Chocolate Woman Dreams The Milky Way

This volume documents the creation of Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, a play written and performed by Monique Mojica with collaborators from diverse disciplines. Inspired by the pictographic writing and mola textiles of the Guna, an indigenous people of Panama and Colombia, the book explores Mojica's unique approach to the performance process. Her method activates an Indigenous theatrical process that privileges the body in contrast to Western theater's privileging of the written text, and rethinks the role of land, body, and movement, as well as dramatic story-structure and performance style. Co-authored with anthropologist Brenda Farnell, the book challenges the divide between artist and scholar, and addresses the many levels of cultural, disciplinary, and linguistic translations required to achieve this. Placing the complex intellect inherent to Indigenous Knowledges at its center, the book engages Indigenous performance theory, and concepts that link body, land, and story, such as terra nullius/corpus nullius, mapping, pattern literacy, land literacy, and movement literacy. Enhanced by contributions from other artists and scholars, the book challenges Eurocentric ideologies about what counts as "performance" and what is required from an "audience," as well as long-standing body-mind dualisms.

What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global? What frictions emerge from these encounters? In negotiating aesthetic and political approaches to Canadian cultural production within contexts of global circulation, this collection argues for the value of attending to narratorial, lyric, and theatrical conventions in dialogue with questions of epistemological and social justice. Using the twinned framing devices of crosstalk and cross-sighting, the contributing authors attend to how the interplay of the verbal and the visual maps public spheres of creative engagement today. Individual chapters present a range of methodological approaches to understanding national culture and creative labour in global contexts. Through their collective enactment of methodological crosstalk, they demonstrate the productivity of scholarly debate across differences of outlook, culture, and training. In highlighting convergences and disagreements, the book sharpens our understanding of how literary and critical conventions and theories operate within and across cultures.

Traces the historical dimensions of Native North American drama using a critical perspective.

Auto/biographical narratives of the Americas are marked by the underlying themes of movement and belonging. This collection proposes that the impact of the historic or contemporary movement of peoples to, in, and from the Americas—whether chosen or forced—motivates the ways in which identities are constructed in this contested space. Such movement results in a cyclical quest to belong, and to understand belonging, that reverberates through narratives of the Americas. The volume brings together essays written from diverse national, cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary perspectives to trace these transnational motifs in life writing across the Americas. Drawing on international scholars from the seemingly disparate regions of the Americas—North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America—this book extends critical theories of life writing beyond limiting national boundaries. The scholarship included approaches narrative inquiry from the fields of literature, linguistics, history, art history, sociology, anthropology, political science, pedagogy, gender studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies. As a whole, this volume advances discourse in auto/biography studies, life writing, and identity studies by locating transnational themes in narratives of the Americas and placing them in international and interdisciplinary conversations.

In this wide-ranging study, Ric Knowles demonstrates how the examination and practice of theatre is enhanced by an expanded semiotic approach. Moving from the history and theory of performance analysis to its practical application and paying particular attention to cross-cultural applications, he examines not what a particular piece of theatre means, but how meaning is produced in the process of creating, viewing and analysing theatre. How Theatre Means presents contemporary case studies and explores intersections between a wide range of theories and methods. Clear and accessible, this book brings a key analytical methodology to life for students, practitioners and scholars.

"This book explores how Indigenous people in Mesoamerica use social networks to alter, enhance, preserve, and contribute to self-representation"--Provided by publisher.

"Performing the Intercultural City explores how Toronto--a representative global city in the first country in the world to adopt a policy of official multiculturalism--stages its diversity through its many intercultural theater companies and troupes. By examining the ways in which Indigenous, Filipino, Latino/a and Afro-Caribbean Canadian theater in Toronto has developed play structures based on culturally specific forms of expression, Performing the Intercultural City analyzes the ways in which theater companies from a variety of marginalized communities of color in Toronto have worked across cultural difference to produce a new kind of intercultural performance"--

A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome and crossed; motivates bodies to climb over; and threatens physical harm. This book critically examines a range of cultural performances produced in relation to the tensions and movements of/about the borders dividing North America, including the Caribbean.