Term One Comes to a Close.doc

Week ten of the term has come and gone. Yesterday all three MAIPR groups - curation, scholarship, and creative practice - presented their final projects to the cohort of students and faculty. The presentations mark the official end of first term. After handing in an assignment due on Monday, I'll be free to travel around through December and January. I then arrive back in the class room on February 1 in Amsterdam. That's right, just under two months off in Europe.

Yesterday's final presentation went extremely well. My group, who had been slotted into the curation modality, created an exhibit interacting with notions of national identity in the theatre. We sought to question the claim that we are living in an age post-nation in which the search for national identity has become less important in a more globalized world. In light of the constitutional crisis going on back home, the question of identity has never seemed more important in regards to the future direction of the country. As I put together the Canada section of the exhibit (each group member created a station based around a play or playwright from their country), I couldn't help but feel proud of our socially liberal and fiscally conservative country, but also fearful of its future. 

I featured Wajdi Mouawad's Scorched as a play that deals with questions of national identity. My station statement read as follows: Wajdi Mouawad is a Lebanese-born Quebecois artist. He makes little claim to be writing about Canadian identity – in fact, the majority of the action of his plays takes place outside the country’s borders. Yet, it is his exploration of the need, as a nation of immigrants, to revisit our individual origins, that proposes a picture of a globalized Canadian identity. Scorched features a pair of twins who must return to the country of their Mother’s birth to discover who they really are. In addition to a display which contextualized the play and its production history, I performed a looped six minute monologue of text from the play at the centre of my space. Here are some pretty pictures:

My station lingered between exhibit and installation. One of the strengths of our efforts was the diversity of  approaches by the group members in answering the same question - we all displayed our material differently and utilized a variety of performance modes. While I struggled working for four weeks in a group (my A-type personality does not always mesh with collective work), the process, as opposed to the final product, is where I really learned a lot. I think originally I gravitated towards curation because it was something I hadn't done before. I've visited a lot of museums in the past two months and I now know some of the considerations that are made before any material is displayed: contextualization, navigation, selection, collaboration, mediation, interpretation, and synthesis. It's a long process but I find the work quite interesting. I think I may add it to the list of job options to explore upon return.

After the three presentations, the students and staff did a first term debrief - we talked about where we started and how we got to the end of term. The discussion reminded me how special this program is. Where else would I be able to study theatre and performance with students from ten different countries? I'm certain to blog about it in more depth later on, but I know this international opportunity has changed me already. I've never felt more out of my comfort zone, but I've learned so much about communicative and pedagogical methods that attempt to create a bridge between cultures. With this knowledge comes an international awareness which I thought I had, but which was never tested. In Amsterdam, our group will join students coming from the site in Finland - it's yet another opportunity to meet more new international friends. 

As you can guess, we were ecstatic to have the term wrapped up. As rewarding as the ten weeks have been, they've been pretty intense. The group of us got together last night, save for Lotte who had to rush off to London for rehearsals, and had one more hurrah before some of the students leave for home. As so often happens with our group, we met in one of the Heronbank kitchens with some libations and played a variety of "games" before departing for The Spa. The rules of the games have to be explained usually five to eight times just so everyone is on the same page - it's an endearing feature of our group. Dev, the drama teacher from India, makes me laugh like no other when he has a few drinks in him; he's a natural comedian. The running joke is that once Dev + Amsterdam will be too much to handle. 

We jumped on the bus, as one has to do to get off campus for a night out, and made our way to two fine establishments over the course of the evening: The White Horse, which I've been to twice before, and Smack which is a club I had heard a lot about. It was a great night all around. I could sense the group felt liberated after successfully conquering the final projects of term. It was good to let loose and not worry about deadlines, as we had been doing for the past four weeks. I had a late night, post-pub, post-bar, post-club skype chat with Miss Van Dyk last after getting home. Probably a bad idea, but entertaining for her I'm certain. 

 

This weekend I'll be looking to get this assignment done for Monday, which shouldn't prove too taxing, and then I'll start getting my ducks in a row before jumping into the Christmas travel spirit. Emily and I are partners in crime again in just about a week!

Doc's Prescription of the Day: A Saturday off, if you can manage it! I'm taking it easy today after working on all cylinders this past week. Hopefully your Saturday will be somewhat restful; avoid those malls.