Projects & Activities
Corporeal Dramaturgy: Redistributing Agency in Dance
A two-year, international research-creation project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) led by research-practitioner Angélique Willkie. With collaboration from choreographers Pia Meuthen and Mélanie Demers, the project aims to rethink the body of the dancer as a political site of corporeal singularity and an active point of departure for creation, rather than merely an instrument for channeling the creativity of others.
This project is composed of two main research-creations: Against the Black Canvas, with Pia Meuthen as choreographer, Tarek Rammo as performer and A. Willkie as dramaturg, and Confessions Publiques, with Mélanie Demers as performer, Anne-Marie Jourdenais as rehearsal director, and Angélique Willkie as performer and dramaturg.
The ABCs of DE
A a series of podcasts funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and entitled The ABC’s of DE designed to address points of articulation and/or tension in and between the fields of dance dramaturgy and black performance studies. The ABCs of DE engage and focus on articulating how the concepts of blackness and dramaturgy (productively) rub up against one another. They seek to mobilize and disseminate an ongoing study of how theories of blackness - and its fugitivity, opacity and expression - challenge performance dramaturgy’s implicit supposition that the performer’s body, and the resulting creative work, is a “blank canvas” on which the dramaturgical process might unilaterally ascribe meaning. Each event will highlight two primary “keywords” emerging from our research, placing them in relationship and examining the movement between them.
Murmurations
Funded by the Social Science and Humanity Research Council, Murmurations is a twelve-month suite of outreach activities centred on the interrelation of the conceptual pillars of 'blackness' and 'dramaturgy.' 'Blackness,' entails the specific processes of embodiment and identification possessed by and imposed upon those of African or Afro-diasporic origin. 'Dramaturgy,' is the process of in-gathering the physical, material and creative elements of a performance work according to a logic that is itself emergent. The overarching goal of the proposed activities is to gather, finalize, activate and share the outcomes of three years of robust research-creation investigation under the name"Dramaturgical Ecologies" (DE), led by PI Willkie.
The two specific objectives of Murmurations are to:
1. Mobilize the knowledge produced by DE over the past three years in order to demonstrate how the concepts of 'blackness' and 'dramaturgy' bear upon the practice and study of contemporary performance creation.
2. Gather and establish an interdisciplinary, international network of scholars and practitioners in (dance) dramaturgy and black studies to develop, exchange and build upon these findings; and to site these conversations at the nexus of these emerging fields of study in Canada.