[Candrama] CATR 2023 Call for Participants: Historiographing Hannah: A Critical Scrapbook Dedicated to Hannah Moscovitch

[Michelle Macarthur]

Call for Roundtable Participants:
Historiographing Hannah: A Critical Scrapbook Dedicated to Hannah Moscovitch

Convenors:
Sasha Kovacs, University of Victoria
Michelle MacArthur, University of Windsor

“Scrapbooks are archives in and of their own right, whose flexibility invites anyone to engage in archiving [...]”
–Cherish Watton, “Suffrage Scrapbooks and Emotional Histories of Women’s Activism,” pp. 1029

One of Canada’s most prolific and celebrated contemporary playwrights, Hannah Moscovitch has seen her work produced domestically and internationally, on stage, screen, and radio, for nearly two decades. Moscovitch’s plays have been distinguished with high honours including the Governor General’s Award for English-language Drama and Yale University’s Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize. Critics have bestowed her with titles such as “our most competent playwright, and I don’t mean that as faint praise” (Cushman), “a heavy hitter in Canadian theatre” (Murphy), and “one of contemporary theatre's greatest writers of character” (Barker 424). And yet, scholarship within Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies has not kept up with Moscovitch’s abundant and acclaimed output, leaving scant critical discourse on her work (Barker, Demers, Jones, Zatzman).

As CATR 2023 gathers on Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the L’nu (Mi’kmaq) people, now also known as Halifax and Moscovitch’s adopted hometown, this roundtable invites participants to present short reflections on her body of work in order to seed further scholarship on one of Canada’s most-produced playwrights. Its overarching goal is to generate contributions to and interest in a forthcoming critical collection on Moscovitch’s plays edited by session co-conveners Sasha Kovacs and Michelle MacArthur.

Participants are invited to respond to some artifact, broadly conceived, of Moscovitch’s work as inspiration and anchor for their contribution–whether a specific scene, design rendering, song, program, photo, review, etc. These artifacts will be gathered and circulated in the lead-up to the roundtable, laying the foundation for a “critical scrapbook” that will also inform the structure of the edited collection in development. Understanding archiving as a site where “knowledge production begins” (Eicchorn 3) and scrapbooking as a “type of feminist archiving” (Watton 1030) that incorporates affective and creative materials and emphasizes collective knowledge-making, our approach uses the scrapbook as a method of feminist theatre historiography.

Participants will be invited to write a short, 10-minute paper that uses their artifact to illuminate some aspect of Moscovitch’s work. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  *   representations of war
  *   representations of Jewish history and culture
  *   representations of motherhood
  *   representations of sexuality
  *   performing history
  *   performing auto/biography
  *   feminisms in/feminist readings of Moscovitch’s work
  *   common dramaturgical approaches (e.g. direct address, music)
  *   international production and reception of Moscovitch’s work
  *
artistic partnerships and collaborators (e.g. Maeve Beaty, Sarah Stanley)


The roundtable will take place during the in-person conference scheduled for June 15-17, 2023 at Dalhousie University and may include some (minor) advance preparation. Submissions from scholars and artists across career stages are welcome.

Please send a 250-word proposal describing your contribution to the roundtable, including your chosen artifact, and a brief bio to alexandrakovacs at uvic.ca by Friday, April 14th.

Works Cited:
Barker, Roberta. “SONGS OF THE EXILES.” Dalhousie Review, vol. 99, no. 3, 2019, pp. 421+.
Cushman, Robert. “The Family Way; Hannah Moscovitch, Our Most Competent Playwright, Does Domestic Realism.” National Post (Toronto), 2013.
Demers, Patricia. Women’s Writing in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2019.
Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Temple University Press, 2013.
Jones, Matt. “After Kandahar: Canadian Theatre’s Engagement with the War in Afghanistan.” Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 157, Jan. 2014, pp. 26–29. DOI.org
      (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.157.006.
Murphy, Aisling. “From Toronto Stages to the ‘Interview with the Vampire’ Writers’ Room, Playwright Hannah Moscovitch Is Having a Moment.”
      The Toronto Star (Online), 2022.
Watton, Cherish. “Suffrage Scrapbooks and Emotional Histories of Women’s Activism.” Women’s History Review, vol. 31, no. 6, Sept. 2022, pp. 1028–46. DOI.org
      (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2021.2012343.
Zatzman, Belarie. “Difficult Knowledge in Theatre for Young Audiences: Remembering and Representing the Holocaust.” Theatre and Learning, edited by Art Babayants
      and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 23–49.


Michelle MacArthur, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Dramatic Art
University of Windsor
michelle.macarthur at uwindsor.ca
pronouns: she/her

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