Day 2 - Département de danse - UQAM

therapeutic in different ways, they share the primary aim of giving individuals with disability an opportunity to participate in the
arts outside of a purely therapeutic context. Through a series of interviews with artistic directors and participants of mixedability
theatre companies comprised of members with/without intellectual disability, this paper will explore the challenges these
companies are faced with when defining themselves as artists.
12:15-1:00pm
Buffet Lunch (provided)
Phoenix Theatre
1:00-4:00pm
a) Upsurges of the Real (Part 2) George
Seminar Organizer: Jenn Stephenson (Queen’s University). Participants: Catherine Graham (McMaster
University), Isabel Stowell-Kaplan (University of Toronto), Kimberly Richards (University of Calgary),
Johanna Lawrie (University of Toronto), Donia Mounsef (University of Alberta), Matt Jones (University
of Toronto), Jordana Cox (Northwestern University), Emily St-Aubin (University of Alberta), LJ Nelles
(York University), Kelsey Jacobson (Queen’s University), Nicole Edge (University of Calgary), Diana
Manole (Trent University).
As David Shields notes in his manifesto Reality Hunger, “every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to
figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art” (3). In the last decade or so, artists in
varying disciplines have responded to this perennial challenge of presenting reality by including larger and larger chunks of
actual “real” stuff into their works. Theatre, however, constitutes a special case, because any staging of “real” elements is
complicated by the core operation of the theatrical frame, which is to take a real thing (an actor) and turn it into a fictional thing
(Hamlet). This essential fictionalizing property of theatre presents significant challenges to the representation and perception
of real objects as “real.”
This seminar “Upsurges of the Real part 2” aims to parse out the complex and sometimes ambiguous relationships of
“reality” and fiction in what we might term reality-based or “documentary” theatre. From the analysis of the ontological status of
these elements, it will be possible to connect various strategies for representing the “real” to the invariably overt politically or
socially-activist intentions of these documentary works. Picking up from the fruitful work done by the participants in last year’s
“Upsurges of the Real” seminar, the aim of this sequel is to extend our previous work but also to refine the focus of the group
specifically toward the staging of actual material in performance. This version of the seminar has two specific objectives: 1) to
bring together scholarly work in a variety of reality-based performance genres (site-specific, documentary, verbatim,
autobiography) so that their strategies for managing the real can be compared 2) to begin collectively to develop a poetics of
reality-based performance.
b) Dancing at the Edge: Moving (in the) West McIntyre
Seminar Organizers: Alana Gerecke (Simon Fraser University) and Peter Dickinson (Simon Fraser
University). Participants: Sima Belmar (UC Berkeley), David Garfinkle (MacEwan University), Alana
Gereke (Simon Fraser University), Jia Wu (St. Mary’s College).
Part historical recovery project, and part demonstration of the liveliness of and continuities between contemporary Pacific Rim
movement practices, practitioners, and festivals, the subject of this proposed seminar is dance in British Columbia, and along
and beyond the west coast of North America more generally. Taking as our point of departure both the material site of this
year’s CATR Conference, and the overall Congress theme, we are seeking to initiate a dialogue on the places of dance’s
performance, as well as on dance’s performances of place. In the same way that the recent Pacific Standard Time exhibitions
in LA and Southern California forced a radical reconceptualization of the accepted east coast/trans-Atlantic narrative of
modern art (including performance art) in North America, we are suggesting that a focus on dance- making and presentation
on the west coast will generate similarly fresh perspectives on the continental and oceanic “drift” of modern and postmodern
dance, whose New York and Toronto epicenters have long been taken as hemispheric givens. Additionally, in soliciting papers
addressing an array of forms, styles, histories, and regions—including important Aboriginal and Asian influences—we aim to
demonstrate the diversity and complexity of west coast movement practices and audiences, challenging presumptions both
about their “newness” and their “isolation.” While emanating from our own individual research interests, this seminar is timely
for a number of additional reasons specific to the local dance and performance scene in BC’s Lower Mainland: Vancouver’s
Dancing on the Edge Festival, the oldest such festival in Canada, will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2013; the
Scotiabank Dance Centre, a flagship facility and resource centre for the dance profession and the public in BC, recently
celebrated its own 10th anniversary; and a resurgent Ballet BC, together with other internationally recognized companies and
choreographers (e.g. Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot), and a lively traffic between dance and theatre artists compositionally and
dramaturgically, suggests that creative movement of all sorts is thriving in the region, even in the face of continued funding
woes and critical neglect from the rest of Canada. Finally, as scholars who work between theatre and dance, we hope to use
this seminar as a way to encourage increased participation and exchange between dance scholars and practitioners in CATR.
40