Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

Day 3: Monday, June 3
9:00-10:30am
Keynote: Helen Gilbert (Royal Holloway, University of London)
George
“Step by Step: Walking, Reconciliation and Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty”
Made possible by the CFHSS International Keynote Speaker Support Fund. Introduction: Sheila
Rabillard
Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London and co-convener of its interdisciplinary
Postcolonial Research Group. Her monographs and co-authored books include Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-
Cultural Transactions in Australasia (2007), Sightlines: Race, Gender and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre (1998)
and Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996). She has published widely in theatre and performance as well as in
postcolonial studies and has recently co-written a book on orangutans, race and the species boundary. Her primary research
is now focused on an interdisciplinary and multinational team-based project examining Indigeneity and Contemporary
Performance, funded until 2014 by the European Research Council.
10:30am — break (featuring an excerpt from Nelson Gray’s Hear Oceans Roar in the Circular Plaza)
10:45-12:15pm
a) Canadian Performance Genealogies George
Roundtable Organizer: Heather Davis-Fisch (University of the Fraser Valley). Participants: Roberta
Barker (Dalhousie University), Kirsty Johnston (University of British Columbia), Laura Levin (York
University), Marlis Schweitzer (York University), Kim Solga (Queen Mary, University of London).
Genealogies of performance, which Joseph Roach describes in Cities of the Dead as genealogies that “document—and
suspect—the historical transmission and dissemination of cultural practices through collective representations” (25), provide a
theoretical and methodological framework for positioning theatrical, extra-theatrical, and non-theatrical performances in
conversation with one another and for describing “the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory
as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (26). Roach’s work on performance genealogies, as well as
Diana Taylor’s formulation of the archive and the repertoire, Alice Rayner’s theorization of substitution and mimesis, and Greg
Dening’s description of ethnographic history, have helped performance scholars to respond to Walter Benjamin’s call for the
historian to move beyond telling “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” (255) and to take his or her own affective
and ethical engagements with the past into account. A genealogical approach to performance history appears to provide new
ways of interpreting the performances of the past and (re)introducing previously overlooked performance practices. However,
it is crucial to consider how the theories, terminology, and methodologies of this approach operate in Canadian contexts and to
pose questions about the historical, ethical, and social implications of genealogical approaches to performance history. For
example, Roach suggests that this approach provides scholars with specific ways of addressing intercultural performances of
the past: when considering the former settler-colonies that are now Canada, it is essential to interrogate how western modes
of temporality, which Roach’s concept of vortices of behaviour relies upon, might be in tension with Indigenous understandings
of time and space.
b) From Orientalizing Agendas to Indigenous Dramaturgies Bishop
Open Panel Moderator: Sheila Rabillard (University of Victoria)
“Orientalizing agendas in the Far North: Marie Chouinard’s Les trous du ciel (1991).” Bridget
Cauthery (York University)
In 1991 avant garde Quebeçoise choreographer Marie Chouinard created Les trous du ciel (“holes in the sky”) for her nascent
contemporary dance company. The work features throat singing by a fictitious clan of half-animal, half-human “primitives”
drawn from Chouinard’s imagination and from her research on Canadian Inuit culture. The premise for the piece is taken from
the notion that, for the Inuit, each star is a hole in the sky. Chouinard was inspired by the poetic potential of this idea as well as
the aural possibilities of shared breath and the resulting work for seven dancers met with national and international acclaim.
Stepping aside from the artistic success of the work Chouinard’s Les trous du ciel may be read in terms of its performance of
an infantilized primitivism with overt links to Orientalism.
While Said’s notion of Orientalism (1978) was developed in relation to depictions and interpretations of the Near and
Middle East application of his theories to post- and neo-colonial interpretations of the Arctic are significant (Bloom 1993;
Brandt 2005; Bravo & Sverker 2002; Davidson 2005; Grace 2001; Hansen & Norberg 2009; Moss 2006; Pratt 1992; Spufford
1996). In relation to the “North” orientalism plays an unequivocal role in the reception and representation of indigenous
peoples and artefacts as well as in the on-going development of international trade negotiations and oil rights.
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