Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

d) Theatres of (Ir)reverence: The Ethics of Performing Biography, Religion, War Fine Arts 103
Open Panel Moderator: Jenn Stephenson (Queen’s University)
“Reflections on Impossible Pursuits: Staging Harry Partch.” Conrad Alexandrowicz (University
of Victoria)
This essay traces the development and production of the performance work entitled The Boy Who Went Outside, which took
as its point of departure the life, work and struggles of the American musical revolutionary and composer Harry Partch (1901-
1973). It is at once a personal reflection, the biography of a stage production, an argument about discursive hegemony, and a
contribution to the ongoing discussion amongst artists and scholars about the problematized texts that fall under the rubric of
‘auto/biographical theatre.’ In the course of describing this work I aim to demonstrate that this kind of theatre as much
‘autobiography’ as it ‘biography’—or rather, that it is neither, as the theatre cannot sustain meaning in a way that is equivalent
to that of written text.
Why did I choose to tell Partch’s story? Is it because I felt an affinity with his outcast status? Not only a composer, he was
also an innovative theorist, who, in the 1920s and ‘30s, formulated an entirely new system of tuning. He rejected Western
music, in particular its dissociation from other art forms, and so also became a musical dramatist who wrote his own texts and
created music-dance-theatre works. He may have been the first serious interdisciplinary artist of the 20th Century in the West.
Partch’s story offers truths about how modes of cultural production are established and perpetuated, and how rival
discourses are ghettoized or even erased. This is a reflection on an impossible work based on the life and work of an
impossible artist, who was driven by an impossible mission.
“Religious and Secular Bodies and the Extreme: Raffaello Sanzio and the Post-Secular.” Megan
Macdonald (Independent Scholar / Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Victoria)
Reviews of Raffaello Sanzio’s On the concept of the face: Regarding the son of God focus on the switch “from mundane
medical realism [to] apocalyptic iconoclasm” (Michael Billington). This piece caused upheaval in Paris, and protests in
Montreal because of its treatment of the image of Christ. The piece started with a son looking after his incontinent father in a
white living space that ends covered in ‘excrement.’ The second part involved children throwing grenades at a huge image of
Christ on the back wall, and in the third part the image was ripped apart and covered in more ‘filth.’ The piece was well
received throughout most of Europe but even then the critical attitude at work in the responses point to a notion of
iconoclasm—that the creators of the piece must necessarily be breaking down the untruth of religion to make way for
philosophical truth.
I want to question the assumptions about materiality and temporality in relation to the use of religious symbols in theatre
made by reviewers and academics. Through an analysis of the piece, reviews and commentary, Iwill argue that the
performances of these bodies and the use of an image of the historical body of Christ are not bound by an assumed postsecular
paradigm. Drawing on the work being done in the field of post-secular studies, I will argue that this piece performs a
nuanced contemplation on religion that bypasses social-scientific categories framed by Western Protestant theological
concepts. By examining the bodies on stage in light of current research we will see other patterns emerging from this piece
that trouble long held understandings of how the body must function when put in relation to religious images and symbols, and
prove more extreme than the ‘fecal’ matter that covers the stage.
“‘Foreign Exchange’: The Transnational Mobility of Colleen Wagner’s The Monument” Sarah
Waisvisz (Carleton University)
Colleen Wagner’s 1993 Governor General’s Award-winning play The Monument is set at the end of a civil war in an unnamed
place. Inspired by “rumours out of Yugoslavia” (Wagner quoted in Capraru, 2009), the play stages the confrontation between a
soldier accused of mass rape and mass murder, and the mother of one of his victims. The play’s vague setting has allowed it
to be adapted to different contexts including the Sudan, the DRC, and Rwanda. Indeed the play’s resonance with other
contexts has led to criticism that the script universalizes and flattens the unique issues of particular contexts (Moberley Luger,
2009). The most striking example of its adaptability is the production staged by Rwandan theatre company ISÔKO and
directed by Jennifer Capraru, a Canadian descendant of European Holocaust-survivors. Translated into Kinyarwanda, and
staged by Rwandan artists for post-genocide Rwandan spectators, and then later “returning home” to Canada in a subtitled
touring production, Capraru’s artistic project is fraught with controversy including charges of cultural appropriation and
irresponsibility (Lisa Ndejura, 2009).
Yet how different is Capraru’s mission from Wagner’s? In other words, why do so many Canadian artists feel compelled to
intervene in international cases of human rights violations? Is this type of intervention from artists, who are often not-directly
related to the event or context, appropriating and racist? Or is the intervention “legitimate” if, like Capraru, the artist feels a
kinship to the event based on a similar event in their own family and country of origin? Instead, perhaps this risk of
appropriation can be seen entirely differently as an effort to invoke and encourage a transnational strategy of witnessing that
could mobilize a more active, ethically responsible theatre public. In this paper I argue that Wagner’s The Monument and
Capraru’s production with ISÔKO are both suggestive of a critical labour of repair, rectification, and remediation that needs to
be part of the work of transitional justice and redress in conflict zones both on foreign shores as well as here, “at home.”
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