We encourage you to bring your own questions, curiosities, and insights to the seminar program. Here are some questions that guide our work. We hope you join us to engage—and improve upon—the following questions:
Broadly speaking, the humanities tell us about ourselves—where we come from and how cultures are constituted—and the work of decolonization involves facing up to the complexity of this legacy by taking responsibility for traumas and their wakes. With careful consideration, how can academics participate in performing arts’ decolonization work while facilitating multi-directional knowledge transfers such as how Indigenous genocides, trans-oceanic and intra-continental slave trades, and the artistic tropes of exoticization and exclusion underpin shared heritage?
Music, acting, and choreography inform declamation to awaken the imagination of performers and spectators. How can historic repertoires speak not only through but against supremacist prerogatives?
How can decolonizing impulses be fully carried through in solidarity with performers’ identities and intersectionality? As long-held convictions about the importance of “neutrality” in physical and vocal training give way to multiple culturally specific kinds of embodied knowledge, how can this be taken up in the disciplines of operatic singing, classical dance forms, and the vocal challenges of long-18thC dramatic poetry and prose?
In performance, roles are elevated to a semantic field when race is part of the casting schema. How can casting also engage performers’ cultural heritage and insights to reveal latent narratives and biases in historic repertoire? What are the potentials for performance to strategically decenter non-Eurocentric and non-cis perspectives of the human body? What are the objective limits on such goals in opera, where it is frequently difficult to find certain kinds of singers, regardless of cultural heritage, and how might the culture of education adapt to meet this challenge?
How can spectators and patrons participate in the public work of decolonization? If audiences are enabled and encouraged to co-create/co-curate their experience of performance, what might get in the way of this? Conversely, what might facilitate it, and to what ends?