To Expand the Possibilities of Performance: Laura Nanni on SummerWorks

Abstract

In her interview with Karen Fricker and Melissa Poll, the artistic director of Tkaronto/Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival, Laura Nanni, discusses how the festival responded to COVID-19 and calls for racial justice in 2020 and beyond.

Keywords::

• COVID-19
• diversity
• equity
• inclusion
• festivals
• performance
• summerworks

Notes on contributors

Karen Fricker is Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University, Ontario, Canada, theatre critic at the Toronto Star, and author of The Original Stage Productions of Robert Lepage: Making Theatre Global (Manchester UP, 2020). With Charles R. Batson she is co-founder of the Circus and its Others research project; she also researches theatre criticism in the digital age.

Melissa Poll is a dramaturg and settler scholar who currently occupies territory that has historically been home to the Kaw, Osage, and Pawnee, among others. Her research has been published in Body, Space & Technology, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Performance Matters. She is the author of Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy: The Aesthetic Signature at Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Notes

1. ‘The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries’, Outside the March, https://outsidethemarch.ca/the-experiences/the-ministry-of-mundane-mysteries/ (accessed January 29, 2022).

2. Canadian Stage is a major not-for-profit theatre in Toronto. See https://www.canadianstage.com (accessed January 29, 2022).

3. Kelsey Adams, ‘Toronto’s Hottest Club is Online’, Now Toronto, March 21, 2020, https://nowtoronto.com/music/features/club-quarantine/ (accessed January 29, 2022).

4. A co-presentation between SummerWorks and Canadian Stage, We Were, We Are, We Will Be was a week-long series of digital and analog projects in which artists reflected on the past, present, and future in the context of life in the pandemic. Genres ranged from dub poetry to installation art to dance to theatre; there were several site-specific live performances including Esie Mensah’s Can you trust me? (See Image 2). See ‘We Were, We Are, We Will Be’, SummerWorks, https://summerworks.ca/show/we-were-we-are-we-will-be/ (accessed January 29, 2022).