Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

Full Conference Programme
Day 1: Saturday, June 1
9:00am-9:15am
Opening Remarks: Allana C. Lindgren (University of Victoria) and Lynne van Luven (Acting
Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria), and Stephen Johnson (CATR/ACRT
President, University of Toronto)
George
9:15am-10:30am
Keynote: Marie Clements, “A Creator's Guide to The Unknown.”
George
Made possible by the CFHSS International Keynote Speaker Support Fund. Introduction: Sheila
Rabillard (University of Victoria). Sponsors: Talonbooks and Canadian Theatre Review (Laura Levin,
Editor-in-Chief)
Marie Clements is an award-winning performer, playwright, director, screenwriter, producer, and co-director of Frog Girl Films
and the newly formed Red Diva Projects. Her twelve plays, including Copper Thunderbird, Burning Vision, and The Unnatural
and Accidental Women, have been presented on some of the most prestigious Canadian and international stages.
10:30am — break (featuring an excerpt from Danette Boucher’s Lady Overlander in the Circular Plaza)
10:45am-12:15pm
a) The Performed Urban Body: Identities, Ethnographies, Economies George
Open Panel Moderator: Kim Solga (Queen Mary, University of London)
“Geographies of Performance: Cirque du Soleil and the Urban Context.” Susan Bennett
(University of Calgary)
Cirque du Soleil is one of Canada and Quebec’s best-known cultural producers with permanent and touring shows available to
audiences in very many countries across several continents. In the first instance, then, this paper addresses the kinds of cities
that host a Cirque du Soleil show and the cultural work it provides for them in the context of local planning and development
agendas. This is, in part, a question of physical geography, but, more specifically, it contributes to an economic geography of
place. My paper will argue that the importance of Cirque du Soleil’s performance for the cities where their shows are seen is,
to take a phrase from the conference CFP, to be at the economic edge. In other words, these performances often function to
stimulate economic activity that extends far beyond the event itself.
I will focus on the siting of touring shows both in Canada and elsewhere (with short, illustrated case studies), but engage,
too, the successes and failures of permanent theatre locations in the United States and Asia, as well as the more recent move
to arena versions of previously ‘big top’ shows so as to open up the Cirque du Soleil market as well as feed the ‘creative
sector’ aspirations of smaller North American cities.
Despite huge audiences for Cirque shows worldwide, there is still very little published critical scholarship on the company,
especially in English. This research is part of a larger project I have underway on the international circulation of performance
culture. My most recent work includes Theatre & Museums (Palgrave) and Shakespeare Beyond English (a co-edited
collection from Cambridge, forthcoming in 2013).
“Dis-ing the Main Drag in Here Be Dragons.” Andrew Houston (University of Waterloo)
Two young men, who self-identify as Asian-Canadian and queer, decide to leave the small, socially conservative southwestern
Ontario city where they both grew up. They decide to perform the story of this departure, its origins, its process, and its
possible outcomes. The performance takes the form of a map, and before long each man maps a terrain vastly different from
the other and different from what most who live in the city would recognize as home.
José Estaban Muñoz argues that “identities-in-difference” emerge out of a failed interpellation within the public sphere.
Disidentifying with the dominant sphere allows for the emergence of a counter-public sphere; the landscape is the same, but
the way it is mapped and used is different. Refuting both identification and counter-identification—or assimilation and antiassimilation—disidentification
allows for a third mode of dealing with dominant, embedded ideology that uses the idea of
“‘working [both] on and against’ as a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within” (Muñoz 7).
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