Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

12:30pm-2:00pm
Lunch & Launch
University Club
Lunch courtesy of Playwrights Canada Press, featuring readings from Yvette Nolan (The Unplugging), Joseph Jomo Pierre
(Shakespeare’s Nigga), Jim Dugan (Discovering Mavor Moore), Natalie Alvarez (Latina/o Canadian Theatre Performance),
and Lina de Guevara (Fronteras Vivientes)
2:15-3:45pm
a) University Student Productions George
Roundtable Organizers: Moira Day (University of Saskatchewan) and Diana Manole (Trent University).
Participants: Conrad Alexandrowicz (University of Victoria), Irwin Appel (University of California Santa
Barbara), Claire Borody (U Winnipeg), Claire Carolan (Simon Fraser University), Andrew Houston
(University of Waterloo, Ursula Neuerburg-Denzer (Concordia University), Jenny Salisbury (University
of Toronto), Paul Stoesser (University of Toronto)
This roundtable panel addresses the issue of university student productions’ artistic value vs. their educational value.
Consistent with this year’s conference theme, drama/theatre/ performance “at the edge” of innovative scholarship and practice
in Canada and beyond, we invite participants to consider both our current practice and possible new directions in response to
Patrice Pavis’s plea to “revamp” the year-end and other types of university student productions into “artistic research
project(s)” (429) that are properly valued by the theatre and academic communities as both teaching tools with educational
value, and as artistic creations in their own right.
b) Performance and Auto/ethnography: Interdisciplinary Conversations Bishop
Curated Panel Moderator: Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston (York University) and Dara Culhane
(Simon Fraser University)
“Do You Hear Me Looking at You? Autoethnography, Collaborative Memory Work, and Irish
Performance Studies.” Dara Culhane (Simon Fraser University)
This presentation analyzes a performance event held in Co. Galway, Eire, in November 2012. The event consisted in my
autoethnographic performance drawn from memories, archival research into family letters and photographs, interviews with
siblings and relatives, and a personal collection of letters that trace my relationship with my father through my journey from
adolescence to middle age, and his from middle age to old age, dementia, and death. The performance reflects on research
creation, imagination and memory, relationships between children and parents across time and space, and wrestles with the
question: can we achieve reconciliation without forgiveness?
Audience participants were invited to carry on conversations evoked by the performance over a post performance meal.
The intergenerational, transnational audience engaged in collaborative memory work/storytelling that included debates about
historical and contemporary changes in Irish society, education and family life; political/aesthetic debates about storytelling
and theatrical performance practices; tensions between “fiction” and “nonfiction” in autobiography; experiences of emigration
and exile; relationships between children and parents in Diaspora, and the contentious question of forgiveness in the context
of post war peace-building.
I bring emerging scholarship on the potential contributions of Deleuzian theory to autoethnographic performance
scholarship into conversation with Irish Performance Studies that articulates traditions of storytelling, autoethnography, and
monologue performance with analyses of the “inherently theatrical” in Irish social life. I offer this presentation as a story “good
to think with” about contemporary debates in autoethnographic performance, and potential connections with collaborative
memory work extending beyond the performance event.
“‘Quiet Theatre:’ Towards a New Autoethnographic Praxis.” Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
(York University)
This paper rethinks autoethnography in the context of performance ethnography research by focusing on my ongoing work
with Roma women in postsocialist Poland. I trace the trajectory of my autoethnographic research from critical reflexivity to
what I refer to as “quiet theatre." I discuss the ways in which ethical and moral dilemmas that had marked my doctoral
fieldwork led me to reconceptualise critical autoethnography, not merely as a project of destabilizing power differentials
between the ethnographer and research participants, but also as a critique of power struggles within the ethnographic
research process itself. Furthermore, I consider how my recent project, which studies elderly Polish Roma women’s
experiences of ageing through dramatic storytelling, has further impelled me to formulate the concept and praxis of “quiet
theatre:” an autoethnographic inquiry wherein research participants take on key roles in defining the nature, scope and
applications of reflexivity, both during fieldwork and in the ensuing ethnographic products. In doing so, I suggest ways of
facilitating an autoethnographic, bidirectional research process in which the ethnographer and research participants can seek
reciprocal empathic and cognitive understandings of one another’s worlds.
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