Distance, Disruption, and De-hierarchization: Negotiating Care in the Virtual Space of Zoom Theatre

Michelle MacArthur, Kim McLeod, Scott Mealey

The Stream You Step In (TSYSI) was a research creation project consisting of four plays commissioned for Zoom and co-produced by Outside the March (OtM), one of Canada’s leading immersive theatre companies, and the University of Windsor in 2020. Conceived as an act of care, TSYSI aimed to provide an antidote to the disappointment experienced by the creative team, students, and audiences when theatre seasons were canceled due to the pandemic. Our presentation draws inspiration from Fisher’s definition of “performance as a mode of care that emerges somewhere in-between art and social practice” to examine participants’ complicated negotiations of physical, virtual and emotional spaces in the creation and reception of the performance event. 

Building on the concept of intermedial intimacy, we begin by considering how performing via Zoom challenged expectations of the separation of art and life in BFA acting training. The use of performers’ homes as stage meant performers “expos[ed] aspects of their behavior and personality that they normally keep private” (Scott and Barton 72). This intimacy de-hierarchized the online creative process as the performers held unique knowledge about the physical environment. This de-hierarchization spilled over to the rest of the production team, creating space for care that redrew the boundaries of BFA training. The socio-political context of the commissioned plays further disrupted boundaries, those separating fiction and reality. Playwrights explored issues stemming from global anti-racist activism unfolding in real time during the creation process. This necessitated modes of dramaturgical care to mitigate potential harm. Finally, the medium of Zoom redrew the boundaries between artist and audience. By eliminating demands associated with public audiencing, Zoom addressed some of what Sedgman argues makes in-person theatre feel “inaccessible or uncomfortable” (167). Our presentation explores the possibilities and limits of care within Zoom as a space of live performance and pedagogy and argues that this space offers new, altered modes of caring that can be applied in other performance contexts. 

Works Cited

Fisher, Amanda Stuart. “Introduction: Caring Performance, Performing Care.” Performing Care, Manchester University Press, 2020, pp. 1–18. www.manchesteropenhive.com, https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526146816/9781526146816.00007.xml.

Scott, Joanne, and Bruce Barton. “The Performer in Intermedial Theatre.” Intermedial Theatre: Principles and Practice, edited by Mark Crossley, Macmillan Education, 2019, pp. 62–89.

Sedgman, Kirsty. “Ladies and Gentlemen Follow Me, Please Put on Your Beards: Risk, Rules, and Audience Reception in National Theatre Wales.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 27, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 158–76. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2017.1300153.

Bios

Michelle MacArthur is Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor’s School of Dramatic Art. Her research focuses on theatre criticism, feminist theatre, and contemporary Canadian theatre, and appears in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (forthcoming), Canadian Theatre Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, and several edited collections. Her edited collection Voices of a Generation: Three Millennial Plays was published in 2022 by Playwrights Canada Press. She was associate creative curator of the Zoom anthology The Stream You Step In and principal investigator of a study of its creative process and reception, funded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. 

Kimberley McLeod is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her research on political performance and participatory media has appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, Critical Stages, Digital Performance in Canada, Performance Matters and Theatre Research in Canada. She is co-editor of the Views & Reviews section of Canadian Theatre Review. Kim is also a performer, deviser, director and dramaturg whose work has been seen in Canada, Ukraine, Belgium and the UK. She recently directed The Haven Project, a fiction podcast on food security created in collaboration with the Arrell Food Institute.

Scott Mealey recently completed his PhD at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies (University of Toronto) and currently serves as a mixed methods researcher and audience consultant at the University of Toronto, University of Windsor, and Brock University. His current and upcoming articles, which explore sense-making and engagement in theatrical contexts, appear in Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. He specializes in audience studies and is a founding co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research, with whom he co-edited a special audience issue of Performance Matters.

 

In Conversation with Jalani Morgan

Jaclyn Meloche and Jalani Morgan

Toronto-based artist Jalani Morgan loves baseball. Although he played the sport as a youth, it is his experiences as a fan and photographer on the field that, today inform how he frames the game. Like Morgan, I too am a baseball fan, and it is his photograph Untitled (2021) of a black woman gripping a baseball before throwing the first pitch at a Toronto Blue Jays game that has inspired my current research on the visual culture of the sport. Inspired by our shared desire to challenge the ways in which the culture of baseball continues to falsely represent the body, Morgan and I want will consider the following questions in a staged conversation: What does baseball represent? How has baseball’s history shaped players’ bodies on and off the field? Moreover, how do the images and objects that embody baseball culture, today instigate new conversations about gender and race?

Keynote Conversation with Peggy Phelan

Renowned Theatre & Performance Studies Scholar Dr. Peggy Phelan will be discussing Sarah Cameron Sunde's 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea. Participants will be provided with a short essay and weblink when they RSVP, which they are asked to review before the session.

Bio

Peggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English at Stanford University. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She edited and contributed to Live Art in Los Angeles, (Routledge, 2012), and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. Phelan is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). She contributed an essay to Philip Ursprung’s Herzog and De Meurron: Natural History (CAA, 2005).

She has written more than sixty articles and essays in scholarly, artistic, and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. She has written about Samuel Beckett for the PMLA and for The National Gallery of Ireland. She has also written about Robert Frost, Michael and Paris Jackson, Olran, Marina Abramovic, Dziga Vertov and a wide range of artists working in photography, dance, architecture, film, video, music, and poetry.  She has edited special issues of the journals Narrative and Women and Performance. She has been a fellow of the Humanities Institute, University of California, Irvine; and a fellow of the Humanities Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, one of three quarterly publications of the College Art Association, and as Chair of the board. She has been President and Treasurer of Performance Studies International, the primary professional organization in her field. She has been a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and the Stanford Humanities Center. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. She chaired the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and the Drama Department at Stanford University.

Ghost Artist Screening and Panel Discussion

Johanna Frank, Nick Hector, Brent Lee, Steven Palmer, and Miriam Wright

Ghost Artist (Steven Palmer & Edward Riche, 2019, 66 mins.) 

A maverick artist is rediscovered in Paris when his taboo-busting 1967 film resurfaces in the art world.  Robert Cordier’s movie about medicine and the body made 20,000 faint at the Montreal world’s fair. Ghost Artist unmasks it as an avant-garde work for the masses inspired by collaborations with legendary artists like James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet and Salvador Dalí. Ghost Artist is in the same documentary family as Searching for Sugarman and Finding Vivien Maier. 

Bios

Johanna Frank is a scholar of drama, performance studies, and U.S. literature. Her areas of specialty include feminist, gender, and ethnic studies. She has earned awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Society for Theatre Research, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. She has edited a special issue of Modern Drama on the topic of African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, published a critical edition of Kennedy’s Diary of Lights with song lyrics by Sandy Chapin, and written on topics such as Gertrude Stein, avant-garde theatre, feminism, and performance art. Currently, she is working on a monograph, Geographies of Performance, which explores the link between epistolaries, the language of performance, and the idea of audience in the era of late-Modernism.

Nick Hector CCE has edited or produced more than 150 documentary films and programs across North & Central America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Nick began his career in teleision journalism and soon specialized in long-form documentary, particularly cinéma-vérité. His creative work explores the possibilities of constructed narrative in observational Direct Cinema. Nick's work has been screened at most major international festivals has been nominated for 29 major film awards and been the winner of ten.

Brent Lee is a composer, media artist, and musician whose work explores the relationships between sound, image, and technology, especially through multimedia performance. He has created more than one hundred works, ranging from orchestral music to interactive media pieces to film soundtracks. In addition to performances and broadcasts in many countries, several of his works have been commercially recorded. He is a co-founder of the Noiseborder Ensemble and has been awarded significant funding for research/creation through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council.

Steven Palmer is a historian of Latin America, and of medicine and public health at the University of Windsor. From 2006-16 he was Canada Research Chair in the History of International Health. His creative work includes The Great Eastern, a dramatic comedy that ran on the CBC Radio network from 1994-99 (reprised in 2004 as Sunny Days and Nights), a play, Uncivil Servants, which was staged at the LSPU Hall and toured Newfoundland Arts and Culture Centres in 1998-99, and The Metropolitan, a play that had a staged reading by the School of Dramatic Arts in 2011.

Miriam Wright is an expert on modern Canadian social history. She was the co-director of the public history project, Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred ‘Boomer’ Harding and the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, 1932-1939.  This website includes newspaper articles, photographs, and original oral histories on the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, a Black baseball team from Chatham, Ontario, also the subject including of her forthcoming monograph. From 2009-12 she was involved with a public history project on the Chinese Head Tax in Newfoundland, which included a monument in downtown St. John’s, and a photographic exhibit at Memorial University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aesthetic Frameworks and Research-creation Methodology

Brent Lee

Theoretical frameworks play a prominent role in research design, providing a set of related theories and concepts that shape the interpretation of the data gathered through the research. A potential parallel exists in artistic practice, where theories and concepts might be applied to artistic gestures as they are planned, created, and reflected upon. Further, artists also make recourse to ideas relating to aesthetic issues such as genre and style, convention and innovation, audience and venue: an aesthetic framework. This paper explores these parallels in the context of research-creation, or more specifically, inquiry-driven artistic practice.

Bio

Brent Lee is a composer, media artist, and musician whose work explores the relationships between sound, image, and technology, especially through multimedia performance. He has created works in a variety of media, ranging from orchestral music to interactive multimedia pieces to film soundtracks. He is a co-founder of the Noiseborder Ensemble and the Electric Improv Lab, and is a Professor of Integrated Media in the School of the Creative Arts at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

Subatomic Time*: Challenges in Documenting the Ephemeral

Kim Nelson and Sigi Torinus

This presentation will look at challenges associated with documenting ephemeral creative works in response to a reading of Peggy Phelan’s position on ephemeral presence as an undocumentable event. Considering our current mediatized context however, the idea of irreproducibility calls for a rethinking to accommodate documentation processes and to reimagine the failure of the documentary object as dynamic and productive.

Keywords: Documentation. Performance. Presence. Ephemeral.

*Subatomic Time is a percussion-based investigation of sensorial temporality, where sounds trigger programmed software cues effecting digital algorithms and live video patterns. The piece was created by Brent Lee, Sigi Torinus, and Nick Papador. Filmmaker Kim Nelson documented a performance of Subatomic Time and created two pieces about the work, one a documentary of the performance, performers and process, and the other an edited filmic performance presented at this year’s Propeller Symposium.