Editorial: Negotiating Encounters— Embodiments and Edges

The COVID-19 virus permeates our social consciousnesses, material quotidian choreographies, and virtual social media performances. Theatres have closed; arts programming has been deferred, cancelled or moved online. Many in performing arts communities are in crisis. Many of us stream free, archival footage of performances across our living rooms, in tandem with the slogan, “Together, apart.” What are you watching?

Just before the outbreak in Ontario, the word most resonant in my performance practice, teaching, and research was ‘blockade.’ Following the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) invasion of Wet’suwet’en lands on behalf of the Coastal GasLink pipeline project, Indigenous youth across Turtle Island declared that reconciliation was dead. All eyes were on Wet’suwet’en. My social media was awash with grocery lists for the Tyendinaga Mohawk encampment and round dance footage. Author Trina Moyan, the first author in this Views and Reviews section, picks up this dropped narrative thread as she draws connections between the necessary rethinking of settler-Indigenous relations required in a moment of relentless resource extraction and the renegotiations of interpersonal contact occurring at the edges of sidewalks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nothing is as usual.

As disability performance scholar Petra Kuppers writes in The Scar of Visibility, a work uniquely tuned to viruses, “Forces and differentials move together, and among them bodies emerge and negotiate their living.” I think of Kuppers’ celebratory invocation of the necessity for “art as social fantasy [to interfere] with the reproduction of the same” (203).

At a moment where performing artists, arts organizations, audiences, and performance scholars are unable to gather, we reconsider the live encounters that sustain and nourish us.

The contributors to this issue’s Views and Reviews reconsider relationships at the site of performance. These thoughtful pieces raise questions about embodiments that renegotiate settler-Indigenous relationships through edge-of-the-woods, call-and-response protocols; festival work in which talking rice steamers collude to dismantle capitalism; the evolving and diversifying field of dance studies in Canada; and the assemblage of Indigenous performance histories and practices in Performing Turtle Island.

Writing about her participation in Encounters at the Edge of the Woods, the first Indigenous play to show at Hart House Theatre, Trina Moyan (nêhiyaw) weaves nêhiyaw worldviews, lines from the script, and impressions from the play’s participants with thoughts on social distancing and colonialism. Material and perspectival edges shift throughout Moyan’s reflection. For instance, the Canadian railway appears as a transitway for cultural genocide, through settlement and transportation of children to residential schools, and also as a site for disrupting the flow of capital, as Indigenous communities blockade rail lines in their territories to assert the urgent need to recognize Indigenous sovereignties. Moyan considers human relationships to kikâwînaw askîy (Mother Earth), the effects of shared storytelling across difference, and her own whiteface performance as she cautions us against siding with wîhtikow.

In Ric Knowles’s review of Toronto’s Progress International Festival of Performance and Ideas, he reflects on performances that parse relations across communities and nations, encounters that are often fraught. Knowles efficiently outlines war tourism and civil disobedience in bluemouth inc’s immersive and multi-disciplinary Café Sarajevo; Scottee’s “stand-up night addressing immigrant issues and encounters”; and Jan Derbyshire’s Certified, which featured psychiatrists played by rubber balls and the audience delivering a verdict on the performer’s sanity. Knowles arrives at the “powerfully political” Cuckoo, by Jaha Koo, a play that enacts “a post-human friendship” between talking rice cookers and the human performer, formed in the wake of Korea’s “National Day of Humiliation.” In Cuckoo, Knowles asserts, we don’t simply witness “capitalist imperialist neo-colonial disaster” but “isolation, dehumanization and death…. Death by capitalism.”

Anne Flynn offers a concise history of changes in dance studies scholarship in Canada in light of an upcoming (at the time of writing) gathering of the Dance Studies Association in Vancouver. Situating dance studies as a field that has developed pluck, momentum, and interdisciplinarity though conditions of resource scarcity, and that aims to understand “who is missing on the dance floor” and...