Critical Ideas Series

PRESENTED WITH SFU’S INSTITUTE FOR PERFORMANCE STUDIES

SUPPORTED BY:
SFU FACULTY OF COMMUNICATIONS, ART AND TECHNOLOGY & SFU WOODWARD’S CULTURAL PROGRAMS

FREE • No registration required.

Critical Ideas is a partnership between PuSh and SFU’s Institute for Performance Studies. Coordinated by IPS Director Peter Dickinson and PuSh Associate Artistic Director Joyce Rosario, the series brings together artists, critics, scholars and audiences to discuss formal, social and ideological issues affecting performance practice and reception today. Panels are free and open to the public. Now entering its fifth year, the 2020 edition of Critical Ideas has been guest-curated by PuSh Scholars-in-Residence Dylan Robinson and Keren Zaiontz.

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Peter Dickinson is Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, where he also serves as Director of the Institute for Performance Studies. His most recent book, My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community, will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2020.

Scholars-in-Residence

Dylan Robinson + Keren Zaiontz

As PuSh’s inaugural Scholars-in-Residence, we look forward to engaging with festival audiences through the Critical Ideas Series. We plan to bring artists involved in PuSh’s 2020 program with invited Indigenous and disabled artists and curators to ask foundational questions about how performance can intervene in an age of crisis. The panels will range in scope and consider how disabled artists are using the stage to insist on differently embodied democracies, how Indigenous artists are reclaiming the public sphere to insist on resurgent forms of gathering, and what these and many other practices might hold for new types of aesthetic and political forms of commitment. Additionally, over the coming year, we look forward to working with guest artists to sustain these discussions around democracy, gathering, and commitment through residencies that focus on mobilities in public space and in Vancouver/Lhq’a:lets in particular. 

— DYLAN ROBINSON + KEREN ZAIONTZ

Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw (Stólō) artist and writer, as well as an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. His current work involves devising art actions that re-connect Indigenous songs with communities who were prohibited by law to sing them as part of Canada’s Indian Act from 1882-1951. Robinson is curator of the Ka’tarohkwi Festival of Indigenous Arts, and co-curator of the internationally touring exhibition Soundings that features artscores by Indigenous artists.

Keren Zaiontz is an Assistant Professor and Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University where she teaches in the Department of Film and Media and the Cultural Studies Program. Keren writes about how artists navigate the spatial politics of global north cities at the site of performing arts festivals and mega-events. She is author of Theatre & Festivals (Palgrave Macmillan).