CFP: Investigating Urban Social Life through Performance

[Barry Freeman]

*Call for Seminar Participants - Canadian Association for Theatre 
Research (CATR) conference, Fredericton, NB May 28-31, 2011

Seminar: Investigating Urban Social Life through Performance
Organizer: Barry Freeman, University of Toronto Scarborough
Deadline: January 15, 2011
*
The 2006 CATR conference took "Performing the City" as its theme, and 
the federal census of the same year revealed that 80% of Canadians live 
in cities. Since then, scholars in our association have been looking at 
the city from many angles as a special ideological and material context 
for performance. This seminar will contribute to this ongoing 
conversation by examining the use of performance as a lens, method, and 
mode of representation in research into urban social life. This may be 
academic research that uses performance as one investigative tool among 
others, or it may be forms of theatrical creation that involve directly 
investigating the social lives of urban subjects.

In /Theatre & the City/, Jen Harvie notes an ambivalence in this field 
of study between a materialist view that sees urban life as strictly 
conditioned by capitalist forces, and a "willful optimism" that sees 
challenges to such hegemony as expressions of individual agency (67-68). 
The seminar will explore this ambivalence in a range of scholarly and 
artistic investigations of urban social life. By juxtaposing projects 
with different contexts, agendas and audiences, it is hoped that the 
conversation will expose some well-worn assumptions in the field, such 
as a tendency to regard interventions in urban social life as 
permanently transformative. We hope to discuss projects that frame 
themselves as, or borrow the techniques of, applied theatre, 
drama-in-education, protest theatre, verbatim theatre, or theatre for 
development. Questions we may address include:

.    What insights do the techniques used yield into urban social life, 
and what were their practical and ethical limitations?
.    How is theatre and performance being used to support rather than 
conflict with other qualitative or quantitative methods of urban social 
research?
.    What strategies does the work employ for translating brief 
interruptions into sustainable change?
How are the results of the investigation represented, and what role does 
aesthetics play?

The seminar will be limited to 10 members. Participants will be asked to 
circulate their 2500-3000 word papers to the group by May 9. In the 
3-hour session, each participant will be responsible for a 5-minute 
response to one of the other papers, which will be followed by a 
discussion focusing on a small set of issues emergent from the responses.

Interested participants are asked to submit a 250-word abstract and 
short bio to Barry Freeman at barry.freeman at utoronto.ca by January 15, 2011.

Best,
Barry.

-- 
Barry Freeman, PhD
Assistant Professor ~ Theatre and Performance Studies
University of Toronto Scarborough ~ 1265 Military Tr. Toronto, ON M1C 1A4
Graduate Centre for Study of Drama ~ 214 College St. 3rd Floor Toronto, 
ON M5T 2Z9
Email: barry.freeman at utoronto.ca

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