatre/performance ideas while favouring exploration over product. Anne Wessels (who has lived experience of stroke) asked a research question about how movement, gesture and stillness might surface vocabularies of stroke. She became part of the Pure Research program and to begin engaging with the research question, Associate Artist, Andrea Nann (Artistic Director of Dreamwalker Dance) offered the Conscious Bodies Practice that was developed with her company. In preparation for the three days of intensive research inquiry that took place in Tarragon’s Extra Space in January 2023, Anne began this movement practice and regularly shared observations with the team that includes Andrea and the Nightswimming dramaturgs, Brian Quirt, Gloria Mok and Nathaniel Hanula-James.

The CATR workshop will draw from this intensive three days of research inquiry. Workshop attendees would not require any previous movement training, but they would be offered the opportunity to experience some of the ways of working that were explored and activated in Pure Research. Participatory in design, attendees could choose to take part in whatever way would be most useful to them. This proposed workshop would welcome 5 – 15 attendees but would not be well suited to observers. There are no special requirements for the space – just enough room to safely move.

This proposed workshop would be most relevant for those who are curious about theatre research as an exploratory process and for those who work at the intersections of movement and brain injury/neurological difference.

Bio: Anne Wessels completed her PhD at OISE, University of Toronto in 2014. Her award-winning dissertation focused on youth and their performances of the suburb. As Director of Education at Tarragon Theatre she put her research to work by engaging with youth through theatre in the suburban areas of Toronto. Anne has taught at OISE, University of Windsor and at Centennial College.

09:15 – 10:45 ADT

Fluidities of Gender and Performance

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Kelsey Jacobson

09:15 – 10:45 ADT

XR and the Future Stage

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Sponsored by York University, Department of Theatre

Co-Convenors: Laura Levin and Kim McLeod

Participants: Michael Bergmann, Elisha Conway, Caroline Klimek, Thea Fitz-James, Derek Manderson, Jayna Mees, Parjad Sharifi, Michael Wheeler

More info

XR and the Future Stage

The field of theatre and performance has recently seen an upsurge in experiments with XR (extended reality) as an artistic medium. A term used to reference virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, XR has allowed artists to shift to safe delivery formats during the COVID-19 pandemic; at the same time, it has also offered creators new tools for worldbuilding and spectatorship.

This session explores how XR performance challenges assumptions about what theatre is. We are inspired by provocations posed in the “futureStage Manifesto,” a text composed by the futureStage Research Group at metaLAB, which urges the performing arts industry to grapple with “new expectations for media, culture, and presence in a hyperconnected world,” while simultaneously accounting for the political effects of technological shifts. We will take up this challenge by featuring work addressing how XR theatre experiments align with, particularize, and critique the manifesto’s central tenets. Roundtable participants might consider these questions:

Is physical co-presence required for theatre? Is XR leading to a new medium that is something else entirely?
What are the limits of utopian thinking about intersections of theatre and new technologies?
Do we push back against the manifesto’s claim that “performance isn’t a commodity,” or does it suggest a political orientation to this work to think through carefully?
Is “liveness plus” a generative concept helping us to articulate new media affordances, or are we looping back to old binaries between liveness and mediatization that push against the emergent nature of this work?

Co-Convenor Bios

Bio: Kim McLeod is an artist-scholar whose research on political performance and participatory media has appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, Digital Performance in Canada, Performance Matters and Theatre Research in Canada. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Bio: Laura Levin is Associate Dean, Research in York’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. Her books include Performing Ground and Performance Studies in Canada (edited with Marlis Schweitzer). In addition, Levin’s research-creation work explores intersections of political performance and digital technologies; most recently, she collaborated on SpiderWebShow’s VR project, You Should Have Stayed Home (2022).

Break – 15 minutes

11:00 – 12:30 ADT

Burning It All Down: Advocating for Structural Change Through Disability Justice (Part One)

+++ Closed Session: seminar participants only +++

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Organizers/moderators:
Jenn Boulay (Concordia University) jenn.boulay@mail.concordia.ca,
Signy Lynch (University of Toronto Missisauga) signy.lynch@gmail.com,

Participants: Kat Germain, Caroline Klimek, Shannon Hughes, Daniella Vitinski Mooney, Alejandra Nunez, Gabriela Petrov, Laine Zizman Newman

More info

Rationale:

This seminar builds off our seminar at last year’s conference: “Performing Complaint: Working on theatre and performance institutions,” which drew inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! inviting participants from a wide range of backgrounds to share responses that engage with the theme of complaint as it relates to effecting change in Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (DTPS) departments and institutions.

Our proposal for this year, “Burning it All Down” seeks to incorporate the principles of disability justice in order to think towards structural change. In an article for the journal Knots, Jenn Boulay observed of the conditions in DTPS departments in Canada, “Collectively, the student body of racialized students, disabled students, multiply marginalized students, and our allies do not feel that the academic environment is safe, inclusive, or accessible. Our efforts to voice our concerns have led us to work towards collective liberation, as the systemic issues that exist within both academic and non-academic arts institutions have yet to be fully recognized and fully acknowledged by those who have the power to implement change and eradicate systemic oppression” (Boulay 73).

Our session this year picks up this observation and seeks to make space and offer a trusting space for participants (in particular students, grad students, recent post grads, and precariously employed artists/scholars/teachers) to reflect on and converse about this work towards collective liberation. We aim to use the principles of disability justice, defined by the Sins Invalid collective, as “Intersectionality, Leadership of those Most Impacted, Anti-Capitalist Politics, Cross-Movement Solidarity, Recognizing Wholeness, Sustainability, Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity, Interdependence, Collective Access, and Collective Liberation” (“10 Principles”) (principles that we also invite the Association and its members to ground themselves in to work to create a trusting environment) to cultivate a forum for critical reflection and knowledge-sharing towards both scholarly and practical ends.

The seminar session will be open to participants only due to the sensitive nature of some of the responses we anticipate. Seminar participants will share short written or pre-recorded video reflections prior to the conference session. Each reflection will focus on a structural issue
that the individual would like to address with the group. During the three hour session, participants will each be given 5-10 minutes to summarize their contributions, followed by a moderated group discussion on ways to manage and respond to each, which may involve brainstorming possible courses of action and how they intersect with disability justice principles.

Works Cited: “10 Principles of Disability Justice” Sins Invalid, sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice

Ahmed, Sara. Complaint!. Duke UP, 2021.

Boulay, Jenn. “The World is On Fire: Disability Justice is my Strength.” Knots: An Undergraduate Journal of Disability Studies, vol. 6, no.1, 2021, pp. 68-75.

Bios of Organizers:

Jenn Boulay: Jenn is an emerging interdisciplinary performance artist/creator, playwright, performer, singer-songwriter, musician, theatre reviewer, and scholar. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. She is currently pursuing a graduate diploma in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her current research project examines the gaps/absence of disability theatre (practice and scholarship) in Eastern Canada, focusing on Québec and Atlantic Canada, compared to Western Canada. Jenn’s current research interests include, intersectional identity politics (visibility, and non-visibility), disability studies/theatre, theatre, theatrical clown and finding ways of how to make contemporary theatre more accessible to performers and audiences. You can find her creative and academic work published in Feminist Space Camp Magazine, Knots: An
Undergraduate Journal of Disability Studies (Knots), Theatre Research in Canada (TRiC), Canadian Theatre Review (CTR), and UC Magazine. She is an editor of the forthcoming issue of Knots.

Signy Lynch: Signy Lynch is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Universty of Toronto Mississauga. In 2021, she defended her PhD dissertation in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University, where her research was awarded the Barbara Godard Prize for Best Dissertation in Canadian Studies and the prestigious Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her current research interests include intercultural, intermedial, and participatory theatres (particularly in Canada), audience research, and theatre criticism. She has written articles for publications including Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Canadian Theatre Review. She also works as a critical dramaturg to reimagine theatre criticism practices. She is co-editor of Canadian Theatre Review volume 186 “Theatre After the
Explosion” (2021), co-chair of Cahoots Theatre’s board of directors, and co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (Queen’s University).

11:00 – 12:30 ADT

The Floating Body: Butoh-inspired Movement as Decolonial Performance Pedagogy

Location: Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Workshop Leader: Carla Melo

More info

Location: Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Workshop Leader: Carla Melo

11:00 – 12:30 ADT

Springs of Inspiration: Ceremony, Training, and the Performer’s Art

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Roberta Barker

Sponsored by the University of Ottawa, Department of Theatre

Ariel Watson, “Signalling Through the Flames: Pyroturgs and Theatromancy”

Charlotte Dorey, “Finding Holiness in the Mundane: Ceremony as a Dramaturgy of Participatory Theatre”

Benjamin Barrena, “Affluents pédagogiques dans le théâtre de Robert Lepage”

More info

Signalling Through the Flames: Pyroturgs and Theatromancy

At what point, what ancient Germano-Greek crossroads of language, did the intellectualization of theatre as a field of knowledge and inquiry become dramaturgy (the work of drama, the doing of dran), with its subtext of urgency and urges? Might we have been theatromancers instead, prophets who behold? Theatromancers might thus have been keepers of the mysteries, as the Bacchantes or the medieval guilds conceived them, the sacred flames that light a ritual theatre and render it legible and potent.

This swirls up with the eye-stinging smoke on a chill October night as I sit in Mi’kma’ki by the firepit of shalan joudry’s Elapultiek, the second in Two Planks and a Passion’s “by fire” series I have seen. What is the ritual connection between the fire and the stage, and how does it play out with audiences who may view theatre as cordoned off from spiritual and political praxis? How does this variety of theatre in the round create communities through spatial inclusion and exclusion? How does it render us complicit? In what sense are campfires like islands, natural community structures, and defence combining the human and the elemental. What is the dramatic work of the fire – its pyroturgy? In Joudry’s play, we find two biologists – one a settler scholar and one Mi’kmaw – in awkward observation of endangered chimney swifts. Our huddle around their campfire in the rising dark and cold means that spectatorship is a new kind of work:
the work of making space for the actors to move. It requires of us not to forget immersion or illusionism but the self-consciousness to know how your body occupies a space that is needed, and that pre-exists you and how to give way before the urging of an Indigenous theatrical world.

Dr. Ariel McClanahan Watson, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Drama Saint Mary’s University Department of English

Bio: Ariel Watson is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University. Her research covers metatheatre, documentary theatre, psychotherapy on stage, national theatre, and the influence of gaming on theatrical performance. She has published articles in journals that include Modern Drama, Canadian Theatre Review, Text and Presentation, Breac, and Theatre History Studies. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in From Band-Aids to Scalpels (“Untrustworthy Bodies,” about obstetric violations of the consent) and won the H.R. (Bill) Percy Prize (“Beasts of Prey”).

Finding Holiness in the Mundane: Ceremony as a Dramaturgy of Participatory Theatre

A ceremony is an embodied and enacted practice in which a congregation of people comes together for a shared, collective purpose—usually to bring about a change through the performance of a prescribed set of actions or a “showing of doing” (Schechner, 456). A ceremony is a process that facilitates transition and growth and serves as a marker for moments of significant change. Similarly, participatory theatre invites participants to take action and interact with the play, engaging in meaningful play. They perform not just for audiences but with them, allowing participants to engage with the work in a way that is more ‘real.’

Drawing on the work of scholars such as Yvette Nolan, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, and Gareth White, this paper will focus on Jarin Shexnider’s Holy Moly, presented as part of rEvolver Festival 2022. Holy Moly borrows the form of ceremony to explore themes and ideas relevant to Shexnider’s own childhood. Throughout the show, she guides us through a series of holy and sacred moments to her and, therefore, to us as audience members as well. How does an invented theatrical ceremony like Holy Moly use familiar structures found in a ceremony to create an experience for the audience congregants? What can we learn about participatory theatre if we look at it through the lens of ceremony? What do our mundane rituals say about what is valuable and comforting to us? How does integrating ceremony into theatre pieces help audience participants better understand themselves and how we connect?

Charlotte Dorey, Queen’s University

BIO: Charlotte is a graduating 4th-year student from Queen’s University, having studied Drama and English. She works under Dr. Jenn Stephenson and Mariah Horner on their project play/PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation. Charlotte’s own undergraduate thesis project involved studying moments of ritual and ceremony in theatre, specifically participatory performance.

Affluents pédagogiques dans le théâtre de Robert Lepage

Le théâtre de Robert Lepage est connu dans de nombreux pays sur différents continents, d’un bout à l’autre du monde. Ses spectacles se sont répandus à l’autre bout du monde, comme des branches de la culture québécoise, pour mettre en lumière les chocs culturels de notre monde contemporain. Bien que ses créations aient gagné en sophistication technologique et en diversification des genres et des formats au cours des dernières décennies, les caractéristiques méthodologiques de ses processus créatifs remontent au début de sa carrière professionnelle et sont les héritiers d’une formation théâtrale aux influences culturelles et pédagogiques en provenance des deux côtés de l’océan, comme le théâtre-création d’Alain Knapp, les Cycles Repère de Jacques Lessard (basés sur les RSVP Cycles de Lawrence Halprin) ou la pédagogie de Jacques Lecoq à travers du professeur Marc Doré. Ces œuvres originales sont liées à une
pédagogie de la création théâtrale centrée sur le jeu de l’acteur et sa capacité créative telle qu’elle se manifeste, entre autres, par le biais de l’improvisation. Sa conception de l’acteur se comprends non seulement comme un interprète mais aussi comme le narrateur et l’auteur de ses propres histoires. Ces affluents pédagogiques marqueront plus tard le parcours professionnel de Robert Lepage et, dans cette perspective, cela nous interroge sur ce que devraient être les fondements pédagogiques de l’enseignement du théâtre aujourd’hui, afin de continuer à créer et développer un théâtre qui touche, émeut et communique, dans un monde global, notre société contemporaine.

Benjamin Alonso Barreña, Université Dalhousie

Bio: Benjamin Alonso Barreña est chercheur postdoctoral à l’UQTR, au CRILCQ et à l’Université du Pays Basque (Espagne). Il est titulaire d’une maîtrise en histoire de l’art, d’un master en études théâtrales et d’un doctorat avec une thèse sur le théâtre de Robert Lepage, pour laquelle il a obtenu la Bourse d’excellence Gaston-Miron 2015. Dans les années 1990, il a étudié auprès du maître Jacques Lecoq à son École Internationale de Théâtre à Paris. Il a travaillé au théâtre professionnel comme acteur, metteur en scène et professeur de théâtre. Entre autres, il a enseigné à l’Institut del Teatre de Barcelone et a dirigé l’Aula de Teatre de l’Université Polytechnique de Catalogne. Il a écrit quelques pièces de théâtre et des articles autour des arts de la scène. Ses recherches portent sur les processus de création, les langages du corps, la communication avec le public, la mise en scène et la pédagogie du théâtre.

11:00 – 12:30 ADT

The Archives Spill Out

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Sasha Kovacs

Robin Whittaker, “‘Waiting for You For Sure Tonight 8.30 by the Tree =GODOT=’: Alumnae Bring the Absurd to Halifax”

Marlis Schweitzer, “The Lecture on Heads Comes to Halifax, c. 1785-91”

Jessica Riley, “Relational Dramaturgy: Lessons from the Archives and Beyond”

More info

‘Waiting for You For Sure Tonight 8.30 by the Tree =GODOT=’: Alumnae Bring the Absurd to Halifax.

Near the shores of Halifax Harbour, filling the 1,280-seat Queen Elizabeth High School auditorium, the University Alumnae Dramatic Club remounted its acclaimed Toronto premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in competition at the Dominion Drama Festival on May 15, 1958. Featuring mid-century acting stalwarts Kenneth Wickes, Ivor Jackson, and Powell Jones, future Queen’s professor Fred Euringer, and a young Reg Barnes, the production was led by first-time director Pamela Terry and produced, perhaps ironically given the all-male cast by the company that is today North America’s longest-running women-run theatre group, now known as Alumnae Theatre Company. As in Toronto six months earlier, it was the first time Haligonians had seen Beckett’s puzzling and dramaturgically controversial play in which nothing happens twice, produced by “these mysterious ladies whom we never saw.” 2 In front of DDF festival patron and Governor General Vincent Massey, Alumnae earned the Festival Plaque for the best production in English; Wickes earned best actor, having arrived in Canada from England just one year earlier. 3

Drawing from extensive archival research for my forthcoming book that traces the impact of the now-105-year-old, non-professionalizing “Alumnae” on Canadian theatre, this paper focuses on one production that garnered Alumnae national attention, made names for the actors involved, moved audiences to a “real standing ovation,” 4 and led adjudicator Philip Hope-Wallace to conclude that the “standard of amateur acting in Canada is higher than in England.” 5

Robin Whittaker, Associate Professor, St. Thomas University

Bio: Robin C. Whittaker, Ph.D., is an associate professor at St. Thomas University, where he teaches dramatic literature courses. His current research activity focuses on non-professionalizing theatre practices, including his forthcoming book on Alumnae Theatre Company. He is the co-creator of the verbatim play No White Picket Fence (Talonbooks 2019) and editor of Hot Thespian Action! Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse (AUP 2008), and since 2013 he has sat on CATR’s Board, currently serving as President.

The Lecture on Heads Comes to Halifax, c. 1785-91

One of the most enduring performance pieces of the eighteenth century, the Lecture on Heads, arrived in Halifax in 1785 courtesy of a touring actor named Mr. Moore (Kahan 197-203). Originally staged in 1764 at the Little Haymarket Theatre in London by George Alexander Stevens, the Lecture was deceptively straightforward. For more than two hours, Stevens (as himself) introduced audiences to a series of life-like heads made of wood and paper maché, which represented a cross-section of contemporary London society: heads included that of a quack doctor, jockey, cuckold, Methodist parson, lawyer, old bachelor, old maid, and so forth. Moreover, the Lecture’s simple scenography and flexible dramaturgy made it highly attractive to imitators like Moore, who could purchase one of the many pirated versions of the play text that circulated from the 1760s onwards and prepare their own version, complete with prop heads. Within a decade, the Lecture travelled throughout the British Empire, with stops in India, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and most American colonies. My paper will analyze accounts of the Lecture’s appearance in Halifax and consider how travelling actors like Moore not only participated in the dissemination of Steven’s satirical commentary but also enfolded Haligonians within a much larger effective community of colonial theatregoing that extended up and down the shores of North America and into the Caribbean. This paper aims to address Halifax’s glaring absence from most studies of transatlantic performance culture (Maddock Dillon; Roach; Wilson) while also reflecting on the Lecture’s unique migratory history.

Marlis Schweitzer, Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance, York University

Bio: Marlis Schweitzer is a Theatre and Performance Studies Professor at York University. Her most recent book, Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (2020), received the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association and was named a finalist for the 2021 ATHE Outstanding Book Award.

Relational Dramaturgy: Lessons from the Archives and Beyond

This paper bridges past and present to draw out insights into dramaturgical theory, training, and practice as it relates to new play development in the land known as Canada. Since the rise of theatrical nationalism in the 1970s, English Canadian theatre has been centred on new play development. At the front end of this developmental wave were several influential figures who dramaturged a generation of plays at the end of the twentieth century. Their formative contributions to the nascent canon of Canadian drama are revealed through analysis of archival records. These records provide insight into the methods deployed by these early dramaturgs in developing new work; they also expose the often unexamined or obscured aesthetic and ideological values embedded in early developmental processes. Finally, drawing on my archival research into the dramaturgical work of such late-twentieth-century figures as Urjo Kareda, Bill Glassco, and James Reaney, this paper explores how the ideological coding of play development practices has affected the representation of race, sexuality, gender, and other marginalized subject positions both on and off stage. In the process, I bring this earlier generation of new play dramaturgs—and the lessons we can learn from their archives—into conversation with twenty-first-century dramaturgs, such as Jessica Watkin and Lindsay Lachance, whose work reveals the potential for a new wave of developmental dramaturgy, a turning of the tide grounded explicitly in the transparency of values and consciousness of relationality, responsibility and interdependence.

Jessica Riley, University of Winnipeg

Bio: Dr. Jessica Riley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at The University of Winnipeg. Her research and teaching focuses on theatre history, historiography, dramaturgy, and Canadian drama. Jessica is the editor of A Man of Letters: The Selected Dramaturgical Correspondence of Urjo Kareda. Her work has been published in the Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies, Performing the Intercultural City, Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada.

11:45 – 12:45 ADT

VR Makerspace

Location: Large Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Open for drop-ins to explore our members’ VR projects!

More info

Open for drop-ins to explore our members’ VR projects!

In person at Dalhousie, there will be a Makerspace hosted by the Digital Theatre Working Group. There will be two VR experiences to explore. Be sure to make room in your schedule to stop by and engage with this incredible event!

12:45 – 14:15 ADT

Lunch and Launch – Hosted by Talonbooks

Location: Fifth Floor Atrium, Dalhousie Arts Centre

More info

Vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free options will be available for each lunch.

Break – 15 minutes

14:30 – 16:00 ADT

Burning It All Down: Advocating for Structural Change Through Disability Justice (Part Two)

+++ Closed Session: seminar participants only +++

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Co-Convenors: Jenn Boulay and Signy Lynch

Participants: Kat Germain, Caroline Klimek, Shannon Hughes, Daniella Vitinski Mooney, Alejandra Nunez, Gabriela Petrov, Laine Zizman Newman

More info

Burning It All Down: Advocating for Structural Change Through Disability Justice (Part Two)

This seminar builds off our seminar at last year’s conference: “Performing Complaint: Working on theatre and performance institutions,” which drew inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s Complaint!, inviting participants from a wide range of backgrounds to share responses that engage with the theme of the complaint as it relates to effecting change in Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (DTPS) departments and institutions.

Our proposal for this year, “Burning it All Down,” seeks to incorporate the principles of disability justice to think toward structural change. In an article for the journal Knots, Jenn Boulay observed the conditions in DTPS departments in Canada, “Collectively, the student body of racialized students, disabled students, multiply marginalized students, and our allies do not feel that the academic environment is safe, inclusive, or accessible. Our efforts to voice our concerns have led us to work towards collective liberation, as the systemic issues that exist within both academic and non-academic arts institutions have yet to be fully recognized and fully acknowledged by those who have the power to implement change and eradicate systemic oppression” (Boulay 73).

This year’s session picks up this observation. It seeks to make space and offer a trusting space for participants (in particular students, grad students, recent post-grads, and precariously employed artists/scholars/teachers) to reflect on and converse about this work towards collective liberation. We aim to use the principles of disability justice, defined by the Sins Invalid collective, as “Intersectionality, Leadership of those Most Impacted, Anti-Capitalist Politics, Cross-Movement Solidarity, Recognizing Wholeness, Sustainability, Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity, Interdependence, Collective Access, and Collective Liberation” (“10 Principles”) (principles that we also invite the Association and its members to ground themselves in to work to create a trusting environment) to cultivate a forum for critical reflection and knowledge-sharing towards both scholarly and practical ends.

Works Cited:

“10 Principles of Disability Justice” Sins Invalid, sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice

Ahmed, Sara. Complaint!. Duke UP, 2021.

Boulay, Jenn. “The World is On Fire: Disability Justice is my Strength.” Knots: An Undergraduate Journal of Disability Studies, vol. 6, no.1, 2021, pp. 68-75.

Bios of Organizers:

Jenn Boulay: Jenn is an emerging interdisciplinary performance artist/creator, playwright, performer, singer-songwriter, musician, theatre reviewer, and scholar. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. She is currently pursuing a graduate diploma in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her current research project examines the gaps/absence of disability theatre (practice and scholarship) in Eastern Canada, focusing on Québec and Atlantic Canada, compared to Western Canada. Jenn’s current research interests include, intersectional identity politics (visibility, and non-visibility), disability studies/theatre, theatre, theatrical clown and finding ways of how to make contemporary theatre more accessible to performers and audiences. You can find her creative and academic work published in Feminist Space Camp Magazine, Knots: An
Undergraduate Journal of Disability Studies (Knots), Theatre Research in Canada (TRiC), Canadian Theatre Review (CTR), and UC Magazine. She is an editor of the forthcoming issue of Knots.

Signy Lynch: Signy Lynch is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Universty of Toronto Mississauga. In 2021, she defended her PhD dissertation in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University, where her research was awarded the Barbara Godard Prize for Best Dissertation in Canadian Studies and the prestigious Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her current research interests include intercultural, intermedial, and participatory theatres (particularly in Canada), audience research, and theatre criticism. She has written articles for publications including Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Canadian Theatre Review. She also works as a critical dramaturg to reimagine theatre criticism practices. She is co-editor of Canadian Theatre Review volume 186 “Theatre After the Explosion” (2021), co-chair of Cahoots Theatre’s board of directors, and co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (Queen’s University).

14:30 – 16:00 ADT

The Audience Flows In

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Kimberley McLeod

Allen Baylosis, “Spectating With/Against: How Do Postshow Talkbacks Ask Which Bodies That Matter?”

Kelsey Jacobson and Bethany Schaufler, “Feeling Together: Boundaries, Exchanges, and Shared Spaces Amongst Audiences”

Derek Manderson, “Learn/Roll/Play: Using Game Structure to Scaffold Participation”

More info

Spectating With/Against: How Do Postshow Talkbacks Ask Which Bodies That Matter?

Postshow talkbacks invite the audience to pose questions, make remarks, and provide feedback to the cast, director, and dramaturg. In the two talkbacks I witnessed in 2022, for both plays written by Korean Canadian playwright Ins Choi, I examine how postshow talkbacks become “offshore performances” by entangling the crucial roles of both the audience and the performers in establishing what they make of the play. In this paper, I ask: “How do the postshow talkbacks of “Kim’s Convenience” and “Bad Parent” expose and regulate bodies at (dis)play?” Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “enactments of power,” Karen Shimakawa’s “abjection of Asian performers,” and Jacques Ranciere’s “emancipated spectator,” I investigate how presenced bodies are enmeshed in the political realm of curating discussions in talkbacks. Moreso, I offer an analysis of the renegotiation of power relations juxtaposing the [w]hite dominated audience and racially marginalized artists. I argue that talkbacks do not mark the play’s ending but rather an extension of it. It furthers the crevice created through spectatorship insofar as the questions posed by the audience members alter the narrative of the actors and characters at (dis)play. Ultimately, this paper exposes the dramatic stakes involved in asking questions and providing feedback as ways of examining how spectatorship operates with and against the gaze of [w]hiteness.

Allen B. Baylosis, Ph.D. Student, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia

Bio: Allen Baylosis is an emerging dramaturg and performance scholar. He is interested in the intersections of transnational theater, minoritarian performances, migration, and the Filipinx diaspora. He is a Ph.D. student in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. He is currently an Institute of Asian Research fellow, primarily affiliated with the Centre for Southeast Asian Research and the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. He holds an MA in Performance Studies (New York University) and a BA in Speech Communication (UP Diliman).

Feeling Together: Boundaries, Exchanges, and Shared Spaces Amongst Audiences

How does co-presence generate or negate feelings of comfort and safety amongst audience members in live performances? While the pleasure of sharing effects is a common idea – it is popularly understood that we go to the theatre to feel together (Hurley, 2010) – notions of risk and discomfort are arguably front of mind in a pandemic-effected world. By putting the scholarly works of Erin Hurley and Sara Ahmed in conversation with data collected from a tiered audience research method, we ask how audiences co-create effects, specifically examining effective safety and comfort. Audience members’ firsthand reporting of their experiences attending theatre at the Kick and Push Festival in Kingston, ON, suggests that safety is not just a practical, material experience (e.g. physical safety, masking, vaccine policies) but also an effective, discursive project; one that has the power to circulate amongst a multiplicity of bodies and generate emotional, felt responses.

This paper argues that audience members generate feelings of safety through self-imposed responsibility that either reaffirms or reduces boundaries with those around them. Safety is as personal as it is collective, insofar as one’s perceived safety also depends upon the actions and behaviours of others. For this reason, audience members may be inclined to not only awareness over their own behaviour but the behaviour of those around them as well, feeling pleasure in shared response and frustration with difference. Applying Sedgman’s (2018) understanding of behaviour-policing, this paper investigates how audience self-governance can be a method of affective co-creation that highlights modes of inclusion and exclusion in audiences.

Kelsey Jacobson, Assistant Professor & Bethany Schaufler-Biback, Incoming Master’s Student

Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor at the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. She is also a co-founding director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research and is currently working on an SSHRC-funded project about audience co-presence.

Bethany Schaufler-Biback is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Drama at Queen’s University. She is working on an undergraduate research project on audience safety and care and is working with Dr. Jacobson as the senior undergraduate research assistant on her
SSHRC-funded project.

Learn/Roll/Play: Using Game Structure to Scaffold Participation

The uncharted waters of participatory performance continue expanding as creators find new depths to explore each year. This audience-driven theatrical style boasts the opportunity for meaningful collaboration driven by the agency of participants; however, it also creates the potential for a pressure-cooker environment which hinges its success on audiences who may be wary of assuming responsibility for the outcome of a performance. Spectators turned players may contend with the risk of embarrassment because the expectations being placed upon them are sometimes murky. How might we support an audience paralyzed by uncertainty so they can comfortably engage in this exciting realm of theatre? Such was the impetus for my project Learn/Roll/Play, which sought to bring people together in a gamified performance playground built on a clear set of rules to scaffold participation.

Drawing upon tabletop role-playing games and educational theory, I designed a performance-game hybrid to facilitate the improvisation of a collective storytelling experience. Using an iterative development process, I solicited participants to help test the game over the course of a few months, allowing me to build practice-based strategies for supporting players. For example, I saw great success in providing a“need card” to give each individual motivation for their character. Players reported that this functioned as a helpful guidepost for their role-play. For CATR, I propose drafting a paper presentation highlighting these performance tactics to map a working framework for inviting confident audience participation and creation.

Derek Manderson, York University

Bio: Derek is a Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. His research focuses on participatory theatre, using a game-design framework to analyze collaborative play rules. He is passionate about education and currently holds a teaching assistant position in the AMPD faculty.

14:30 – 16:00 ADT

UK Theatre Roots Soaked Up

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Marlis Schweitzer

Marie Trotter, “Reimagining the Fourth Wall Through Metatheatrical Direct Address in the Stratford Festival’s 2022 Hamlet”

Helmut Reichenbächer, “The Consequences of Totalitarianism: The Disappearance of Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream During the Third Reich”

Morgan Martin, “ ‘Twice the Sea Took Him and Once Gave Him Back’: An Examination of the ‘Sea Change’ of the Littoral in Scottish Maritime Plays”

More info

Reimagining the Fourth Wall Through Metatheatrical Direct Address in the Stratford Festival’s 2022 Hamlet

J.L. Styan wrote of the contemporary theatre’s refusal to commit to either a proscenium or in-the-round space as the dominant performance venue: “Playing in a frame or in a circle affects the whole discipline of the actor and the choice of play he makes, but the decision will radically determine the kind of experience that audiences expect of their theatre-going.” (138) The structure of performance spaces have shaped not only audience expectations and experience but theoretical language, with “breaking the fourth wall” becoming the common descriptor for the effects of metatheatrical moments onstage. However, such language is insufficient for the conventions of Early Modern drama and for the plays of Shakespeare, written initially for in-the-round performance spaces such as the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, in which no “fourth wall” exists. In this paper, I examine how the Stratford Festival’s 2022 production of Hamlet combines the effects of the proscenium and in-the-round theatres to allow for a playing space that enhances metatheatrical bisociation (Purcell 26), thereby reimagining the idea of the fourth wall as boundary between isolated actor and audience domains. I analyze this delineation as both a form of separation and a provocation into the relationship, suggesting that Shakespeare’s metatheatrical language allows for a co-creative making of drama that unites the two spaces of the theatre and their inhabitants. I demonstrate that direct address in Hamlet acknowledges explicitly and embraces the spatial conceits of performance, rewriting the boundaries of performed fiction to encompass the audience’s creative presence in theatrical time and space.

Marie Trotter, McGill University

Bio: Marie Trotter is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at McGill University, working on metatheatre and audience reception in the plays of Shakespeare. She writes poetry, plays, and arts criticism and is published in Broadview, Plough, Ekstasis, and Intermission, among others.

The Consequences of Totalitarianism: The Disappearance of Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream During the Third Reich

The conference theme of “Shores of Performance” is a perfect metaphor for describing the precarious situation of theatre programmers during the Nazi period.

Increasing political pressures from the Nazi regime rapidly affected the number of performances of repertoire deemed “unsupportable.” A particularly interesting test case relates to the programming of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Until 1933, the comedy’s performances were usually accompanied by the tremendously popular incidental music of Jewish-born Felix Mendelssohn. Nazi ideologues created the “shifting sands, ” making such programming risky and ultimately impossible.

The paper addresses the question: who was the last theatre director programming such “unsupportable” repertoire during the Third Reich? Programming unwanted repertoire exposed theatre directors to considerable professional or even existential risk. My research traces the disappearing Mendelssohn music to a last set of performances in 1935 in a provincial town in eastern Germany with a long and significant theatre history. It describes how it affected the theatre director’s career path.

The paper draws on archival research and developing a performance statistics database. It offers insights into the complex circumstances under which theatre directors operated within the Nazi dictatorship and reveals some of the mechanisms of cultural decision-making under the regime.

Helmut Reichenbächer, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCAD University)

Twice the Sea Took Him and Once Gave Him Back’: An Examination of the ‘Sea Change’ of the Littoral in Scottish Maritime Plays

The space between land and the depths is known as the littoral zone. The saltwater littoral as a space of interrelationship is one worth considering when studying the performance of the sea, shorelines, and islands. This paper analyzes the littoral as it manifests in two Scottish plays, George Mackay Brown’s The Storm Watchers and Donald Campbell’s The Widows of Clyth. This paper considers the effects of the littoral on performance via techniques employed by Steve Mentz, who uses Ariel’s song in The Tempest to examine the materially transformative power of the ocean. In Campbell and Brown’s Scottish coastal dramas, Ariel’s song “sea change” (1.2.404) is simultaneously at work upon the bodies of fishermen who died at sea and the women who survived them and must work together as a community to rebuild their lives. In the physical and meteorological realities of daily life in a coastal environment, the characters who inhabit them are physically and emotionally eroded by wind and salt. I argue that the “sea change” of the littoral is evident in how the plays scenographically evoke the margin between land and sea, in the knowledge that is held by those who live there, in the physical transformation of the bodies of the drowned, and the hopeful narrative future that the women perform for the audience despite their grief.

Morgan Martin, University of Guelph, School of English and Theatre Studies

Bio: Morgan Martin is a Ph.D. student at the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theatre Studies. She recently completed her MA thesis at Guelph entitled “Oxygen, Orkney, Ozone: The Oceanic Works of Margaret Tait” and is continuing to focus her research on Scottish island literature.

14:30 – 16:00 ADT

Historiographing Hannah

Location: Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Sponsored by St. Francis Xavier University, Department of English

Co-Convenors: Sasha Kovacs and Michelle MacArthur

Participants: Amanda Attrell, Bridget Baldwin, Roberta Barker, Kailin Wright, Keren Zaiontz

More info

Historiographing Hannah: A Critical Scrapbook Dedicated to Hannah Moscovitch

“Scrapbooks are archives in and of their own right, whose flexibility invites anyone to engage in
archiving […]”

–Cherish Watton, “Suffrage Scrapbooks and Emotional Histories of Women’s Activism,” pp.
1029

One of Canada’s most prolific and celebrated contemporary playwrights, Hannah Moscovitch, has seen her work produced domestically and internationally, on stage, screen, and radio, for nearly two decades. Moscovitch’s plays have been distinguished with high honours, including the Governor General’s Award for English-language Drama and Yale University’s Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize. In addition, critics have bestowed her with titles such as “our most competent playwright, and I don’t mean that as faint praise” (Cushman), “a heavy hitter in Canadian theatre” (Murphy), and “one of contemporary theatre’s greatest writers of character” (Barker 424). And yet, scholarship within Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies has not kept up with Moscovitch’s abundant and acclaimed output, leaving scant critical discourse on her work (Barker, Demers, Jones, Zatzman).

As CATR 2023 gathers on Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the L’nu (Mi’kmaq) people, now also known as Halifax and Moscovitch’s adopted hometown, this roundtable invites participants to present short reflections on her body of work to seed further scholarship on one of Canada’s most-produced playwrights. Its overarching goal is to generate contributions to and interest in a forthcoming critical collection on Moscovitch’s plays edited by session co-conveners Sasha Kovacs and Michelle MacArthur.

Participants are invited to respond to some broadly conceived artifact of Moscovitch’s work as inspiration and anchor for their contribution–whether a specific scene, design rendering, song, program, photo, review, etc. These artifacts will be gathered and circulated in the lead-up to the roundtable, laying the foundation for a “critical scrapbook” that will also inform the structure of the edited collection in development. Understanding archiving as a site where “knowledge production begins” (Eicchorn 3) and scrapbooking as a “type of feminist archiving” (Watton 1030) that incorporates affective and creative materials and emphasizes collective knowledge-making, our approach uses the scrapbook as a method of feminist theatre historiography.

Co-Convenor Bios:

Bio: Sasha Kovacs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria. The focus of her research is Canadian theatre historiography. Her previously published research on E. Pauline Johnson was awarded the 2018 Canadian Association for Theatre Research Richard Plant Award for the best-published essay on a Canadian theatre/performance topic. In addition, she is a co-investigator of the national research partnership project Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance (www.gatheringspartnership.com), which aims to deepen methodological approaches to studying and preserving Canadian performance history.

Bio: Michelle MacArthur is an associate professor at the University of Windsor’s School of Dramatic Art. Her SSHRC-funded research on contemporary Canadian theatre has appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research in Canada, and several edited collections.

16:15 – 17:45 ADT

“Irresistible Practices”

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre

90 minute session open to all conference participants

Co-Convenors: Katrina Dunn (Leader, Course Correction Working Group), Hope McIntyre and Kimberley Skye Richards (Leaders, Environmental Stewardship Working Group)

Members of the Course Correction Working Group: Sandra Chamberlain-Snider, Alana Gerecke, Danielle Howard, Laura Levin, Jayna Mees, Alessandro Simari, Keren Zaiontz,

Members of the Environmental Stewardship Working Group: Selena Couture, Katrina Dunn, Taylor Graham, Dennis Gupa, Zhuohao Li, Stefano Muneroni, Kelly Richmond

More info

Pratiques irrésistibles est une séance plénière qui aborde le chavauchement thématique de deux groupes de travail de l’ACRT : la gestion de l’environnement dans l’enseignement du théâtre et de la performance et Changement de cap : réorienter les approches de l’espace dans le théâtre et la performance. Le groupe de travail sur la gestion de l’environnement a pour mission de repenser comment nous enseignons, nous nous documentons et nous préparons les étudiantes et étudiants à des pratiques durables dans le domaine du théâtre et de la performance pour répondre à la crise climatique. Changement de cap poursuit le travail concernant les études de l’espace en définissant et en explorant de nouvelles directions pour les perspectives spatiales du théâtre et de la performance, incluant l’éthique environnementale, la théorie spatiale féministe et queer et la décolonisation des méthodologies spatiales. Visant à rendre ce changement « irrésistible », cette séance présente les pratiques multidimensionnelles des deux groupes et offre aux personnes participantes une occasion de prendre part à la discussion.

Break – 15 minutes

19:00 – 22:00 ADT

Conference Banquet

Location: The Wooden Monkey Restaurant

40 Alderney Dr. #305, Level 2 Alderney Ferry Terminal, Dartmouth NS

Food cost included in conference registration

More info

Location: The Wooden Monkey Restaurant

40 Alderney Dr. #305, Level 2 Alderney Ferry Terminal

Dartmouth NS

Click here for Google Maps Link

Food cost included in conference registration

The Wooden Monkey is a local institution beloved for its locally sourced, organic food, including Atlantic seafood as well as meat, vegetarian, and vegan options. You can find the menu options for our banquet here. Food costs for the banquet are covered by your conference registration fees; attendees must pay for any beverages, including alcoholic beverages. This is always a joyful evening for connection with new and old friends.

If you would like to attend the banquet, please go here to confirm your attendance and fill in your menu choices by Friday, June 9.

Please note that banquet numbers will be limited to 70, so please do confirm your attendance as soon as possible in order to ensure your seat! In a case where there is more demand for the banquet than we can accommodate, we will give priority to folks registered for the conference—another incentive to make sure you register as soon as possible!

For those attending the banquet, it will be helpful to know that the restaurant is located in the Dartmouth ferry building, a quick and beautiful ferry ride across the water from Halifax, and has lovely views of the great harbour that gives Kjipuktuk its Mi’kmaw name. It can also be reached by cab, uber, or bus.

Please note that for participants who would like to take the ferry to the banquet, Accessibility Committee Co-Chairs Jayna Mees and Kirsty Johnston will be available on-site at the ferry terminal to help you locate the ferry, and to accompany you to the restaurant upon request.

Please send any questions, specific access requirements, or access requests for this event via email to Jayna Mees at catr.accessibility@gmail.com.

Saturday, June 17

08:30 – 09:15 ADT

Coffee

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall Lobby, Dalhousie Arts Centre

More info

Strug Concert Hall Lobby, Dalhousie Arts Centre

08:30 – 09:15 ADT

Somatic Engagements | Engagement Somatique (Part Three – In-Person/Online): “performance-lecture & thinking-moving

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Open to all conference participants

Co-Convenors: Christine (cricri) Bellerose & Ursula (Ulla) Neuerburg-Denzer

Working Group Members: Naomi Bennett, Jenn Boulay, Eury Chang (†), Stephen Donnelly Tracey Guptill, Mark Lipton, Virginie Magnat, Gabriel (Gabi) Petrov

More info

Come as you are, coffee in hand or in pajamas from your online space, to observe in silence or engage in gentle moving-thinking activities. Walk-ins welcome.

09:15 – 12:30 ADT

VR Makerspace

Location: Large Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Open for drop-ins to explore our members’ VR projects!

More info

09:15 – 10:45 ADT

The Body Sounds, Voices, Sleeps

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Kailin Wright

Dayna McLeod, “The Performance Art of Sleeping: Working to Sleep, Sleeping to Work”

Tracy Guptill, “Voicing an Echo, Re-Rooting in Resonance”

Moynan King, “There is Nothing You Need to Do Now”

More info

The Performance Art of Sleeping: Working to Sleep, Sleeping to Work

I’ve always had sleep disturbances like nightmares, sleepwalking, and night terrors, but didn’t realize their extent and frequency until I started filming myself as part of my performance-based art practice. My paper examines my sleep performance in the video installation, Restless and compares it to my live feed sleeping performance, Under Surveillance: 12hrs at the PHI. In both performances, sleep explores the boundaries between conscious and unconscious states—a liminal space that I argue is productive for my art practice as a space of knowing and unknowing. Here I can recuperate my demonstrable sleep anxieties that take the form of gasps, yelling, talking, screaming, starts, jumps, snores, and sleepwalking as performance gestures, inviting viewers to reflect on their sleep experiences. My analysis draws on queer theoretical analyzes of effect, performance, counter-publics, and subjectivity. The queer theory offers a way of thinking about the effect that expands on traditional understandings of sleep as political, how publics and counter-publics are created and circulate meaning, and the transformative processes of queer performativity. I will discuss how my sleep performance differs between Restless and Under Surveillance, highlighting the dis/similar affective registers and productive unconscious performativity. I will also examine the formal presentations that these performances take and how these differences contributed to, shaped, and revealed different sleep states. Finally, I will conclude by reflecting on my own sleep performance and its ability to re-frame sleep as a productive practice for performance creation.

Dayna McLeod, Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, McGill University

Bio: Dayna McLeod is an artist-scholar and Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture research-creation postdoctoral fellow. She earned a Ph.D. from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. She is part-time faculty at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University.

Voicing an Echo, Re-Rooting in Resonance

Across the great body of the Atlantic Ocean, do my own ancestor’s earth-based traditions still echo, vibrating between the memories of trees chopped down and hearths covered over with poured concrete? Before the archive, before my ancestors were robbed of their traditions, like all people, they sang while they worked, put their babies to sleep, and fought. Songs, like water, flow, they resonate across time and space filling in cracks of understanding.

In The Book of Jessica, Linda Griffiths debates with Maria Campbell about the treasures of Maria’s sacred traditions. Maria, a Métis activist and artist, continuously entreats Linda to search back through her traditions to find her power. Where Linda could not find this connection, I wish to help settlers build bridges to their land-based ancestral traditions by using vocality as a path to the traditions of my Gallic ancestors. In developing a practice centred on the power of vocality espoused by Virginie Magnat in her latest monograph, my goal is to listen to these ancient songs while exploring the body and voice connection. In this presentation, I will unpack how I plan to use my voice to examine whether Magnat’s cross-cultural theory of vocality as a performative tool is useful in remaking relationships between settlers and the land while contributing to settler accountability.

Tracey Guptill, Queen’s University

Bio: Tracey Guptill is a Cultural Studies Ph.D. student at Queen’s University.
Drawing from years of collaborative devising with anARC Theatre, theatre voice and movement training in Canada and France, a degree in Philosophy and a practice-based master’s degree in Environmental Studies (2014), her research brings together the disciplines of cultural and environmental studies, philosophy, and performance studies under the umbrella of research-creation.

“There is Nothing You Need To Do Now”

On the boundary of performance and sound studies, my paper will be a theoretical reflection that responds to a post-pandemic spatiality by invoking the surge in popularity of ASMR and meditation apps over the course of the pandemic – forms which use sonic stimulation as therapeutic performance practices. This work draws on relaxation and healing meditations while challenging the cisheteronormativity of such forms with a queer (and theoretical) approach to what it might take to relax in a world not made for us. My intention is to consider forms of attunement and sound/space in relation to the positionality of listening practices by disrupting the boundaries of public and private listening and to parse the shores of (dis)comfort in the reception of certain types of sound in the era of post-pandemic re-gathering. I pursue this line of inquiry because I am interested in how queer soundings permeate the shoals of theory and performance.

As part of a larger research-creation project, I am working on a series called Queer Medz, which are sonic meditations that turn to queer theory as the potential foundation for achieving a queer sense of calm. I have been invited to perform a public meditation at the Spoken Web Sound Symposium in Edmonton in May 2023. For the CATR conference, I will present the auto-ethnographic reflection that emerges from this work as part of my investigation of the ways that und reaches listeners (through waves) in both live and mediated contexts.

Moynan King, Postdoctoral Associate, University of Western Ontario

Bio: Moynan is an artist and postdoctoral scholar working on a research project entitled “Queer Resonance.” She is currently (re)developing trace about the voice in gender transition (Theatre Passe Muraille, April 2023) and working on Queer Medz; the first of which, “Queer Time:1”, will be released on the Listening, Sound, Agency lathe cut record project in 2023.

09:15 – 10:45 AST

Shaped by Water

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Christine (cricri) Bellerose

Sponsored by Dalhousie University, Fountain School of Performing Arts

Laura Nanni, “Buried Rivers and Shifting Shorelines: Mobile Performances Shaped by Water”

Camille Renahrd, “In the Middle, Gestes entre terre et eau: Réflections sur une récherche-création portant sur les pratiques des lavandières”

Caitlin Gowans, “Bodies of Water as Agential Bodies in Royal Court Dramaturgy”

More info

Buried Rivers and Shifting Shorelines: Mobile Performances Shaped by Water

Focusing on mobile performances that have been shaped by water routes– some hidden and others still flowing; I will examine how four particular works, unique in content and form, respond to site, unearth uncomfortable truths, and contemplate how we are shaped by and also shape the land. Featured works include: Something About a River (2002), a five-hour epic performance by bluemouth inc. traversing the route of the now buried Garrison Creek inToronto/Tkaronto; DISH DANCES (2021), a large-scale performance and installation led by Ange Loft (Kanien’kehá:ka) and Jumblies Theatre + Arts, reanimating the Credit River in Ontario, a place of origin for the Dish with One Spoon agreement which is central to the relationship between Indigenous Nations in the Great Lakes region; SWIM (2021), an audio-play by Pandemic Theatre based on the 8km swim from Güzelçamli, Turkey to the Greek Island of Samos; and finally, Connected as we are (2021), a participatory work I co-created with Sorrel Muggridge, inviting audiences in two separate locations, Canada and the UK, to take a journey together, beginning from their respective shorelines, while following each other’s directions.

Bio: Laura Nanni is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and producer. Her research considers the process of walking and aspects of mapping and navigation. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed performance publications, as well as conferences, festivals and exhibitions across the
globe. She is the former Artistic & Managing Director of SummerWorks, presenting an annual performance festival (2016-2023).

In the Middle, between land and water: A research-creation on the practices of washerwomen

This presentation focuses on a research-creation process entitled In The Middle, which proposes to reanimate the gestures of the washerwomen and their ritual and care practices, through site specific performances and actions.

By reducing the gesture to its purest relation of production, to a gesture which is rationalized in its unique relation of speed/product/efficiency, we lose all its relational, collective, embodied (Nastassja Martin, 2015, Tim Ingold, 2012) and therefore vibratory dimension (Renarhd, 2021). With In the Middle, I question these losses through learning gestures and practices that have almost completely disappeared. I also question how the embodiment of material, historical, and empirical data reactivates memories that are “déjà là” (already there, Tourangeau, 2014), ignored, or “inouïes” (unheard) allowing us to weave and terra-form new possibilities (Haraway, 2016) where the path is missing (Burger, 2015).

Based on three case studies – three site-specific performances – my aim is to share the discoveries and challenges encountered during this research-creation. My axes of presentation are the following: – Porosity between performance and historical/ethnographic research

– The lack of archives and the relevance of site-specific and somatic work

– The passages between a work in solo immersion and the transmission to an audience through performative actions

More broadly, I will outline how performative and ecosomatic approaches (Bardet, Clavel, Perron, 2016) bring the unforeseen or the invisible into being; and thus, how it can be manifested trough words or performative actions.

Cette présentation aborde un processus de recherche-création intitulé In The Middle qui propose de réanimer les gestes du lavage des lavandières et les pratiques rituelles et de soin qui y sont liés, par la mise en œuvre d’actions performatives in situ.

En ramenant le geste à son plus pur rapport de production, c’est-à-dire à un geste rationalisé dans son unique rapport de vitesse/produit/efficacité, nous perdons toute sa dimension relationnelle, communautaire, rituelle (Nastassja Martin, 2015, Tim Ingold, 2012) et donc vibratoire (Renarhd, 2021). Avec In the Middle, j’interroge ces pertes à travers l’apprentissage de gestes et de pratiques presque complétement disparues. Je questionne comment la mise en relation somatique et incarnée de données matérielles, historiques et empiriques permet de réactiver des liens inouïes – dans le sens qui ne sont pas entendus -, des mémoires corporelles et de tisser ou terraformer de nouveaux possibles (Haraway, 2016) là où le chemin manque (Burger, 2015). À partir de trois études de cas – soit trois performances in situ –, je partage les découvertes et les défis rencontrés lors de cette recherche-création. Mes axes de présentation sont les suivants :

• Les passages entre un travail en immersion solitaire et la transmission à un public sous la forme d’une action performative

• Porosité entre performance et recherche historique/ethnographique

• Le manque d’archives et la pertinence d’un travail somatique in situ

Camille Renarhd – Postdoctoral fellow

Center of Interdisciplinary Studies In Society and Culture, Concordia University

www.camillerenarhd.com

Camille Renarhd est une artiste transdisciplinaire et une chercheuse postdoctorale associée au Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) à l’Université Concordia, Montréal. Ses travaux explorent les intersections entre l’écologie, les somatiques, l’art sonore et l’art performance. Elle est titulaire d’un doctorat en études et pratiques artistiques (UQAM, U of A). Sa recherche est soutenue par le FRQSC et le CRSH.

Camille Renarhd is a transdisciplinary artist and a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, Montreal. Her works explore the intersections between ecology, embodiment, somatic, sound and ritual performance. She holds a PhD in Art Studies and Practices (UQAM, U of A). Her research is supported by the FRQSC and SSHRC.

Bodies of Water as Agential Bodies in Royal Court Dramaturgy

Students in programs of Drama and Theatre at Canadian institutions will, at some point in their studies, learn that one of the first (this is, the first colonial) theatrical performances, Théâtre de la Neptune En Nouvelle France, took place on the Atlantic Ocean. The nautical setting had more to do with spectacle than consideration for shores or bodies of water as sites or bodies of knowledge, as does the theme of this conference. In light of this conference’s theme, this paper takes a metaphorical trip back across the Atlantic from Canada to the United Kingdom to consider the status of bodies of water as agents of posthumanist embodiment in plays at the Royal Court Theatre.

“What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories,” asks Donna Haraway in her Staying with the Trouble. Haraway approaches this question with “generative joy, terror, and collective thinking” (31). In examining the agential role of bodies of water in Caryl Churchill’s Far Away and Escaped Alone as well as Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, I argue for the sea and its shores not just as a site for performance but a performance of itself in and of itself. With performances originally taking place at the (noticeably dry) Royal Court theatre, bodies of water leak into the dramaturgies nonetheless and insist upon a revision of “human-only histories.”

Caitlin Gowans, University of Toronto

Bio: Caitlin Gowans is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, where her research focuses on posthuman dissent and defiance in contemporary dramaturgy at the Royal Court Theatre in London, UK. Caitlin lives on the land historically called t’karonto, where the trees are standing in the water.

09:15 – 10:45 AST

Wading Into Audience Research

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Convenors: The Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (Kelsey Blair, Kelsey Jacobson, Signy Lynch, Scott Mealey, and Jenny Salisbury)

Participants: Kat Germain, Caroline Klimek, Bethany Schaufler-Biback, Derek Manderson

More info

Significant exploration of the choppy waters and distant shores of audience reception can be a fraught and overwhelming task. It’s easy for the novice to lose their way amongst the policies and practicalities of spectatorship studies (Reason). In response, increasing numbers of audience researchers are venturing into these waters, hoping to broker equitable encounters between researchers, spectators, and theatre makers. This in-person workshop invites new and experienced audience researchers to join us on a Maritime spectatorship adventure with the goal of expanding our participants’ methodological navigation.

In conjunction with CATR programming– and with permission from the artists– participants will attend a local theatre production in Halifax. We will either focus on a show that is part of CATR’s programming (pending) or will work with local artists such as Dapopo Theatre. Using the polyvocal, mixed methods approach featured in our article from “From Site to Self” (Blair et al.), workshop participants will complete a survey and interview each other about the production at a post-performance session on audience research. The workshop will also highlight critical approaches to audience research and engage participants in an evaluation of current methods.

The Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research will ensure institutional research ethics board approval for this activity. We are inviting participants to undertake this work with the intention of creating a forum contribution about audience experience for Theatre Research in Canada.

The workshop requires no special equipment. Observers will be welcome in our 90-minute session, but only participants will be involved in the survey and interview process.

Convened by the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research:

Kelsey Blair is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. Her areas of research include: performance studies, the socio-cultural study of sport, Broadway musical theatre, and theatre audience studies. Her first monograph, Sport and Performance in the Twenty-First Century, is forthcoming in December 2022.

Kelsey Jacobson is an assistant professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. Her first monograph, Real-ish: Audiences, Feeling, and the Perception of Realness in Contemporary Performance is forthcoming in February 2023.

Signy Lynch is a postdoctoral research fellow at UofT Mississauga. Her research interests include contemporary intercultural, intermedial and participatory performance, audience studies, and theatre criticism. She completed her PhD at York University in 2021 where she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal (2022) and Barbara Godard Prize for best dissertation in Canadian studies (2021).

Scott Mealey is a continuing sessional instructor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Crandall University. His research has been published in Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. He is a founding co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research.

Jenny Salisbury is a postdoctoral research fellow at OISE, University of Toronto. The project, titled “60 years of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (QTBIPOC) Activism and Care” uses verbatim theatre to amplify archives of Queer liberation. She is a sessional instructor specializing in community-engaged theatre and audiences.

09:15 – 10:45 AST

Wading Into Audience Research

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Convenors: The Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (Kelsey Blair, Kelsey Jacobson, Signy Lynch, Scott Mealey, and Jenny Salisbury)

Participants: Kat Germain, Caroline Klimek, Bethany Schaufler-Biback, Derek Manderson

More info

The workshop requires no special equipment. Observers will be welcome in our 90-minute session, but only participants will be involved in the survey and interview process.

Convened by the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research:

Break – 15 minutes

11:00 – 12:30 AST

Switching CATR

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Convenors: Naty Tremblay, Sedina Fiati, Lexi Sproule (Members of the Switch Collective)

More info

This Praxis Workshop will invite up to 25 participants to join the Switch Collective in an exploration of our methodologies for developing radical & roving queer street performance. This is open to anyone interested in street art for social change, collaborative creation using transformative justice frameworks, or simply exploring personal modes of performative inqueery in unexpected settings. Participants willing to improvise & experiment will benefit most. As the term ‘switch’ implies, we are using performative frameworks that center queer cultures, sex/desire positivity, versatility, consent practice & radical change. Ideally we will host this workshop in a protected outdoor space, with access to more public space nearby. We will queer “warm ups” using prompts to guide stretching, words & gestures to introduce ourselves to one another, describe our passions & explore transgressive bodily expressions. We will then use circle work to explore key concepts that inform our work including regenerative reciprocity, consent, switchiness, accessibility & care in order to establish sacred agreements for working more deeply together. Participants will then be led through exercises that explore transgressive movement through space, working with place & architecture, mixing mediums into collaborative performance gestures & animating political prompts rooted in the site(s) of our work. We will aim to harvest insights gained from these exercises to loosely curate a thread of performative gestures (inspired by Pocha Nostra, Violeta Luna), followed by a brief discussion returning to ‘care’ in order to then take our experiments to the streets for a roving mini performance. We hope to document this street experiment and share with participants of the workshop.

11:00 – 12:30 AST

At the Shorelines of Media and Performance

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Moderator: Laura Levin

Douglas Eacho, “In the Shoals Between Media and Performance: Rebecca Schneider’s (im)Media Theory”

Shana MacDonald, “Reconceptualizing Internet Archives: Feminist Memes as Repertoire”

Julia Matias, “‘You Have Left Your Imprint in my Heart, Forever and in Gold’: Embodied Memorial in Virtual Tribute Burlesque Performance”

More info

In the Shoals Between Media and Performance: Rebecca Schneider’s (im)Media Theory

Rebecca Schneider, arguably the leading theorist of American Performance Studies, has recently moved from Brown’s Theatre department to its storied department in Modern Culture and Media. To her readers, this has a certain logic. Save those focused on digital media, and no performance theorist has so consistently tacked between broad conceptualizations of performance and the similarly broad, transhistorical claims of media studies – an interdisciplinary field in many ways analogous to performance studies, though rarely in conversation with it. How to think about media and performance together? How to conceptualize the rarely breached shore between these two paradigmatically postmodern inter-disciplines? Towards this broader attempt, this paper reads and critiques writings from across Schneider’s career.

Schneider, I argue, has presented an empty concept of ‘media’ to preserve her theory of a ‘performance’ which can disrupt modernity by establishing transhistorical exchange. But, as I show, this is ultimately an (im)Media theory, holding that the material world serves as a neutral slate upon which intersubjective communication can flow freely. Through this reading, we can better understand the deep divides between performance and media theory, boundaries which stem from the overly expansive claims of our own treasured canon.

Dr. Douglas Eacho, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, CLTA Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Assistant Director, Academic BMO Lab in Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies, and AI University of Toronto

Bio: Douglas Eacho is a historian and theorist of digital performance-based at the University of Toronto (Ph.D., Stanford University). His work contextualizes performance and computation within the history of capital. Essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Theatre Survey, TDR, and elsewhere.

Reconceptualizing Internet Archives: Feminist Memes as Repertoire

Feminist archive scholars have long warned about both the power imbalances and the erasures that are embedded in the institutional practices of archives. Digitally-born artifacts are no different. The current meltdown of, and mass exodus from, Twitter shows what is at stake when our cultural archives are owned by corporations that need not be held accountable to their public. This paper proposes to consider internet archives from a feminist performance studies perspective. To do so, it examines how vernacular discourses on reproductive rights have been captured by feminist memes. The paper situates these memes as digitally-born artifacts that make up an ongoing archive of resistance that is embedded in our visual and cultural landscapes. Drawing on a private meme collection I have developed with the Internet Archive, I will look at hashtags and memes surrounding Roe V. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson. The paper frames collective archives of feminist memes as effectively vibrant spaces of critical and creative reckonings. It ultimately argues that these memes are best framed not as archives but as performative repertoires that provide vital acts of transfer (Taylor 2002). For Taylor, the repertoire stands in contrast to official archives, which can act as institutional sites of oppression for those bodies most marginalized and erased by official discourse. This leads to the questions the paper explores: Are we enacting repertories online? What do they look like? How do they function? What are they transmitting, and how do we attend to them as sites of research?

Shana MacDonald, Associate Professor Communication University of Waterloo

Bio: She is the PI for the SSHRC funded Insight Grant “Feminist Digital Media (2016-2020): Building Affective and Activist Worlds” and co-director of the Feminist Think Tank.

‘You Have Left Your Imprint in my Heart, Forever and in Gold’: Embodied Memorial in Virtual Tribute Burlesque Performance

In this paper, I explore how mentorship between generations of women who perform burlesque produces care, support, and collective mourning through “tribute act” performances. The “Tribute” act is a performance wherein contemporary neo-burlesque performers create a burlesque act inspired by one of the Burlesque Legends– or any burlesque performer who was a feature or headliner before the year 1975. Post-2020, virtual tribute act performances can be read as a response to the “unmooring” effects of social isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Legends have passed on or are in failing health and require material support and a collective process of ascribing value to their life’s work through performance. To do so, I closely read a virtual tribute act created in 2021 by Portland-based Lola Coquette to the late Marinka– a trans-Latinx burlesque performer who was an international headliner throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Central to the creation of this tribute act was Coquette and Marinka’s relationship and the responsibility bestowed on Marinka to carry on her legacy. Using a metaphor of “reaching out through time,” or reaching across the shores of life to those who have passed on, I describe how performing tribute acts involves extending this ethos to a kind of transtemporal erotics in the Lordian sense– an erotics that, yes, is rooted in revelling in the joy of performing sexuality, but also the sensuality that comes from tracing the roots of kinship through performance across the bounds of time, and past the barrier of death. This burlesque aspect of looking back and acknowledging our elders is not so much about sex as it is about embrace, willful entanglement, and care.

Julia Matias, University of Toronto

Bio: Julia Matias (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate completing a collaborative degree with the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on feminist knowledge production in neo-burlesque. She is also an active neo-burlesque performer.

11:00 – 12:30 AST

Shoring Up – and Challenging – Neoliberalism

Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Moderator: Sheila Christie

Meghan Lindsay, “The Stickiness of Impact: Tracing Policy to Public”

Keira Mayo, “Improv for the Win! Competitive and Sport-Style Forms in Canada”

Hope McIntyre, “The Business of Theatre: Shoring up the Industry or Creating Change-Makers”

More info

The Stickiness of Impact: Tracing Policy to Public

This paper explores how benevolence, transformation, and social impact narratives move through policy, practice, and public in the Canadian performing arts. Integrating affect theory from Dylan Robinson, Brian Massumi, and Sara Ahmed with textual analysis of Canadian1 granting organizations’ publications, qualitative audience data from “Being Together” (an SSHRC-funded research project on how audiences perceive co-presence), and individual interviews with Canadian theatre practitioners, this paper traces how impact moves in and throughout the various bodies engaged in performing arts.

Specifically, this paper asks how both Canadian theatre practitioners perceive the public benefit of their work and how audiences perceive the public benefit of theatre practice. This paper thus contributes to the broader discourse on inequality and the instrumentalization of the arts and argues that the “stickiness” (Ahmed) of impact, as understood by artists and audiences, sustains narratives of good citizenship, cohesiveness, and universal transformation in Canadian theatre practice.

The language with which artists are encouraged to frame their work is predicated on social benevolence and benefit, which often places audiences in the role of receiver of social good. Paradoxically, audiences also perceive their role to be one of benevolence: supporting artists whose work is inherently important to a good society. This inherent disconnect between artists and audiences in their role in the ‘impact cycle’ points to the complex and ill-defined impact discourse that pervades Canadian performing arts making: while stakeholders may agree that impact is essential to artistic practice, what impact that is, who benefits, and at whose cost it is achieved remains unclear.

Meghan Lindsay, Queen’s University

Bio: Meghan Lindsay is a Ph.D. Candidate at Queen’s University Department of Cultural Students. She is on the Faculty of Carleton University’s School of Public Policy. Meghan is an acclaimed member of the Canadian performing artistic community. She is currently working on an SSHRC-funded project about audience co-presence

Improv for the Win! Competitive and Sport-Style Forms in Canada

Improv markets itself as a fun and freeing mode of performing and entertaining. Yet, improv’s frequent claims to use “creativity” and “fun” as a means toward self-improvement are steeped in neoliberal ideologies. The improviser must become, in Ulrich Bröckling’s (2015) Foucault-inspired formulation, an “entrepreneurial self.” For many theorists, competition is the most crucial feature of neoliberal entrepreneurialism in North America (Bloom 2017, Wilson 2018, Olsen 2019). Therefore, when thinking about improv and neoliberalism together, I explore the popularity of competitive and gamified improv in Canada. Though Theatresports creator Keith Johnstone clearly states that the competitiveness of the form (and its offshoots, the Canadian Improv Games, ComedySportz, or Whose Line) is just “for show,” accounts from improvisers describe tangible competitive energies and behaviour on and off stage. Through performance analyses of the Theatresports 40 anniversary performance series and interviews with their artistic directors and performers, I ask how the competitive side of improv’s form and culture fit into Canada’s social and economic landscape.

The stakes of this question emerge when we take seriously (1) Randolphe Hohle’s argument that ‘competition’ as a feature of “market-based solutions to problems” makes it so that “race is silenced in neoliberal discourse” (2019, p. 6) and (2) that improv continues to afford more stage time and leadership roles to white men. In answering my core question, this paper goes beyond critiques of representation. It is not about who is onstage; rather, it is about how neoliberal institutional politics create the conditions of possibility for what happens on and offstage. In its uncritical embrace of neoliberal modes, competitive improv serves as a case study for understanding how market-based discourses shape performance practices.

Keira Mayo, University of Toronto

Bio: Keira is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in collaboration with the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her SSHRC-funded research, Innovating and Incorporating Improv in Canada and the US, examines the relationship between racial capitalism and improvisation. Keira is currently a research assistant for Flourish: Community-Engaged Arts. She is committed to anti-racist praxes and going slowly.

The Business of Theatre: Shoring up the Industry or Creating Change-Makers

For four years, I have been drawing on my experience as a producer and artist to teach a Business of Theatre course that prepares students for an arts career. Lacking a suitable textbook for this course, in August 2022, I received a research grant to create an open-source textbook. I have since undertaken a national survey of theatre graduates, highlighting gaps in their training. Interviews then began with theatre professionals from across Canada. In addition, contributors have been engaged to share their experiences by writing sections addressed to future theatre graduates.

A theme that has arisen in the work to date on the book and through teaching the course has been how we prepare students to enter an industry that is not necessarily equitable or healthy. This has led me to question my role, research, and teaching. Should I prepare students to enter into the current structure by teaching them the way the theatre industry currently operates? Or should I be working with students to reimagine an accessible, inclusive, and sustainable model that they can actively pursue as change-makers.

This paper will provide an update on the national survey and interviews to date, as well as my own response to the data. I will tackle two main questions. Have I been erroneously teaching students to shore up a problematic structure? How can we, as post-secondary educators, prepare students to find work successfully after graduation while supporting future waves of change?

Hope McIntyre, University of Winnipeg

Bio: Hope McIntyre is an award-winning playwright/director and Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg. She has a BFA in performance and an MFA in directing. After completing an apprenticeship in England, she worked for a commercial producer and managed an arts school in Toronto. She was Artistic Director of Sarasvàti Productions for 22 years.

Strategic Foresight and the Future of Prairie Theatre

Future Prairie Theatre (FPT) is a team of theatre researchers and practitioners taking a multi-pronged and multi-year approach to engaging theatre artists and theatre institutions about the sector’s future on the Canadian prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba). Anchored in the values of relationality, responsibility, and accountability, and with a place-based commitment, FPT is dedicated to working with diverse stakeholders to help the sector meet current challenges and envision and collectively create a preferred future. Building upon the first stream of activities, Re-imagine & Re-build Prairie Theatre (R&R), the Future Scenarios for Prairie-based Theatre (FSPT) furthers and deepens this sector-driven work by engaging invited participants to tackle specific issues through different modalities. FSTP involved conversations and workshops with independent theatre artists, companies, funding organizations and
governing bodies to strengthen interprovincial connections and forge a regional identity. In this panel, the research team— Professor Christine Brubaker (UCalgary), Dr. Taiwo Afolabi (URegina), artist/scholar Yvette Nolan and Heather and Jessica shared some of the research findings from FSPT. The research team works within both the academy and the profession. It invests deeply in facilitating collaboration within the sector for a healthy, equitable and thriving prairie-theatre ecosystem.

Panelists/Research Team

Christine Brubaker is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary.

Taiwo Afolabi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Regina.

Yvette Nolan is a playwright, director and an MA candidate at the University of Regina. Heather Russet and Jessica Thornton are the founders of Creative Futures. Cali Sproule is an MFA candidate at the University of Calgary. Ibukun Fasunhan is PhD student at the University of Regina. Steven Condo is an MFA student at the University of Calgary.

11:00 – 12:30 AST

Strategic Foresight and the Future of Prairie Theatre

Location: Studio 2, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Panelists: Taiwo Afolabi, Christine Brubaker, Yvette Nolan Heather Russet, Jessica Thornton

More info

Strategic Foresight and the Future of Prairie Theatre

Future Prairie Theatre (FPT) is a team of theatre researchers and practitioners taking a multi-pronged and multi-year approach to engaging theatre artists and theatre institutions about the sector’s future on the Canadian prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba). Anchored in relationality, responsibility, and accountability, and with a place-based commitment, FPT is dedicated to working with diverse stakeholders to help the sector meet current challenges and envision and collectively create a preferred future. Building upon the first stream of activities, Re-imagine & Re-build Prairie Theatre (R&R), the Future Scenarios for Prairie-based Theatre (FSPT) furthers and deepens this sector-driven work by engaging invited participants to tackle specific issues through different modalities. FSTP involved conversations and workshops with independent theatre artists, companies, funding organizations and governing bodies to strengthen interprovincial connections and forge a regional identity. In this panel, the research team— Professor Christine Brubaker (UCalgary), Dr. Taiwo Afolabi (URegina), artist/scholar Yvette Nolan and Heather and Jessica shared some of the research findings from FSPT. The research team works within both the academy and the profession. It invests deeply in facilitating collaboration within the sector for a healthy, equitable and thriving prairie-theatre ecosystem.

Panelists/Research Team

Christine Brubaker is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary
Taiwo Afolabi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Regina
Yvette Nolan is a playwright, director and an MA candidate at the University of Regina
Heather Russet and Jessica Thornton are the founders of Creative Futures
Cali Sproule is an MFA candidate at the University of Calgary
Ibukun Fasunhan is Ph.D. student at the University of Regina
Steven Condo is an MFA student at the University of Calgary

Break – 15 minutes

12:45 – 14:15 ADT

Lunch: Celebrating CATR Distinguished Scholar and Honorary Associateship Recipients

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

More info

Vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free options will be available for each lunch.

12:45 – 14:15 ADT

Lunch: Celebrating CATR Distinguished Scholar and Honorary Associateship Recipients

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

More info

Vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free options will be available for each lunch.

12:45 – 14:15 ADT

Lunch: Celebrating CATR Distinguished Scholar and Honorary Associateship Recipients

Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

More info

Vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free options will be available for each lunch.

Break – 15 minutes

14:30 – 15:30 ADT

CATR Scholarly Awards Ceremony

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Hybrid Session

Live English/French Translation will be provided

Award ceremony honouring the recipients of the Saddlemeyer, O’Neill, Plant, and Godin Awards.

More info

Award ceremony honouring the recipients of the Saddlemeyer, O’Neill, Plant, and Godin Awards.

15:30 – 17:45 ADT

CATR Annual General Meeting

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Live English/French Translation will be provided

Hybrid Session

More info

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Live English/French Translation will be provided

Hybrid Session

17:45 – 18:00 ADT

Closing Remarks and Farewell

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Live English/French Translation will be provided

Hybrid Session

More info

Location: Joseph Strug Concert Hall, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Live English/French Translation will be provided

Hybrid Session

CATR 2023 Conference Organizers

Conference Co-Chairs

Roberta Barker, Heather Davis-Fisch, Kailin Wright

Local Events Coordinator

Luciana Fernandes

Online Coordinator/ Technical Director

David DeGrow, Adam Hill (Assistant)

Membership, Registration, and Care Coordinator

Christine (cricri) Bellerose

CATR President/Conference Past Chair (2022)

Robin Whittaker

Credits

Online Team

Mattea Li, Clement Cameron, Sterling Kai Pollock, Sara Waldron, Taylor DeCoste, Ciara Wainwright

Committees

Organizing Committee: Roberta Barker (Chair), Kailin Wright, Heather Davis-Fisch, Robin Whittaker, Katrina Dunn, Neil Silcox, Sebastian Samur, Jayna Mees, Kirsty Johnston, Taylor Graham, Kim Solga, Taiwo Afolabi, Luciana Fernandes, Dave DeGrow, Christine (cricri) Bellerose

Programming Committee: Roberta Barker (Co-Chair), Heather Davis-Fisch (Co-Chair), Kailin Wright (Co-Chair), Taiwo Afolabi, Giorelle Diokno, Sarah Robbins, Neil Silcox, Robin Whittaker

Finance and Financial Management Committee: Katrina Dunn (Chair)

Digital Dramaturgy Committee: Neil Silcox (Chair)

Translation Committee: Sebastian Samur (Translation Coordinator), Liviu Dospinescu

Accessibility Committee: Jayna Mees (Chair), Kirsty Johnston (Co-Chair)

Communications Committee: Taylor Graham (Co-Chair), Kim Solga (Co-Chair), Giorelle Diokno, Bridget Baldwin, Sebastian Samur

TheatreAgora Committee: Taiwo Afolabi (Co-Chair), Nicole Nolette (Co-Chair), Jordana Cox, Katrina Dunn, Jane Koustas, Jeanne Murray-Tanguay, Jacobs Nevins, Marie-Eve Skelling, Neil Silcox, Fraser M. Steven, Robin Whittaker