Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

This statement, which I made during the development of Nina Arsenault’s performance entitled 40 Days and 40 Nights:
Working Towards a Spiritual Experience, was inscribed by the artist on the walls of the installation. Arsenault inscribed this
text, along with other fragments, automatic drawings and assorted visual ephemera on the walls of the Theatre Centre pop up
space in Toronto’s Queen Street West area as part of the 2012 Summerworks Festival.
As dramaturg for this event, I will offer a perspective on the process of creation as well as document some of the
components of the installation.
The work evolved over 40 days and nights, culminating in 10 days of public viewing from dusk to dawn (approximately 9
pm until 5 am). While different showings varied in content, some parts of the installation were always fixed (such as her 90
minute self-flagellation while nude, riding an exercise bicycle, and her telling of the hour-long story of her recent facelift under
local anesthesia, while in full make-up.) In the days and nights preceding the installation, Arsenault limited contact with the
world, phenomenal and virtual, fasted, experimented with sleep deprivation, light deprivation.
Did she achieve a spiritual experience? Did she discover, uncover or recover anything? These and other questions will
form part of my paper which I propose falls into the category of “Bodies on the brink: extreme performance(s)”
I have worked with Arsenault for twenty years, first as her mentor/professor during her transition, and then as dramaturg
for her stage plays (The Silicone Diaries, I Was Barbie, and a new work currently in development). I also edited a volume of
essays and photographs about her work (TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work, Intellect
Books 2012). 40 Days and 40 Nights represents a departure from her theatrical work, moving her into the world of
performance installation and as such is an important piece within her oeuvre.
“Techniques for New Realist Performance, or, ‘What does ‘not-acting’ look like?’” Jenn
Stephenson (Queen’s University)
Theatre has not been aloof from the millennial fever for authenticity. New Realists among us desire real food, expressed in the
rise of locavorism (community gardens, backyard hens, nanobreweries); real clothes (vintage, handknits); real service (a
human on the helpline, store greeters, customization); real experience (crowdsourcing, the do-it-yourself ethos, immersive
tourism)—the list goes on (Shields, Boyle, Spretnak, Gilmore and Pine). Given the cultural capital assigned to the “real” in this
particular moment, it is important not to naively accept the semblance of the real as being truly essentially real, rather it
behooves us to examine how that “real” is constructed and specifically in the theatre why certain performance elements
encourage reading as “real.”
First, considering what actors do, this study draws on a cognitive model of acting which figures acting as “behaviour”
resulting from the navigation of specific opportunities and restraints (Blair, Pinker). Using this framework, I assess the
differences and commonalities in acting technique between presenting a fully fictional character and presenting an actual “self”
(Kirby, Auslander). Second, this study turns to audience perception, examining the generic characteristics of “reality-based”
performance to generate a model for the dramaturgical and scenographic techniques which are calculated to promote our
sense of the performer as “real.”
For the development of this model, I draw on two recent reality-based autobiographical performances that present “notacting”:
A Brimful of Asha (Ravi Jain and Asha Jain, Toronto 2011) and Winners and Losers (James Long and Marcus
Youssef, Vancouver 2012). Both plays purport to be unmediated improvised conversations. One features a mother and son
who affectionately disagree about the benefits of an arranged marriage. In the other, two best friends viciously dissect each
other to determine who is a winner and who is a loser. With this model in hand, it will be possible to establish a pattern of
connections to show how specific genre characteristics of reality-based performance work to support (or undermine) the
thematic understanding offered by each play.
“‘Is this literature or truth?’: Trauma/Traumatic Reenactment in Michel Marc Bouchard’s The
Orphan Muses.” Rebecca Halliday (York University)
Several of Québécois playwright Michel Marc Bouchard’s scripts incorporate instances of metatheatre in which characters
narrate and enact traumatic moments from a shared familial, historical or political past. Bouchard’s 1988 drama, Les Muses
orphelines—translated into English by Linda Gaboriau as The Orphan Muses (1995)—is set in Lac Saint-Jean, Quebec, in
1965, and depicts a tense reunion between four siblings two decades after their mother’s decision to abandon them for a
Spanish soldier with whom she had begun an affair. This childhood trauma and its resultant secrets have impacted their
familial and social relations since. Catherine, Martine, Luc and Isabelle Tanguay inhabit a “self-contained illusion outside the
world of social praxis” (States 19) not simply as characters in a theatrical production but as actors in a constructed milieu.
This paper illuminates the numerous metatheatrical layers Bouchard establishes and argues that the characters’
habituated falsehoods, dramatic remembrances and mimetic enactments represent a distorted but nonetheless potent
Freudian process of working through that both immerses the characters in and releases them from their fictions. First, I
examine instances in which characters inhabit, in turn, the role of their mother, as well as the mother’s appearance as a
“phantasmatic reproduction” (Hamacher 39) both through invocation and through material, semiotic traces. In particular, Luc’s
imitation, in his mother’s clothes, is a problematic moment of transference in which he acts out his trauma through his mother’s
form and projects his resentment onto the townspeople that judged her. Further, I describe sequences in which characters
reenact the moment of their abandonment, building to a full, climactic, rehearsed performance inside the house. Here,
theatrical repetition functions both as resistance—producing in the characters a false “theatrical emotion” (Hurley 3)—and as a
catalyst for the illusion’s rupture and their painful rebirth into the (nonetheless theatrical) ‘real’.
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