Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

Day 4: Tuesday, June 4
9:00-10:30am
Keynote: Juliana Saxton (University of Victoria)
George
“Plus ça Change….”
Introduction: Monica Prendergast (University of Victoria).
Sponsor: Theatre Research in Canada (Marlis Schweitzer, Editor)
Juliana Saxton, professor emeritus, Department of Theatre, University of Victoria, is an international master teacher, keynote
speaker and co-author of a number of texts, most recently, Applied Drama: A Facilitator’s Handbook for Working in Community
(Intellect, 2013). A lifetime in theatre is context for an idiosyncratic overview of “What’s up now?”
10:30am — break
10:45-12:15pm
a) Child’s Play: By Youth, For Youth, Like Youth George
Open Panel Moderator: Cam Culham (University of Victoria)
“Playing with signs at the edge of sense: a cognitive perspective.” Christopher Jackman
(University of Toronto)
In Jacques Lecoq’s scholarship on jeu (or “play”), he exploits an overlap of meanings between drama, games, and children’s
play (Lecoq 191). Whether in a rehearsal room or a sandlot, play lets us alter the conditions of our experience with the world; it
is the imaginative embodiment of the possibilities those novel conditions might afford. When two people are playing together,
identities are created, enforced, and transformed just as the rules governing those transformations are themselves hashed out
through practice. It is also remarkably flexible in its incorporation of signs: a broomstick can invoke a horse as readily as two
coconut halves clopping together. Child psychologist Lev Vygotsky calls play “a dynamic and complex … interactive form of
social imagination” (John-Steiner et al. 11), where participants co-create its representational and behavioural “logic.” For this
paper, I will demonstrate that a cognitive model of play can offer a generative and rigorous account for theatrical signification:
§ I will introduce the enactivist model of perception, which suggests that we perceive the world in terms of the possibilities for
action it affords to us, and recognizes the precedence of affect and intuition to conceptual knowledge. This casts both actor
and spectator as embodied, active participants in the theatre event, whatever the conventional framework. § I will adopt Seitz’s
theory of basic metaphor as an alternative to cognitive linguistic models of conceptual blending. Seitz’s metaphors are
preconceptual linkages rooted in cross-modal perception, and facilitate real-time experiences according to “metaphorical”
contingencies that aren’t themselves objects of our conscious thought. § I will describe play as an autonomous system of
intersubjective coordination, sustained by increasing complexity in the insights it affords participants. Though I will primarily
focus on physical and improvisational play, I will also indicate wider applications to traditional audience-actor relationships with
reference to the National Theatre of Great Britain’s War Horse. This will show that a cognitive perspective of representational
play foregrounds experience, intuition, and openness to possibility, whatever the conventional idiom.
“Dance, Landscape and Empathetic Child Spectators.” Heather Fitzsimmons Frey (University of
Toronto)
Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) is an area of theatre research that is systematically understudied and marginalized by
theatre scholars, even though hundreds of thousands of Canadian children see TYA annually. Dancing, performing bodies are
a tool TYA practitioners often use to create on-stage worlds in order to both construct an imaginary landscape that the
audience could not otherwise access, and to help the audience navigate the fictional space. TYA artists have often explained
to me that dance allows children to experience the world of the play for the duration of the performance very effectively: some
months ago I became curious as to how. Combining information from personal interviews with TYA directors and
choreographers from across Canada, and a wide range of theoretical ideas (kinesthetic empathy and mirror neurons, child and
dance spectatorship, space, and ways dance can engrave culture onto a dancer’s body), this paper suggests a conceptual
“theoretical tower.” Specific performances are bounced off the tower to test its stability. For the purposes of this conference, I
will focus my examples on performances that address ethnic or cultural heritage. Since most Canadian schools still engage
with Canada’s official multiculturalism policy, these plays are widely sought out by educators. The ethnic heritage focus raises
additional issues about exotification, stereotyping, and cultural reduction, which problematize the connections I make between
dance, landscape, and child spectators.
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