Research
RESEARCH AXIS
As performance practitioners we articulate our research through our diverse practices. These practices are compositional, participatory, theatrical, performative, choreographic, perceptual, dramaturgical, improvisational and comprovisational.
CURRENT PROJECTS
These research projects are initiatives anchored in LePARC, led by our members and benefiting from LePARC resources.
ANGLES OF CONSEQUENCE
Reflecting Sunlight: Reflecting on the Climate.
Angles of Consequence is a SSHRC-funded research-creation project led by PI Meghan Moe Beitiks, composed of a series of site-specific performances devised in response to the sun and human responses to global warming, created with custom laser-cut and etched signal mirrors as scenographic elements. It asks: How does sunlight effectively make climate action visible and urgent through performance?
The research team for this project is composed of
Keith Fernandez
Carolie Delisle
Christine White
DRAMATURGICAL ECOLOGIES
This is a two-year, international research-creation project led by research-practitioner Angelique Willkie that aims to rethink the body of the dancer as a political site of corporeal singularity and an active point of departure for creation, rather than merely an instrument for channeling the creativity of others.
The dancer’s body is often thought of as a vessel for the choreographer’s creative input, yet many choreographic processes rely on the embodied improvisational responses of dancers to generate movement and theatrical material for development and performance. Furthermore, audiences never read bodies on stage neutrally: race, gender, age and movement style affect the way a dancer’s body is interpreted. In our current political climate where visible minorities do not have the luxury of being blank canvases, performance is a crucial space in which to interrogate notions of identity, perception, and agency, rather than bury those individualities under fantasies of neutrality.
This project spearheads much-needed discourse between Montreal, a hub for performing arts in Canada, and Europe, where dance dramaturgy has established roots. The project’s overall goal is to strengthen the position of dramaturgy in the field of dance, currently a fledgling practice in Canada, and shift dramaturgical reflection about creative processes, with emphasizing the corporeal dramaturgy of the dancer as a source rather than a repository or medium.
EMBODIED INTERVENTIONS
Embodied Interventions is student-run a performative platform for the research-creation projects of LePARC’s student membership. Structured as a week-long creation residency in Concordia’s Black Box, some of the projects are the fruit of months of individual or collaborative gestation, others are born of spontaneous meetings during the residency itself. The event culminates in a weekend of presentations, performances, discussions, workshops and reflections to share the various projects and practices that compose our student members.
MEETING THROUGH MATERIALITIES, BODIES AND WORDS
A research-creation project led by Lilia Mestre with the support of a PCYIA Grant 2023-24.
This research-creation project aims to activate choreographic research as a resource for new passageways of socio-political and environmental awareness. It is a collaboration exploring touch, movement and fabulation as modalities that connect bodies with their environment.
With Aaron Richmond, Heather Anderson, Valentina Plata, VK Preston, Esteban Donoso, Diego Gil, Magali Babin, Jacob Wren, Lília Mestre, Peng Hsu, Lydia Gravelin, and others.
REFLECTIVE INTERATIVE SCENARIO ENACTMENTS (RISE)
Led by Dr. Eldad Tsabary and funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE) is a Le PARC based 5-year (2020-2025) research-creation project designed to enact and investigate cataclysmic scenarios in 10 mini-operas. Various narratives from among humanity’s greatest fears (pandemics, ecological disasters, economic collapse, political strife and warfare, technological disasters, surveillance and loss of human rights, cosmic disasters, etc.) will be dramatized in the opera medium and studied collaboratively. The creative process will involve critical reflection sessions in which the research-creation team and members of the public will freely debate emergent matters related to the narrative of the mini-operas and their impact on humanity, challenges to the opera medium, collaborative strategies among researcher and creators from diverse fields and career stages, and production-centred topics.
Learn more here: https://riseopera.ca/
The initial research team is comprised of
Dr. Eldad Tsabary (PI, Music Department);
Dr. Donna Hewitt (Collaborator, Music, University of New England, Parramatta Australia)
Dr. Ricardo Dal Farra (Co-applicant, Music Department)
Dr. Deanna Yerichuk (Co-applicant, Community Music, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo ON)
Dr. Patrick Leroux (Co-applicant, Department of English)
Dr. Sabine Bergler (Co-applicant, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering)