Worlding Feminist Theatre & Performance Historiography
A world history of women’s innovations in theater, dance, and performance is still being written. To date, existing accounts of women’s innovations in theater, dance, and performance in English have been overwhelmingly tied to Euro-American histories of stage actresses, concert dancers, and feminist performance artists. Yet, a vibrant world of women’s social performances, expressive vernacular cultures, and popular entertainment exists beyond these accounts. This roundtable seeks to explore how “worlding”—as a verb, as a method, and as a politics—might open up new trajectories for feminist theater and performance historiography aligned with decolonizing and Global Majority social and aesthetic movements.
Worlding Feminist Theater & Performance Historiography
Frances Koncan, Dr. Amanda Reid, Dr. meLê yamomo
Thursday, May 9
3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT
Zoom Webinar
Please register here
This public roundtable will kick off the Sustaining Global Connections in Feminist Theatre and Performance Historiography Project, a SSHRC-sponsored event hosted by Wilfrid Laurier University in collaboration with York University. Sustaining Global Connections is a two-day virtual event that will bring together theatre and performance artists and scholars from around the world for 1) a roundtable on May 9, 2024 (open to the public), and 2) an authors’ workshop on May 10, 2024 for the contributing authors of Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume 1: Performers (Bloomsbury-Methuen, 2025). This event is convened by Volume 1: Performers co-editors, Dr. Colleen Kim Daniher (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Dr. Marlis Schweitzer (York University).
SPEAKER BIOS:
Frances Koncan (she/they) is an Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia, within the shared, unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Originally from Couchiching First Nation, they grew up on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba and attended the University of Manitoba (BA Psychology) and the City University of New York Brooklyn College (MFA Playwriting). They are currently Assistant Professor of Playwriting at the University of British Columbia. Select plays include: Women of the Fur Trade, Space Girl, and zahgidiwin/love.
Dr. Amanda Reid is an Assistant Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance at Yale University. She is a dance historian who writes and teaches about queer of color critique, West Indian migration, and post-colonial Caribbean Black radicalism. Her current manuscript project, Smaddification: Dance and Decolonization in the West Indies (forthcoming, Duke University Press), explores maximalist queer diaspora aesthetics in Jamaican concert dance to theorize West Indian regional visions of blackness, bodily freedom, and cultural autonomy. Her writing can be found in Theater Journal and The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies (OUP, forthcoming). Prior to working at Yale, Amanda was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Lecturer in Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies department (2020-2022). She received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Michigan.
Dr. meLê yamomo has lived in Lucena City, Los Baños, Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, and Munich, and currently resides between Amsterdam and Berlin. He is an Assistant Professor of New Dramaturgies, Media Cultures, Artistic Research, and Decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam, a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy, and author of Sounding Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is the project leader and principal investigator of the EU-JPICH project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Archives (DeCoSEAS), and the Dutch Research Council project »Sonic Entanglements«. meLê is the fourth winner of the Open Ear Award, the most prestigious composer prize in the Netherlands, and one of the 2020 KNAW Early Career Awardees by the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. meLê curates the Decolonial Frequencies Festival and hosts/produces the Sonic Entanglements podcast. In his works as an artist-scholar, meLê engages the topics of sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies.
Moderated by Dr. Melissa Blanco Borelli , Northwestern University.
