GOING PUBLIC WITH THE MONTREAL LIFE STORIES PROJECT: ORAL HISTORY AS RESEARCH CREATION
With DR. STEVEN HIGH
MONDAY, JANUARY 25 AT 2:30 PM VIA ZOOM
To view the recording of this event, click here.
PANDEMIC PERFORMANCES: CREATING LIVE THEATRE ON ZOOM
With DR. KIMBERLY MCLEOD & ELENA BELYEA
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 5-6 PM
Join us for a conversation about the creative process behind The Stream You Step In, a co-production between Outside the March and the University of Windsor that was performed live on Zoom in November. Panelists Dr. Kimberley McLeod (director), Elena Eli Belyea (playwright), and Dr. Brent Lee (composer) will chat with Dr. Michelle MacArthur (associate creative curator) about how methods of research creation can be adapted in a time of social distancing and Zoom fatigue.
Dr. Kimberley McLeod joined the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theatre Studies in 2016 and teaches courses in contemporary performance practices, including devising and approaches to digital performance. Her main area of research focuses on the intersection between political performance and participatory forms of media. Her current book project, Performing Digital: Publics, Politics and Participation (advance contract MQUP) uses performance theory and critical media studies to investigate how live performance and activism can work with new media tools to facilitate political engagement. An ongoing secondary area of interest for her is the role satire plays in contemporary political culture, particularly within Canada. She is also co-editor of the Views & Reviews section of Canadian Theatre Review and has edited issues of the journal on Gaming and Time’s Up.
Much of Dr. McLeod’s work employs research creation/performance-as-research methods. She is currently working on a performance as research project that addresses the predominance of female voices as digital assistants (e.g. Siri, Alexa) and how this relates to understandings of the openings and constraints for the female voice in performance. She was also recently the director of The Haven Project, a fiction podcast on food security created in collaboration with the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute.
Dr. McLeod is a co-investigator on a SSHRC-funded study of the creation and reception of theatre performed on Zoom during the pandemic, focusing on the Outside the March-University of Windsor co-production of The Stream You Step In. As part of this project, she directed the world premiere of Elena Eli Belyea’s The Jubilant.
Elena (or Eli) Belyea is a queer playwright, performer, producer, dramaturg, director, and arts educator. She is also the Artistic Director of Tiny Bear Jaws, an agile, femme-run cross-Canadian theatre company which produces innovative, provocative, entertaining, and interdisciplinary new works (co-run with designer, producer, theatre-maker, and long-time collaborator Tori Morrison).
They are interested in the storytelling possibilities exclusively possible in live performance, and endeavour to create work that is transgressive in both content and form. Her plays have been produced in cities across North America (including Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Quebec, and Wells) and received numerous awards. They have collaborated with a variety of theatre companies, including Buddies in Bad Times (Toronto), Downstage Theatre (Calgary), Théatre Prospero (Montreal), Swallow-A-Bicycle (Calgary), Nightwood Theatre (Toronto), One Yellow Rabbit Theatre (Calgary), Sunset Theatre (Wells), L’Unitheatre (Edmonton), Major Matt Mason Collective (Calgary), Nextfest (Edmonton), and the Tarragon Theatre (Toronto), where they were the recipient of their 2018-2019 RBC Emerging Playwright Award. Her work has been supported by the Banff Centre for the Arts, Caravan Theatre (Armstrong), and Playwrights Workshop Montreal. I was a member of Nightwood Theatre’s 2016-2017 Write From The Hip Playwriting Unit.
Elena is a graduate of the University of Alberta as well as the National Theatre School of Canada (Playwriting), and has mentored emerging writers and theatre makers for almost a decade through numerous arts organizations such as the University of Virginia’s Young Writers’ Workshop, The Citadel Theatre’s Foote Theatre School, and the University of Alberta’s New Works Festival to name a few.
RESEARCH-CREATION & COMMUNITY BASED COLLABORATION:
“SANDRA’S KEYS,” AN ESCAPE ROOM ON ELDER ABUSE
With Speaker DR. KIM SAWCHUK
February 12th at 4 pm at the Multimedia Studio in the Alan Wildeman Centre (360 Freedom Way Street, Windsor, ON)
About the Event
In 2019, the ACT (Aging-Communication-Technologies) team created an escape room on the topic of elder abuse or as it is known in our local context ‘older adult mistreatment’ with local seniors and subject matter experts in elder abuse. In this talk, Dr. Sawchuk will focus on the challenges and strategies co-developed to build this escape room on elder abuse and discuss how ACT's commitment to participatory action research and the deep knowledge of Augusto Boal's forum theatre by our community partners informed our design approach, decision-making process, implementation, and the gameplay elements.
Speaker's Bio
Dr. Kim Sawchuk is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Mobile Media Studies, and is the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University. She is also the director of Ageing, Communication, Technologies: Experiencing a Digital World In Later Life (ACT), a seven-year research project funded under the auspices of a 2.9 million dollar SSHRC Partnership Grant.
KIM SAWCHUK HOSTS A ROUNDTABLE ON RESEARCH-CREATION
SOCIALLY-ENGAGED ART, EXPERIMENTAL PEDAGOGIE: THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF RESEARCH-CREATION WITH DIVERSE PUBLICS
With Speaker STEPHANIE SPRINGGAY
January 16th at 4pm at the Performance Hall in The Armouries (37 University Ave. E)
About the Event
Feminist scholars argue that we need research practices that break with ableist, racist, extractive, and settler-colonial logics, and instead focus on ones that are situated, relational, and ethical. This means troubling our relationship with institutions and transforming the kinds of value we allow for particular forms of knowledge. We need to alter our practices from ones based on extraction of data or as a means to correct a wrong. As such researchers are urgently turning to new ways of doing research that create conditions for other ways of living and learning, and which materialize new kinds of research relations and questions. It is fundamentally about practicing an ethics based on response-ability, stewardship, care, and reciprocity that centre relationships to land, territory, human and more-than-human bodies. This paper/presentation will take up these important ethical dimensions of doing research and share some exemplifications from my research-creation practice.
For the seminar with the RC group – I will specifically present/workshop the kit. I will bring one of the kits with me, present on anarchiving and then have the group examine kit contents. We will activate 1 of the projects in the kit.
Anarchiving as research-creation.
This workshop/presentation explores anarchiving as transdisciplinary research-creation practice committed to queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial ways of being and doing. If the archive functions as a repository, and operates to uphold state narratives the anarchive is concerned with what it can do in the present-future. This can be done through disruption, or departures in established techniques and procedures. As such anarchiving is less a thing, then a process or an action. Anarchiving practices are political, resistant, and collective; they disrupt conventional narratives and histories, and seek ways to engage with matter not typically found in official archives, and the affective experiences and lived histories of human and more-than-human bodies. In addition to theoretically working with anarchiving practices an exemplification with be shared with the group: the Instant Class Kit a portable curriculum guide and pop-up exhibition dedicated to socially-engaged art as pedagogy.
PIANISTIC INSTALLATIONS: CREATIVE EXPERIMENTS THROUGH THE INTERFACE BETWEEN PIANO REPERTOIRE AND CONTEMPORANEITY
With Speaker ANNA CLAUDIA AGAZZI
Instituto de Artes, Sao Paulo State University, Brazil
November 27th at 5pm at the Multimedia Studio, Wildeman Centre for the Creative Arts
The lecture will address current music performance research Dr. Agazzi is undertaking as a faculty member and collaborator at the Sao Paolo State University in Brazil, including concert music performance paradigms, the Sound Path & Desconcerto Collective projects, pianistic installations, and her current research involving the Glenn Gould archives at the University of Toronto.
The lecture will be followed by a roundtable discussion relating to issues of research-creation in Canada and Brazil.
Speaker's Bio
Born in São Paulo/Brazil, 1969, Anna Agazzi is a professor of piano at Sao Paolo State University (UNESP) - Arts Institute. During her first years as pianist, Dr. Agazzi won the most important local piano competitions in Brazil. She holds a Master in Music Performance Degree from Manhattan School of Music, under the supervision of Nina Svetlanova. She released the critically acclaimed world premiere recording of Respighi-Rossini “La Boutique Fantasque”, which was selected and released as part of the “Great Brazilian Pianists” series by the Master Class label 2002 (Limited Edition for Volkswagen Brazil). She also performed in chamber music groups with Mark Dobrinsky, Michel Lethiec, James Campbell and Alvise Migotto.
Following her interest in inter-disciplinary concert performances, Dr. Agazzi received her PhD in Fine Arts (IA/UNESP), proposing the “Pianistic installations” - which presents works from the traditional piano repertoire in dialogue with contemporaneity. This research inaugurated a new collective at UNESP, called “Desconcerto” involving students from Music, Drama, Film and Fine Arts. Dr. Agazzi is engaged in issues related to the Amazon forest, and participated as co-curator in international exhibitions such as Amazonia Brasil, Amazonia Mundi and the recent tour of Gaia Boat to the communities of Tapajós River (Pará/Amazon): Fitzcarraldo - Music in the Amazon.
Dr. Agazzi is currently an International Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto / Faculty of Music as part of her post-doctoral studies (financed by Fapesp/Brazil) in order to design her next Pianistic installations entitled “Ecstasy” (A.Berg/Glenn Gould).
GUERILLA FILMMAKING 101 WORKSHOP FOR COMMUNITY BUILDERS
On June 15, 2019, The Propeller Project teamed up with Windsor Law, WIFF, SoCA, the DWCC, and the DOC Institute (Toronto) to offer a workshop designed for people new to filmmaking who have a local community-building cause, campaign, or message, that they hoped to communicate through moving images. Participants learned about the mechanics of story, structure, and the basics of tech for creating short community focused films that can be shared easily through social media with presentations from Anneke Smit, Markram Kamel, Lana Oppen, Kim Nelson and Nick Hector.
Please see the below resources for open access to the topics covered:
0. Guerrilla Filmmaking 101 NH Notes
1. Setting and Evaluating SMART Objectives
3. Appearance Permission Release
4. Filmmaking on the Budget by Oppen
PROPELLER SYMPOSIUM
On April 11, 2019 The Propeller Project hosted a Research/Creation Symposium, featuring academic papers and panels relating to of research-creation, about inquiry-driven projects that contribute to knowledge through both creative and research methods and outputs on a range of topics including:
• practice as research
• models for collaboration
• research-creation methodologies
• specific research-creation projects and findings
• strategies for knowledge dissemination
• pedagogical practices the combined research and creative work
Presenters included: Ophélie Queffurus of UQuam, Nicole Clouston and Joel Ong from York, Roberta Buiani of the Fields Institute, Sylvia Su
Anushray Singh, Xavier Vance, Brent Lee, Jennifer Willet, Steven Palmer, Kim Nelson and Sigi Torinus of University of Windsor.
NATALIE LOVELESS RESIDENCY
January 8-11, 2019 the Propeller Project hosted Dr. Natalie Loveless for a residency that included a seminar, public talk and studio visits with MFA candidates in the School of Creative Arts. Dr. Loveless was the ideal inaugural guest as director of the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory (researchcreation.ca) at the Univesity of Alberta and is an internationally recognized scholar of research-creation with a manifesto in progress.
More info about Dr. Loveless:
Natalie S. Loveless is an associate professor at the University of Alberta, where she teaches in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture and directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory (researchcreation.ca). Her forthcoming book, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, examines debates surrounding research-creation and its institutionalization, paying particular attention to what it means – and why it matters – to make and teach art research-creationally in the North American university today. This is also the topic of a forthcoming edited volume called Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation. Loveless recently completed New Maternalisms, a project bringing together feminist art practice, theory and curation, and an interdisciplinary collaborative project on global vaccination called Immune Nations that culminated in a high-profile exhibition at the United Nations in Geneva during the 2017 World Health Assembly. Loveless currently co-leads Speculative Energy Futures, a multi-year project that is part of the Just Powers initiative funded by the Future Energy Systems CFREF and a SSHRC Insight grant (justpowers.ca), and, during the 2018-19 academic year, is in residence as a visiting scholar in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC), where she is developing a new project, Sensing the Anthropocene: Aesthetic Attunement in an age of Urgency.