Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

virtual spectator, I logged in via a realtime live stream Internet link. Within minutes of Hamlet Live commencing, a chatroom
box from one of the other virtual spectators announced: “so... whitney houston just died...so says facebook?” (Silver). Hamlet
Live’s online spectators were given the liberty to access multiple social media platforms and disseminate this information
among themselves during the performance. Parallel, simultaneous and multi-entry perspectives endow spectators with the
agency to engage and disengage as they please, disrupting traditional forms of linear narrative. This intermedial division within
the performance creates a network structure that opens up new possibilities for understanding how disparate cultures are
negotiated. This paper looks at how the commentary produced through their virtual spectatorship conceived a space where
high culture (i.e. Shakespeare) and low culture (i.e. celebrity culture) generated a space where cultural disparities were
discussed among the virtual audience (i.e. why did Hamlet Sr. look and sound like Darth Vader?).
b) A Call to Arts! McIntyre
Strategizing Creative and Tactical Interventions in the Militarization of Canadian Culture
Praxis Workshop Organizer: Helene Vosters
Our military defenses must be made secure; but our cultural defenses equally demand national attention; the two cannot
be separated. (Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1951: 275).
Though military memory projects (monuments, museums, commemoration events, etc.) have long been a part of Canadian
culture, through his use of the term “military-cultural memory network” Canadian studies scholar Howard Fremeth (2010)
gestures towards two significant changes in Canadian military commemoration that have emerged since the early 1990s:
Expansion of conventional memory projects into a broader range of public and “cultural” arenas (radio dramas, Hollywoodstyle
movies, military shows at sporting and community events, etc.); and the emergence of a complex “network” of
organizational stakeholders that have become increasingly adept at utilizing popular media and at accessing infrastructural
support to “canonize and archive Canadian military memory” (Fremeth 2010: 53).
While funding for Canada’s growing proliferation of military-cultural memorial projects has risen over the past two
decades—evidenced most recently in the $28 million earmarked for War of 1812 commemoration events—arts funding has
seen not only a decline but also a move away from arm’s-length practices and towards mandates that base funding on
standards of “social appropriateness” (Jenkins 2009). One mechanism through which this shift is facilitated is through the
channeling of arts funding dollars into “branches of the Department of Canadian Heritage that focus on the department’s social
mandate” (Bradshaw 2008). The blurring of the thin line between Canadian Cultural nationalism and Canadian Imperial
nationalism—signaled by Alan Filewod in his 1996 and 2002 analyses of Canadian Theatre—is today, perhaps more evident
than ever.
The successful incursion of Canada’s expanding military-cultural memory network into a growing array of cultural and
imaginative arenas has, in large measure, been the result of its tactical deployment popular cultural mediums, and its strategic
development of stakeholder networks. I propose that the development of counter-publics capable of generating alternative
discourses of militarism and war might utilize similar methods. A Call to Arts! will begin with a paper and power-point
presentation of my research into Ottawa’s Canadian War Museum to illustrate some of the ways the museum uses popular
culture approaches to create “consensus-producing spectacles” that affirm the “givenness, even naturalness, of the military
presence” (Taylor 1997:62). My emphasis will be on the museum’s use of theatrical, interactive and multimedia platforms
aimed at children and youth and designed to facilitate an atmosphere of participation. This presentation will be followed by a
breakout session in which participants will form clusters based on areas of interest and expertise—theatre/performance;
media; pedagogy; research; funding—and embark on a collective endeavor to strategize creative and tactical interventions into
Canada’s expanding network of military-cultural memory projects. The session will close with cluster reports and a discussion
of possible implementations and next steps.
c) @ the Edges of Theatre Production: Designers, Documents, Social Media Fine Arts 103
Open Panel Moderator: James Dugan (University of Calgary)
“The Temporality of Performance Art Documents.” Chaya Litvack (University of Toronto)
Alongside the digital colonization of theatre over the past decade, a museological shift towards performance art has swept the
contemporary art world; Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Centre Georges Pompidou have all devoted
departments to the form, and performance programming is on the rise internationally. Accordingly, archival records of
performance art are increasingly accessible via online databases, some of which are restricted to the collections of prominent
institutions, like MoMA or The Walker Art Center, and others that aim for a thematic consolidation of records, such as
re.act.feminism, which preserves performance art with a feminist or queer sensibility. These online platforms open vast
possibilities; in the online environment, archivists, scholars, and artists may manage, arrange, describe, codify, and use
performance documents in ways that material records do not permit. If, as information studies scholar Bernd Frohmann
argues, the kinds of practices associated with documents determine their meaning, then the digitization of the performance art
archive will transform both the historiography and the history of performance art. Online archival interventions, in a sense, “reenact”
performance history, and actively alter the manner in which, to borrow Rebecca Schneider’s term, performance
remains. I propose that these emerging documentary practices shape the temporal conditions of “liveness,” “presence,”
“duration,” and “permanence,” and thereby regulate distinct temporalities. In my paper, I examine conceptualizations of the
performance document in the field of performances studies alongside definitions of the document in information studies in
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