Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre Hybrid Session Moderator: Laura Levin 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 [...]
Moderator: Sasha Kovacs Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre ‘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 [...]
Moderator: Barry Freeman Location: Small Rehearsal Room, Dalhousie Arts Centre Hybrid Session 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 [...]
Moderator: Marlis Schweitzer Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre 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 [...]
Moderator: Sheila Christie Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre 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 [...]
Location: Zoom Room A Moderator: Natalie Rewa 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 [...]
Moderator: Selena Couture Location: Zoom Room B 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 [...]
Moderator: Robin Whittaker Location: Zoom Room A Sponsored by the University of Manitoba, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media Sponsored by the University of the Fraser Valley, School of Creative Arts (Un)settler Ecologies: interrogating contemporary settler site-based praxis through immersive improvisatory performance strategies As a recent migrant from Wales [...]
Moderator: Kailin Wright Location: Zoom Room B 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 [...]
Moderator: Roberta Barker Location: Zoom Room B ASL Interpretation will be provided 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 [...]