Hemispheric Encounters
Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices brings together scholars, artists, activists, and community organizations from across the Americas to explore hemispheric performance as a methodology, a pedagogical strategy, and tool for social change.
A project developed by the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, Hemispheric Encounters advances understandings of performance as a unique method for addressing humanitarian and ecological challenges shared by multiple communities in the western hemisphere. Among others, these include: the dramatic rise in nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment, the expulsion of refugee migrants from Central America, record-high rates of gender and sexual-based violence; and the doubling-down on economies of extractivism that hasten climate change, environmental degradation, and displacement of Indigenous persons from protected lands. These challenges have also given rise to mass actions across the Americas, from the marches of Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, and #metoo, to Indigenous pipeline protest encampments, to caravans of migrants moving north toward Mexico and the US. Read together, these stagings beg questions about who controls, and who sees oneself as implicated in, wider hemispheric happenings.
Our Aims
Hemispheric Encounters has three inter-related goals:
- The Partnership seeks to generate understandings of embodied practice as a unique method of conducting research on, and politically addressing, human rights and environmental justice concerns experienced by communities across the Americas. Specifically, it seeks to define, explore, and experiment with “hemispheric performance practice” as a distinctive practice-based, anti-colonial, transborder, and collaborative mode of knowledge production. In doing so, we mobilize a set of innovative live and digital research-creation formats that are designed to increase public engagement, shape public discourse, and reach diverse audiences across the Americas and beyond the academy.
- We aim to create a network of academics, artists, and activists across the Americas working in and with hemispheric performance to share strategies and resources, form transnational alliances, and develop more advanced understandings of shared human rights and environmental challenges.
- We will draw on our network, and knowledge developed in research-creation work, to train graduate students and emerging researchers in performance-based, transborder methods for political engagement.
For us, “transborder” implies movement across national, regional, ethnic, cultural, class, and professional boundaries, as well as an unsettling of national/colonial demarcations of territory as sites of violence and exclusion. We define performance as an embodied act, from artistic activities such as performance art, dance, and theatre to cultural practices like ritual, protest, and enactments of self in everyday life. It is also conceived as a political process—acts of doing that can both reiterate and alter existing geopolitical realities.
Partnership
Hemispheric Encounters is hosted by Sensorium: Centre for Digital Technologies in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at York University. It brings together a group of artists, academics, and activists from 16 universities and 16 arts and social justice-based organizations across the Americas. Partnership involves collaborative projects, exchanges, dialogues, and joint provocations staged around project themes investigating performance as a vehicle for hemispheric and political change. Our academic partners are home to numerous labs, centres, and initiatives that study performance as an arts-led research method, and community partners bring vital experience in working on the real-life impacts of the hemispheric issues that we are exploring.
Learn more about our partners and collaborative projects here.
