Program (2011-2012)
Theatre in the City
- September 22: Theatre and the City: Early Modern London in Reality and on the Stage
Jean Howard
George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
Jean Howard
George Delacorte Professor in
the Humanities, Columbia UniversityTheatre and the City: Early Modern London in Reality and on the Stage
Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches Renaissance Literature, Feminist Studies, and Literary Theory. Her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin; and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (2007). The latter recently won the Barnard Hewitt Prize for the outstanding book of theater history for 2008. In addition, Professor Howard is one of the co-editors of The Norton Shakespeare and has edited seven collections of essays. The recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, and Huntington, Folger, and Newberry Library Fellowships, she has also been President of the Shakespeare Association of America and an active member of many committees of the Modern Language Association. As an administrator, Howard has served as a Trustee of Brown University, has chaired Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, served as Columbia’s first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, and has just completed a term as Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is working on two books: a study of the plays of the contemporary feminist dramatist, Caryl Churchill, and a book on Renaissance tragedy.
Abstract
Between 1550 and 1600 London grew from a city of 50,000 to one of 200,000 residents. This demographic surge was accompanied by changes in many other aspects of the city’s life from an increase in pollution to growth in international trade to a spike in certain kinds of criminality. In cultural terms, one of the biggest changes was the establishment of purpose-built playhouses in the city and in its suburbs, playhouses in which a vibrant drama quickly took shape. In this lecture I explore the various ways that the theatre responded to the city of which it was a part, sometimes by setting plays in an imaginary London and sometimes by creating dramatic fictions that more indirectly spoke to the social issues posed by rapid urbanization and the acceleration of commercial activity within what was quickly becoming a bustling metropolis.
Thursday September 22, 7:30 PM
Legacy Art Gallery ~ 630 Yates Street, Victoria
Free Public Event - October 27: The Monument from Kigali to Toronto: Performing Genocide Across Urban Space and Time
Kim Solga
Associate Professor, English, University of Western Ontario
Kim Solga
Associate Professor, English,
University of Western OntarioThe Monument from Kigali to Toronto: Performing Genocide Across Urban Space and Time
Kim Solga is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. She is the co-editor of Performance and the City (Palgrave, 2009) and Performance and the Global City (Palgrave, 2012), and the author of Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts. Her publications on feminist theory, contemporary and early modern performance, and urban performance have appeared in Theatre Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, Modern Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review, among other venues. She is the guest editor of the summer 2011 issue of Canadian Theatre Review, titled The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy. With Roberta Barker, she is now preparing two joint volumes under the title New Canadian Realisms for Playwrights Canada Press.
Abstract
In 2008, Toronto-based director Jennifer H. Capraru produced Colleen Wagner's Governor General's Award-winning play, The Monument, in Kigali. Capraru and her team then took the show on the road across Rwanda, hoping the play might participate in the post-genocide discussion and reconciliation process underway in the nation at large. Working on a shoestring and with very inexperienced actors, Capraru created a show designed to be played in any space under any conditions—including without electricity. Work on this piece led to the founding of Capraru's theatre-based NGO, Theatre ISÔKO, which has since produced Wajdi Mouawad’s Littoral in Kigali and continues to be active in Rwanda today. Then, in 2010, Theatre ISÔKO agreed to bring its Kinyarwanda-language production of The Monument to Toronto for the WorldStage festival at the Harbourfront Centre, one of Toronto's premier international performance sites. The company did four shows in the small Brigantine Room venue at the end of April, 2011.
This paper, which is a version of work I have created and will present with Capraru at this year's American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference in Montreal, will explore the politics of transitioning a play like Monument from a post-genocide East African city to a Canadian urban context. It will ask: what kinds of meaning could this show make—and what kinds of meaning could it no longer make—in its transfer from the “emerging” city of Kigali, fighting hard to project an image of itself as a safe, clean, modern, progressive place, to the city of Toronto, a place arguably already all of these things, but still fighting hard to fashion itself as a “global” urban player?
Thursday October 27, 7:30 PM
Legacy Art Gallery ~ 630 Yates Street, Victoria
Free Public Event - November 24: Community Art and the City: A European View
Eugène van Erven
Senior Lecturer, Theatre, Utrecht University
Eugène van Erven
Senior Lecturer, Theatre,
Utrecht UniversityCommunity Art and the City: A European View
Eugène van Erven (1955) is a scholar and community arts producer from The Netherlands. He is artistic director of the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam and community arts curator for the Treaty of Utrecht cultural program in 2013. He is also Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University and the author of a number of standard works on art and social engagement, including Radical People’s Theatre (Indiana University Press 1988), The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia (Indiana 1992) and the book and video package Community Theatre: Global Perspectives (Routledge 2001). He serves on the editorial board and is an active peer reviewer for RiDE: the Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance (Routledge).
Abstract
Some say that community art is the grandmother of all art. The Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner, for one, suggested that human beings, through art that they themselves create, interpret past and present life and try out new ways of being for the future. It is one compelling reason why everyone should have access to the arts, so that they people can create their own images and tell their own stories, rather than having them represented – inevitably imperfectly - by others (autonomous artists, journalists, populist politicians). Once you know someone’s story it is much harder to hurt them, claims Scott Rankin from Big hART in Australia, one of the world’s most ambitious community arts organizations. His company made a huge impact at the recent International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam, which I directed. That festival attracted many key players from around Europe. Today in our continent, community arts, with roots in the 1960s, is now beginning to spread from its traditionally strong and predominantly urban base in the U.K. and the low lands into new territories in the former east bloc and the south.
Amply illustrated with audiovisual material, this talk will first explore some of the origins and principles of community art as it has developed around the world, before focusing on its current practices and dilemmas in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. What is the elusive power of community art? Are we perhaps frontloading the practice with too many unrealistic social and political expectations at the expense of art? Given the diversity of practices and emphases within the community arts continuum even within one single country, let alone when considered across national boundaries, these questions are not easy to answer. Even between The Netherlands and Flanders substantial differences exist when it comes to community arts. The dialogue across language barriers within Belgium, even among like-minded community arts practitioners, is pretty much mute. Yet, given its fundamental commitment to establishing sustainable, equitable relationships between artists and non-artists, community arts may still be better suited than any other art form for fostering fruitful dialogues across social, cultural, and national boundaries. It uncovers local stories and knowledge on people’s own terms, it provides opportunities for marginalized groups to perform beyond stigmas that others place upon them, it injects creativity and a vibrant cultural life in under-resourced parts of the city and rural areas, it counteracts prejudice and xenophobia, and, in the best of cases, enriches a nation’s cultural canon with innovative art from the bottom up. How it does all this – through theatre, visual arts, dance, and music - I hope to demonstrate with a few fascinating examples from the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, England, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
Thursday November 24, 7:30 PM
Legacy Art Gallery ~ 630 Yates Street, Victoria
Free Public Event
Cities, Governance, and the Politics of Urbanism
- January 19: Governing the City Without: The Challenge of Global Suburbanism
Roger Keil
Professor and Director, The City Institute at York University
Roger Keil
Professor and Director, The City Institute at York UniversityGoverning the City Without: The Challenge of Global Suburbanism
Abstract
As Bob Beauregard has observed, the rise of the suburb has historically been the reason for the emergence of metropolitan governance regimes. At the beginning, what was regulated through metropolitan governance was the growth of the urban region and the balance of wealth and taxation that came with it. Socially, the metropolitan form of governance allowed for — at least theoretically — a modest politics of redistribution across regional space. Three things changed in recent years in Canada: 1. Suburbanization has become more diverse. No longer do the outskirts become more homogeneous and wealthier, they are more diverse in all respects; 2. The neoliberalization and "splintering" (Graham and Marvin) of suburban development has led to a reorientation of metropolitan politics; and 3. The political equation of regionalization and redistribution has been severed as aggressive suburban regimes have come to power regionally or even federally in Canada to use their political base to fundamentally shift the meaning of metropolitan politics. This paper will examine the latest push for suburban politics to be recognized as central in metropolitan politics. It will demonstrate that the diversification of suburban identities has dramatically expanded the range of politics in the suburbs themselves and in the metropolitan region.
Thursday January 19, 7:30 PM
Legacy Art Gallery ~ 630 Yates Street, Victoria
Free Public Event - February 23: How the earth became a collection of land uses: urban planning and law in historical perspective
Mariana Valverde
Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto
Mariana Valverde
Professor of Criminology,
University of TorontoHow the earth became a collection of land uses: urban planning and law in historical perspective
Abstract
Today, planners, local politicians, and civic activists discuss urban design and planning issues using 'land use' as the basic unit of spatial analysis. The historical shift by which we came to think about urban space as a set of land uses is not well understood, however. The lecture will demonstrate that while land-use thinking was to some extent a replacement for the older local-law machinery of 'nuisance', nuisance logics and land-use planning logics coexist to this day, in a dialectical relationship.
Thursday February 23, 7:30 PM
Legacy Art Gallery ~ 630 Yates Street, Victoria
Free Public Event - March 15: Seeing Like a City
Warren Magnusson
Professor of Political Science, University of VictoriaWarren MagnussonThursday March 15, 7:30 PM
Legacy Art Gallery ~ 630 Yates Street, Victoria
Free Public Event
