Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

performatif, qui se lit à haute voix, qui s’entend. Ce lieu de travail, d’écoute et de prise de risques partagés, nécessite la
présence d’un accompagnateur sensible pour que cela advienne. Ian Nielson anime le Cercle depuis sa création (?), il a la
capacité de favoriser un espace d’écriture et de parole entre les différents auteurs. Dans le cadre d’un projet de recherche
CRSH (2010-2013), nous avons rencontré des auteurs du Cercle qui s’apprêtaient à présenter des extraits de leur récente
création dans au Festival découvertes / Discovery Festival, qui en était à sa deuxième année d’existence. Des entrevues
semi- dirigées nous ont permis de mieux comprendre cette pratique de création individuelle qui fait appel aux autres, pratique
dialogique permettant de réunir des auteurs attentifs à leur processus de création et à celui des autres pour que la parole
advienne, celle des personnages en action.
La Troupe du Jour in Saskatoon set up Le Cercle des écrivains ten years ago. It brings together playwrights, authors and
people who have a desire for writing. Le Cercle encourages open discussions and collaboration among participants,
professional or not, who are at different stages in their writing career. All participants agree to share their creative process and
their current writing with the others. Writing is normally a solitary practice but in the Cercle’s case it is as much a collective as a
solitary activity, where participants read aloud and listen to others’ work; it is a place to take risks with confidence. The
presence of a leader is essential in this context, and Ian Nelson has been a sensitive mentor since the beginning of Le Cercle.
He has the ability to open space for writing, for discussing and generating mutually constructive feedback. As part of a SSHRC
project (2010-2013), we met Le Cercle’s authors before they presented excerpts at the second Festival Découvertes /
Discovery Festival (2012) in Saskatoon. Semi-directed interviews were made with authors, and their leader made it possible
for us to grasp the characteristics of the dialogical process for writing that brought words to artistic and theatrical life in such a
unique format as Le Cercle des écrivains.
c) @ the Edge of Canadian Theatre Practices: Gender, Age, Dis/Ability Fine Arts 103
Open Panel Moderator: Kirsty Johnston (University of British Columbia)
“In the Theatre of Excess: Sky Gilbert and the Commodification of HIV/AIDS in Canada.” Dirk
Gindt (Stockholm University)
The proposed paper analyzes how playwright and activist Sky Gilbert, one of the key figures and most controversial
personalities in contemporary Canadian theatre, explores the continuing challenges posed by HIV/AIDS for the
lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender community in the twenty-first century. The paper devotes particular focus on the
commodification of HIV/AIDS, not least by the pharmaceutical industry whose aggressive marketing campaigns of protease
inhibitors have invaded the gay villages of Canadian urban centers. In tandem with these cynically commercial interests, as a
community we are still faced with limited cultural representations of LGBT people with HIV/AIDS and find ourselves constantly
under pressure to fit into and be assimilated by a neoliberal economy with its unholy trinity of individualism, depoliticization,
and consumption—at the expense of community activism and solidarity. Gilbert’s dramatic characters, the paper argues,
attempt to resist this commodification and assimilation into neoliberal modes of consumption by unapologetically living out their
queer sexuality. They celebrate outspokenness as opposed to complacency, shame as opposed to pride, and excess as
opposed to moderation. In the process, they explore complex issues such as the criminalization of HIV, consensually
unprotected sex, or the controversial theories of the so-called AIDS dissident movement, associated with biologist Peter
Duesberg, that questions the link between HIV and AIDS.
“Dissolving the Edges: Challenging Age Binaries by Viewing King Lear in Temporal Depth.”
Julia Henderson (University of British Columbia)
Constructs like ‘edginess’, ‘cutting-edge’, and ‘living on the edge’ are typically linked to youth. When yoked to old age, ‘the
edge’ is most often constructed as an undesirable barrier, a point of no-return. We speak of being ‘over the hill’, ‘slipping over
the edge’ or being ‘on the brink of death’. Western theatrical representations of old age most often show older adults as on the
edge of health about to descend into illness, on the edge of sanity about to descend into madness, on the edge of productivity
and self-sufficiency about to descend into dependency, and on the edge of life about to experience death. But theatre also has
great potential to re-imagine ideas about aging and old age. One way to breakdown ageist stereotypes is to challenge binary
categories of age or dissolve the edges, which Anne Davis Basting and other postmodern theorists do by demonstrating age’s
inherent performativity. However, Basting has also challenged postmodern discourses that, concerned not to understand time
as simply progressive and linear, dismiss the idea of ageing as the embodiment of time. In the face of this criticism, Basting
insists that there can still be a postmodern poetics of the ageing body that acknowledges its temporal component. She outlines
a provocative Model of the Body in Temporal Depth. As a doctoral student investigating performances of old age in
contemporary theatre, I have been exploring Basting’s model in relation to other productions and in this paper I offer an
analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear by Honest Fishmonger’s Coop in Vancouver, Canada.
“An Analysis of Canadian Mixed-Ability Theatre Companies Working with Individuals with
Intellectual Disability.” Ashley McAskill (Concordia University)
Currently there are very few theatre groups in Canada that work with individuals with intellectual disability for purely artistic
purposes. Theatre troupes/companies that work with individuals with intellectual disability struggle to gain recognition as a
theatre group, even among inclusive arts organizations and specifically within the Disability Arts movement (a term used to
describe the work of artists with disabilities in Canada). Needless to say, although the work of current mixed ability groups is
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