Moderator:
Location: Zoom Room C
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/9655843851?pwd=1Kv0eUXPj4fKcTjivlayvy77YiHLqm.1
Online Session
Queering VR: Performance, Memory, and the Archive
This paper endeavours to explore the opportunities, challenges, and ethics of reconstructing and re-enacting archives of memory through virtual reality (VR) performance, using Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close (National Theatre London 2019; Soulpepper Theatre 2020) as an exemplary case study.
Draw Me Close is a 1:1 virtual reality (VR) performance in which the artist’s childhood memories, experiences, and interactions with his mother are reconstructed in the wake of her passing. Solo audience members are positioned as Jordan (the subject and character) and taken through a series of narratives, (virtual) spaces, and interactions with his “mother”, played by a live actor. Piece by piece, audiences are brought into the world of the “shifting” (Mel Y. Chen 2012, p. 16) archive, inhabiting Jordan’s reconstructed virtual world from his early explorations of queer sexuality through to his mother’s cancer diagnosis and passing.
Following Mel Y. Chen (2012) and Rebecca Schneider (2016), this paper will explore how the world of Draw Me Close represents a “touching” and/or “queering” (Schneider 2) of time within its archive, blurring and transgressing the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, life and death. On a philosophical level, considering foundational queer performance scholarship (Phelan 1993; Munoz 1996) and Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995), it will also examine how performance’s ephemerality rewards its artists the dual advantages of visibility and protection, allowing for an ethical exploration of traumatic memory and loss within a disappearing medium.
Finally, this provocation will use Draw Me Close as a point of departure from which to outline future possibilities of performance and emerging (VR) technologies’s engagements with archival theory and practice. By positioning VR performance as an archive-constructing medium, it aims to move beyond the question of how we can take performances seriously as archives, towards how personal (memory) archive construction is itself a performative act.
Camille Intson, University of Toronto
Camille Intson (she/her) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans writing, performance, music, new media, and emerging technology. She is a current PhD candidate within the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. More at camilleintson.com or @thecamiliad.
A Performance of “Justpeace”? Mapping the Emergence of Intimacy Direction in Canadian Theatre
This paper is an initial interrogation of how the emergence of the intimacy director into professional Canadian theatre is a disruption that may or may not foster justice within the process of theatre making. This paper maps out questions relating to how John Paul Lederach’s explanation of “Justpeace” as a liminal “process-structure… characterized by high justice and low violence” that views “systems as responsive to the permanency and interdependence of relationships and change” can inform how the intimacy director may function as an advocate for justice within the rehearsal hall (36). The configuration of creative roles (e.g., director, designer, choreographer, performer) in professional Canadian theatre is undergoing a radical re-think as the inclusion of intimacy directors have become common practice. The paper examines current language being used in the Canadian Theatre Agreement 2021-2024 Material Terms and the DOT Agreement as well as definitions of intimacy as outlined by leading advocates. In assembling the disciplines of peace and conflict studies and theatre studies, this inquiry, stemming from my on-going research, considers how the addition of this new role within the composition of professional theatre makers may function as a proxy for, or performance of, a shift within the larger society.
Works Cited
Lederach, John Paul. “Justpeace The Challenge of the 21st Century”, People Building Peace 35 Inspiring Stories from Around the World, European Centre for Conflict Prevention, in Cooperation with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Coexistence of the State of the World Forum, 1999, pp.27-36.
Heidi Malazdrewich, University of Winnipeg
Heidi Malazdrewich is a director, dramaturg, and educator. She holds an MFA in directing from the University of Calgary and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Manitoba. Heidi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg.
Performing the Doppelganger Paradox: The Role of Audiences in the Production of Representation in Grey Noize
For aging queer and nonbinary subjects, there can be safety in invisibility and violence in visibility (Gossett et al 2017). This counterintuitive paradox is at the heart of my analysis of durational performance works staged in Montreal, 2016-2023 by fifty-something nonbinary artists Nik Forrest (they/them) and Kimura Byol ze/zer), collaborators known as Grey Noize. In this paper, I examine representational intersections between gender, age, race, and sexuality through a textual analysis of their performance-based collaboration. Forrest is Scottish and Byol is Japanese Korean—and they make performance-based works about constantly getting confused for one another other. But how can these artists be confused for each other? Is it racism? Agism? Transphobia? hom*ophobia? What are people seeing in these two very different individuals that makes them appear the same?
Grey Noize take their doppelganger status as a starting point to get to the heart of the ‘noise’ that makes them appear so similar to other people and stage the results. My analysis looks at how Grey Noize grapple with in/visibility and mediate their bodies within their performances, and the central role publics and audiences have in how they contribute to and participate in the production of representation. This paper also considers the potential of queer sociality (Ahmed 2004) as a method of engagement and embodiment, that is, as an affective method to circulate intimacies, vulnerabilities, and empathies between publics, and between publics and queer and nonbinary artists like Grey Noize in their performance-based work.
Works cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Taylor & Francis, 2004.
Gossett, Reina, Stanley, Eric A. Stanley, and Burton Johanna, editors. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. MIT P, 2017.
Dayna McLeod, Middlebury College
Dayna McLeod is an artist-scholar and current SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Middlebury College. Her work appears in The Journal of Autoethnography, The Anthropology of Work Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Journal of Aging Studies, Canadian Theatre Review, and Ciel Variable.
Rehearsing for Revolution: A feminist practice of solidarity through refusal
In gendered, neoliberal, and patriarchal societies, women endure exhausting expectations of behaviour. Instructed to consistently please, smile, flatter, and agree, any failure to perfectly play prescribed archetypes like ‘the good girl’, for example, may result in feared consequences. A parent’s disappointment. A partner’s disgust. A supervisor’s note of dismissal. How can women resist squeezing themselves into these too-tight, rigid, and confining containers when the real-world stakes feel so high? When affirmation – a wholehearted, cheery yes! – is the only acceptable response for women in conversation (in the home, with friends, in the workplace, and in society), our muscles for feminist refusal – for stating a judicious and confident no – weaken.
Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s depictions of the feminist killjoy, I critique her recent book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023), which, while painting inspiring and imagistic portrayals of feminist refusers, prescribes, through its handbook form, alternative containers for killjoys to inhabit. These new restrictions on behaviour further limit a woman, as opposed to liberating her. However, Ahmed’s portrait of the feminist killjoy, a persona willing to question, confront, and complain about unjust systems of oppression, energizes and empowers readers.
Through employing the technical, hands-on teaching methods of vocal coach, Patsy Rodenburg, who describes in The Woman’s Voice (2023) – through a series of exercises utilizing the mind, body, breath, and voice – how to unlock the authentically powerful voice women are trained to suppress, I explore, as a performance artist, physically embodying Ahmed’s evocative representations of the feminist killjoy. I aim, through this repetitive practice, to develop muscles of feminist refusal that will transform me from a paper feminist killjoy to a practicing one. I then discuss my central case study, Rehearsing Refusal: A women’s workshop for practicing feminist refusal, an event I designed, facilitated, and led for a diverse group of twelve adult women in London, which encouraged the practice of feminist refusal through exercises generating an expansive reframing of the notion of refusal, acts of solidarity, gestures of mutual care, and the fostering of a safe space that allowed for outpourings of emotion, including anger and joy.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (London: Penguin Books, 2023)
Barbie, dir. by Greta Gerwig (Warner Bros, 2023)
Baron, Michelle, ‘Queering US Public Mourning Rituals: Funerals, Performance, and the Construction of Normativity’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2011)
Barri Holstein, Lauren, ‘Splat!: Death, mess, failure and “blue-balling”’, Performance Research, 19:2 (2014), pp. 98-102
Gorman, Sarah, Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure (New York: Routledge, 2021)
Harvie, Jen, and Lois Weaver, The Only Way Home is Through the Show (London: Intellect, 2015)
Lorde, Audre, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems (UK: Silver Press, 2017)
Rodenburg, Patsy, The Woman’s Voice (London: Methuen Drama, 2023)
Smith, Tiffany Watt, On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Stuart, Isabel, ‘Fluidity of Felling: Water, Gender, and the Political Potential of In-difference in Travis Alabanza’s Overflow’, European Journal of Theatre and Performance, (2023), pp. 4–37
Mary Tooley, Almeida Theatre
Mary Tooley (she/her) is an artist, researcher, and recent graduate of Queen Mary University of London’s Master’s in Theatre and Performance. Her practice-based dissertation specializes in the generative potential of feminist refusal, and her performance practice finds majesty in the mess. She’s a Young Producer at the Almeida Theatre.
Keywords
Series: CATR 2024 Conference
