Dramaturgical Ecologies (with)in
“Confession Publique”

Dramaturgical Ecologies (DE) is a group of eight interdisciplinary artist-scholars from different countries working on a federally funded project at Montreal’s Concordia University. The project involves a solo, Confession Publique, performed and dramaturged by Angélique Willkie and choreographed by Mélanie Demers. Through movement and sharing of anecdotes, the solo explores Willkie’s embodied dramaturgy and lived experience of Blackness – specifically shaped by her Caribbean origins, European career as a performer, and acquired Canadian citizenship. The notion of embodied dramaturgy enables us to attend to the ways in which racism and intergenerational trauma exist as legacies held within the body. We propose a lecture performance organized as an “open rehearsal” involving Willkie’s and Demers' “embodied histories” (Noland, 2009) of Blackness in dialogue with the creative process of Confession Publique, while being interrogated and facilitated by the research assistants’ questions, interventions, and speculations. The open rehearsal allows us to navigate questions we cannot answer, but which manifest in the microcosm of the creative process and the macrocosm of its context, whilst honouring the complexity and tensions inherent in the work and in our different racial positionings. This navigation carries the possibility to (de)stabilize naturalized contemporary dance culture by agitating and decentring practices that might (re)produce systems of white supremacy by conceiving of the performer’s body as a neutral canvas. 
 
Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment. Performing Gesture / Producing Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 
Keywords:
(in)stabilities, decolonizing technologies and techniques of supremacy, dismantling White supremacy, culture in dance Studies, practice-as-research