Staging Wild with Jordan Tannahill

“Where are the feminist utopian, collaborative, risky imaginings and actions for earthlings in a mortal, damaged, human-heavy world?” — Adele E Clarke & Donna Haraway, Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations

A homocentric worldview, in which human subjectivity has been privileged above all other lifeforms, has led to our present state of climate catastrophe. How can we de-centre human subjectivity as the solitary focus of live performance and, rather, account for the multiplicity of non-human experience on Earth? Jordan Tannahill’s workshop is a collective working-through of disparate ideas, in collaboration with participants, of theories and approaches one might take within their practice to explore the idea of non-human subjectivity in performance. We will dip into the canon of theatrical narratives which foreground the experience of animals, productions which have featured non-human performers onstage, and productions that eschew conventional narrative altogether in favour of performative encounters with the landscape. And finally, beyond even plants and animals, we will explore what it mean for theatre artists to consider physicist Karen Barad’s words that all matter “feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, remembers,” and that there may truly be no such thing as “an object that has no wish.”

November 29, 2021 at 3:00 pm.

This online event will be held via Zoom and is free and open to the public. Tickets will be available at jordantannahillusask.eventbrite.ca.