CATR Conference 2024

Link to Zoom Room A

Moderator: Michelle Macarthur

Crowdsourcing the Canon: (Re)Imagining Global Performance Art Histories Against the Grain 

Since 2019, we have been coediting a new textbook for Routledge’s 50 Key series: 50 Key Performance Artists. While it was easy enough initially to imagine a list of 50 remarkable performance artists (or 100, or 150), we quickly realized that this was not the list that we would necessarily want to use in teaching or research ourselves; or, rather, that most of the artists we immediately thought of were those we could teach, easily enough, because they were already quite frequently written about in English. We noticed too that this list was dominated by links to New York City, the art market, and other flows of power that have in no small sense dominated the genre’s own teleological flow. (The latter is exemplified by a recently published book on the genre that justifies citing artists based primarily in Europe and the US because that is how the history of performance art has been told.) How might we define “key” beyond those criteria? Who are the artists that profoundly impact performance communities in contexts that receive little critical attention in English-language scholarship? And what would a more genuinely diverse list of key artists illuminate about multiple global histories of performance art? Is it possible to trace its lineages without limiting one’s reading to a genre-as-birthplace point of view often employed in art history-oriented survey courses or texts?

So, we took to the ground, as it were, reaching not for the established scholarly works of performance art (though we used them as a counterbalance) but rather to multiple generations of current performance artists and scholars from six continents to ask, Who are your 50 key performance artists?

Beginning at the point where geographic hubs that have typically been given critical attention are decentred, this book generates, we hope, a new kind of list that includes artists whose work has defined and redefined the genre but who are less readily familiar across English-language performance art scholarship. Thinking not through canon or chronology required us to define different criteria by which to evaluate the impact of potential listees-something made especially complex by our focus on underrecognised, body-based practices. Three years of intensive research into each of the hundreds of artists proposed to us, though harrowing at times, resulted in a clarity of a more community-engaged methodology that we mobilised for this book.

The list of 50 performance artists we ultimately developed and put to press is not, by “western” academic standards of contemporary art and performance, canonical; but it is key. This presentation engages the methodological apparatus of ‘crowdsourcing’ we used in compiling the list—the assembly, assembling, and assemblage that finally yielded a TOC that we might be momentarily happy with but know has always been a project predicated on its own happy failure—and asks, for us, very profound questions about the purpose of survey-based textbooks and the process of their curation and compilation during a moment when scholarship and pedagogy become ever more accountable to matters of decolonization, unlearning, and the destabilization of what we mean by academic expectations, standards, and ‘the canon.’

T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko (University of Toronto)

T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko, PhD, is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, where she specializes in experimental art, theatre, and performance, music-theatre, and feminist ethics of care.

Adriana Disman

Adriana Disman, PhD, is a performance artist and researcher. Their solo performance practice has been widely presented since 2010. Their writing on the curation and criticism of self-wounding in performance art can be found in both academic and arts publications.

(P(Re))Forming Justice: Milo Rau’s Trials and Tribunals

Since founding the production company International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) in 2008, Swiss-German theater-maker Milo Rau has gained international acclaim, attention, and, at times, indignation for his politically engaged theatre. As a political artist, Rau has – alongside more classic productions – facilitated petitions, founded political parties, authored political declarations, staged public marches, as well as formed assemblies, think tanks, and talk shows that temporarily bring activists, artists, and politicians together.

“(P(Re))Forming Justice: Milo Rau’s Trials and Tribunals” looks at Rau’s trial and tribunal projects: The Moscow Trials (2013), The Zurich Trials (2013), and The Congo Tribunal (2015). It engages with the intersection of the political and the affective in Rau’s re-temporalization of necessary, but ultimately non-existent, institutions to create utopian, affective institutions demonstrate alternatives to those of the present. In uncovering the connection between the two aesthetic references of affect and politic, this presentation connects three elements of performance in Rau’s projects: (1) the political impulses of these constructed, temporary institutions, (2) their affective power, and (3) the concept and question of justice. By, on the level of theory, bringing together the anarchist concept of prefiguration, Frans-Willem Korsten’s apathy, Olivia Landry’s Theatre of Anger, and Robert Walter-Jochum’s Theatre of Outrage into contact with affect, “(P(Re))Forming Justice” uncovers how Rau’s tribunal theatre, in its creation of a jurisdiction located in the future – a prefiguration for what these spaces should look like – serves as a call to justice that breaks with contemporary apathy.

Lily Climenhaga, Universiteit Gent

Lily Climenhaga (she/they) completed a dissertation about Milo Rau and IIPM in a joint degree between the University of Alberta and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and co-edited Theater’s special edition on Milo Rau in 2021. Lily is currently undertaking the FWO-funded postdoctoral project “Institutionalized Resistance: Milo Rau’s NTGent Period” (1290323N) at Universiteit Gent.

Performing Justice: Post-election Protests in Nigeria

The Nigeria’s 2023 general elections generated varying reactions and responses. The European Union Election Observation Team described the election as lacking transparency and credibility. Humongous protests immediately suffused some streets of the country following the election umpire, Independent Electoral Commission (INEC)’s declaration of results and the litigations at the election tribunals, the Appeal and the Supreme Courts. The post-election protests took varying dimensions and included the deployment of diverse performative creativity to demand for justice. This paper interrogates these protests as performances of justice in Nigeria since the February 2023 general elections. A survey with interviews and analysis of audio-visual media of protests in Nasarawa State of Nigeria form the sample for this study. Archival research is also used to examine, in historical perspective, the role of performances in advocating justice in Nigeria. Data generated are subjected to content analyses. The findings from the research reveal how performances are reflecting the equity system and justice frameworks in contemporary Nigeria.

Mark Onwe, Federal University of Lafia, Nigeria

Mark Ogah Onwe is completing his doctorate in Theatre and Media Arts at the Federal University of Lafia, Nigeria. He obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Theatre Arts from the University of Jos and the Benue State University, Makurdi, respectively. His research interests cut across theatre and cultural change, festivals, literary theory and criticism, theatre aesthetics, script writing and play production where he has published several journal articles and contributed chapters to books.

The Ottawa People’s Commission as Dissident Community Action

In February 2022, people local to downtown Ottawa were caught in the grip of a three-week occupation that called for the end of public health measures—at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—and the overthrow of parliament—in a government town. As hundreds of protestors in semitrucks rolled into Ottawa, blockaded the streets, and with the help of a well-funded, off-site logistical network, settled in with food and fuel, their demands literally idled in the impassable streets. Their populist message of “freedom” found expression in white, male-dominated scenes of public harassment and violence in the nation’s capital. It was the invocation of the Emergencies Act that brought the occupation to an end. The mandated Public Emergencies commission that followed included thousands of hours of testimony from both governmental officials and Convoy leaders. As key organizers from the Convoy “took the stand,” the commission became a platform for western separatists, conservative populists, conspiracy theorists, and even militant libertarians. In contrast, the people of Ottawa, were allotted one morning of public testimony. In anticipation of  being silenced, the local, grassroots Ottawa People’s commission (OPC) was formed and held parallel hearings in Fall 2022. This paper will detail the work of the OPC, a citizen led inquiry held both in person and online, that collected the stories of Ottawans impacted by the occupation. It will discuss both the public hearings and reports that the OPC produced. And it will posit that the OPC performed a dissident community action through testimony that called out the “Freedom Convoy” for what it was: a violent alt-right occupation.

Keren Zaiontz, University of British Columbia

Keren Zaiontz is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of Film and Theatre at the University of British Columbia. She is author of Theatre & Festivals (Methuen Drama) and co-editor of Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan), winner of the ATHE Award for Excellence in Editing.