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<div class="moz-text-html" lang="x-western"> <b>Call for Seminar
Participants - Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR)
conference, Fredericton, NB May 28-31, 2011<br>
<br>
Seminar: Investigating Urban Social Life through Performance <br>
Organizer: Barry Freeman, University of Toronto Scarborough<br>
Deadline: January 15, 2011<br>
</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
In <i>Theatre & the City</i>, 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:<br>
<br>
• What insights do the techniques used yield into urban social
life, and what were their practical and ethical limitations?<br>
• How is theatre and performance being used to support rather
than conflict with other qualitative or quantitative methods of
urban social research?<br>
• What strategies does the work employ for translating brief
interruptions into sustainable change? <br>
How are the results of the investigation represented, and what
role does aesthetics play?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Interested participants are asked to submit a 250-word abstract
and short bio to Barry Freeman at <a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:barry.freeman@utoronto.ca">barry.freeman@utoronto.ca</a>
by January 15, 2011.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Barry.<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Barry Freeman, PhD<br>
Assistant Professor ~ Theatre and Performance Studies<br>
University of Toronto Scarborough ~ 1265 Military Tr. Toronto, ON
M1C 1A4<br>
Graduate Centre for Study of Drama ~ 214 College St. 3rd Floor
Toronto, ON M5T 2Z9<br>
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:barry.freeman@utoronto.ca">barry.freeman@utoronto.ca</a>
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