{"title":"The Theatre of the Oppressed in Tehran: Dilemma of Ethics and Engagement","authors":"Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar","doi":"10.3138/ctr.192.005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.192.005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) of Tehran, established in 2008, has been one of the few groups ardently practising applied theatre despite all the ideological and governmental limitations. This essay focuses on the TO of Tehran's community projects through the lens of ethics and engagement. The nature of TO-Teh's social engagement in the context of Iran is new, yet conservative; innovative, yet cautious. This brings out the question of the ethics of community theatre:How are ethics reinterpreted and morphed in a particular social condition in which the practitioner does not feel free enough to excavate the issue at hand? Applied theatre in communities underwritten with interiorized censorship and control finds a dual function; on the one hand, the bestowed freedom serves to boost social engagement; on the other hand, this engagement is filtered by dominant social norms and decrees.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41927025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"How Could We Not Go to Mosul?\": Empathy, Anagnorisis, and the Politics of Recognition in Orestes in Mosul","authors":"Theodoros Ioannou","doi":"10.3138/ctr.192.012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.192.012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses Milo Rau's and the Ghent Ensemble's recent performance Orestes in Mosul (2019–2020) and the significance of representing ongoing conflict onstage. This article examines the ways in which the politics of recognition, a term coined by Charles Taylor and explored by many scholars after him, has given a renewed relevance to anagnorisis, a term coined by Aristotle and understood as a technical function of classical tragedy. Anagnorisis can be used as a means of accessing empathetic capacities that can in turn create an ethical framework for the reassessment of marginalized identities. In this way, anagnorisis ceases to be the realization of an erroneous action and becomes the protestation of an injustice and the structures of oppression that maintain and perpetuate it. Finally, this article addresses the controversy surrounding Milo Rau and Orestes in Mosul and concludes that at a time of major humanitarian crises, socially and politically engaged theatre can mean the difference between passively observing the practice of exploitation and actively practising solidarity.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44080613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relational Perspectives on Change: The Theory, Stories, and Practice of Postmarginality","authors":"Lisa Ndejuru, A. Babayants, Peter Farbridge","doi":"10.3138/ctr.192.010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.192.010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Postmarginal Edmonton explored the intersections of political multilogues among various theatre communities (Indigenous, Black, racialized, d/Deaf, LGBTQ2S+, Disabled, and neurodiverse). The retreats use an experiential learning pedagogy of storytelling, discussion, and physical practice to tease out perspectives of créolisation that can respond to the paradoxes and pitfalls of contemporary identity politics without removing the awareness of uneven power relationships of coloniality. Underpinning this poetical-philosophical perspective is an approach of generative communication that is inspired by and extends the concept of 'ethical relationality.'After this theoretical framing, Dr. Ndejuru reflects on the qualities the organizers seek, look for, or feel are important in the creation of the retreat. What guides the choices we make as we prepare the conditions for postmarginal work? How do we value the process that then takes place? In our discussion, we pay particular attention to the retreat's use of storytelling and embodied workshops. The storytellers, the participants, and the lenses are all carefully considered, chosen, or vetted in relation to the question guiding our event.Dr. Babayants rounds up our offering with a report on and responses to Le besoin d'être mal-armé: Multilingual Dramaturgy, a workshop on the possibilities of stage multilingualism and multilingual dramaturgy. The workshop invites participants to explore working in languages they speak fluently, languages they are learning, and those they have never had any exposure to. It also challenges the notions of mandatory translation into official languages, that is, the languages of power. The participants are invited to consider how practising multilingualism during collective creation can lead to new dramaturgical forms as well as to queering dominant monolingual frameworks that tend to prioritize colonizer languages.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42065680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Critical Community-Engaged Scholarship: An Antidote to the Representation and Interpretation of Young People's Experiences in Socially Engaged Theatre?","authors":"Jemma Llewellyn","doi":"10.3138/ctr.192.006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.192.006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Today's youth bear witness to growing economic disparities, class inequalities, migrant otherings, and prejudicial thinking. Now more than ever, young people across Canada are asking adults in positions of power to become allies and start creating more spaces for their voices to be heard. Often learning beyond the classroom from their peers, through multimodal ways, young people have transhistorically exemplified creative demonstrations of resilience, solidarity, and tenacity, both online and in the streets.Within the research, practice, and scholarship of applied theatre, children and young people make up a large proportion of the documented case studies that are interpreted and represented through an adult lens. This in turn poses important ethical questions about engagement and representation strategies of their lives, particularly when a large proportion of the work is written from a Western perspective. This article first navigates a personal perspective on ethics in socially engaged theatre. I then reflect on key principles of intersecting practices in radical youth pedagogies and critical community-engaged research that will inform my practice for future ethical engagements with youths in socially engaged theatre.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47009986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Built of Earth: The Casona and Vernacular Earthen Architecture in Oaxaca, Mexico","authors":"Zoë Heyn-Jones","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses Built of Earth, an artistic research project by the author in collaboration with Mexico City-based architect Octavio Castro Gallardo. The work-in-progress—an experimental documentary project consisting of a short film, a publication, and a site-specific installation—explores the restoration of Castro Gallardo’s 200-year-old adobe family home in the town of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico, that was damaged by an earthquake that shook the Pacific coast in February 2018. This article situates the restoration of the Casona within the discourses of vernacular earthen architecture and performance studies, describing how, in addition to being the site of various cultural performances, the Casona itself performs cultural memory. Heyn-Jones discusses the relationships—among humans, more-than-humans, and other actants—that permeate and haunt the adobe walls of this spectacular ruin. Heyn-Jones’s essay offers a provisional discussion of local seismic cultures, aspects of architectural material culture that reactively or preventively resist earthquake damage, and the way these manifest in the Casona. In contrast to the centuries-old adobe Casona are the concrete-block dwellings that surround it and that are ubiquitous across Mexico. This article situates this vernacular within the discourse of the ‘remittance house’ and discusses the materialities and temporalities of these ‘dream houses’ in the context of the Casona. Finally, this article offers some thoughts on architectural animism and how it might manifest in the Casona, this singular dwelling, built of earth.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43825602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When the Crow Caws: Performance and the Relational Politics of Hospitality in Hurmat Ain and Rabbya Naseer’s Art Practice","authors":"Laura Levin","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the complex meditation on domestic environments as relational spaces in Hurmat Ain and Rabbya Naseer’s solo and collaborative art practices. Often rooted in physical sites and material elements of domesticity—from live performances in bedrooms and kitchens to installations with textiles and food—their works orchestrate intimate situations where the meeting of performer and spectator doubles as an encounter between visitor and inhabitant, citizen and foreigner, guest and host. In doing so, the artists reveal how practices of hospitality—the everyday rituals through which ‘home’ is enacted and extended to others—serve to uphold cultural, patriarchal, and nationalist values, while simultaneously opening up space for their transformation.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41288108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tiny Houses, Treesits, and Housing on the Front Lines of the TMX Pipeline Resistance","authors":"K. Richards","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Housing is a strategic component of land defence on the front lines of resistance to extractive development across Turtle Island. This article highlights two resistance efforts along the proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMX) route to provide dynamic examples of housing “as a temporal, embodied, affective, and theatrical practice”: the Tiny House Warriors’ tiny houses and the Protect the Planet Stop TMX treesit. The construction and occupation of tiny houses and treehouses in the pathway of extractive development projects are “sustainable tools”—creative strategies and adaptable tactics that may be adapted and repeated on other front lines of resistance.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48767555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Verbatim Voices: An Investigation of Housing and Development in Kingston","authors":"Dylan Chenier","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Verbatim theatre is a sub-genre of the documentary theatre movement committed to authentic representations of ordinary people and events. As such, it has become a popular tool for Canadian theatre artists to examine contemporary political issues by presenting a plurality of perspectives on the same issue. Through the creation of an original verbatim play on housing in Kingston, I hope to test the effectiveness of verbatim in shaping people’s understanding of Kingston’s current housing crisis. By showcasing the perspectives of a diverse range of citizens, this play will consider the toll the housing crisis is taking on different people. This article examines the ways verbatim is especially well poised to represent Kingston’s housing crisis.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47036174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sounds of Rebellion: A Radionovela by and for Migrant Domestic Workers","authors":"M. Célleri","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When the world went into lockdown in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic sensitized people to how power dynamics and access to capital play a role in how we access housing and experience being at home. This article focuses on the creative ways that migrant domestic workers are negotiating their relationships with the houses in which they live and work in the context of economic, social, and physical vulnerability and deep-seated inequalities. It introduces the work of a Madrid-based migrant women’s collective of domestic workers, most of whom are migrant women from Latin America and the Caribbean, called Territorio Doméstico. The article focuses on their latest performance project, the radionovela Querían brazos y llegamos personas, an eight-episode audio soap opera released in November 2020 over SoundCloud and later adapted for a stage performance. Written and performed by domestic workers during COVID-19, Querían brazos y llegamos personas is an important cultural product that demonstrates the connections between home and power, home and migration, and home and gendered labour politics.","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48403581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On How to Live Well: Houses as Theatres of the Good Life in Mexico City","authors":"Sunita Nigam","doi":"10.3138/ctr.191.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.191.004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, the author explores the contours of housing as performance by examining a sampling of cases drawn from mid-twentieth-century Mexico City. In her analysis of the erection of modernist middle-class housing projects, suburbs, and architectural sculptures against the informal housing system that expanded throughout the national capital from the 1950s through the 1980s, the author reads housing as shifting performances of race, nation, citizenship, capitalist development, and class aspiration. Together, these readings reveal how houses are more than shelters; they are also theatrical practices that offer competing visions of ‘the good life.’","PeriodicalId":42646,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46007889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}