This presentation explores the connections between climate change and settler colonialism, thinking particularly about what dramaturgical approaches to decolonising might be from an intersectional perspective. I argue that theatre and performance can open up ways of seeing and thinking, reflect blind spots and injustices, nuance ecological ideas and conversations and ask questions. This allows for exploration of persistent issues such as environmental justice, urbanisation, reductive images associated with whitewashing climate change and the way in which race, class, gender and colonialism produce ecological contexts and effects. I take an intersectional ecological approach based on the idea that, on a global scale, ecological effects are unevenly disrupted and tied to social structures that disproportionately affect marginalised people such as women, people of Black and Global Majority Heritage, Indigenous peoples and the poor. I consider how forgotten histories and the ongoing ecological effects of British colonialism in India are uncovered in the show-and-tell performance Common Salt (2018 - 2021) by Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer. Addressing the climate crisis requires addressing the underlying structures of oppression and colonialism that enable it. In a novel approach to performing stories of objects and collecting, Common Salt is able to uncover and foreground these structures of (ecological, social and political) injustice. Questions of climate justice and activism are also explored in the digital theatre piece Can I Live? (2021) written and performed by Feniti Balogun. Through disrupting the trope of the Zoom play and use of digital effects, the piece centres the message that ‘climate change is modern colonialism’. Both these pieces bring to light ecological injustices in theatre and performance through an approach of intersectional ecologies.
Dr Lisa Woynarski (she/her) was born on traditional Anishinabewaki territory in Ontario, Canada. She is of white European settler/immigrant ancestry. She is now an immigrant herself as well as Associate Professor in Theatre in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, UK. As a performance-maker and scholar, her work connects performance and ecology, from an intersectional lens. She is the author of Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change (Palgrave, 2020).
Qian Xaio – Transcultural Identity, New Media and Decoloniality: An ethnographic study of transcultural experience of Victoria and Albert Museum
With the rising discussions of decoloniality in museums and universities, together with shifts in online media use since the global pandemic, there is a need for more specific research to investigate the transcultural subject’s experience when encountering Western-centric institutional epistemologies. More specifically, China’s geopolitical and intellectual power now challenges cultural perspectives of mono-polar Western-centralism, raising the specific question of how does decoloniality inform the transcultural experience of identity and consciousness, and how does the Victoria and Albert Museum online attempt to mediate the transcultural subject. I will approach this question in my presentation through a discussion of the online encounter of Chinese international student participants with the Chinese collection at the V&A.
Lynn Obath – With you are the words of life: Luo storytelling strategies in developing a decolonial self
Using a practice-led decolonial autoethnographic approach, my research demonstrates how Luo storytelling tradition cultivates a decolonial sense of self through the practice of orality. Orality embodies a key point in critical discourse analysis (Wiggins & Riley 2010, Amoussou & Allagbé 2018) — that language is active and it establishes patterns in everyday discourse. Orality as defined by Luo storytelling involves the ability to use language in a way that establishes knowledge as an embodied, individual experience and simultaneously as a collective, communal discourse in order to generate knowledge by and for the people (Anzaldúa 1999). By defining and demonstrating orality as a decolonial practice of language which emerges from Luo storytelling, I illustrate the storyteller's role as a culture bearer, researcher, and agent of change (Downey & Novak 2013) who inspires the listen into these same roles.
Teodora Sinziana
This presentation will focus around the concept of “cross-dimensional practices” as a mode of conceptualising those artistic processes concerned with the production of worlds that intersect simulated space, fictive narratives and imagined bodies. These world-experiments, made possible through the use of computational technologies, allow for the creation of hybrid spaces that bring together physical, virtual, real and imagined landscapes. By examining the underlying processes involved in the creation of these speculative, immersive and interactive worlds, as well as their sub-stratal systems of exchange and representational qualities as hybrids of image, space and materiality, this presentation aims to situate the emerging practice of the artist as maker of worlds, whilst tracing the ways in which immersive networked systems can give rise to new modes of affective experience. With particular attention to the web of relations forming between audience and world via computationally-mediated interfaces, the phenomenological possibilities that world-making affords are addressed through an understanding of their multi-layered participatory affordances.
