“When one dives into endlessness, in both time and space, farther and farther without stopping, one needs fixed points or milestones past which one speeds. Without these, one’s movement does not differ from standing still. There must be stars along which one shoots” –M.C. Escher, 124
Möbius Dreams is an immersive. site-specific audio-visual tour that explores the daily choreographies of Queen Street West. It is one of two major components of an MA thesis project at the Centre for Drama Theatre and Performance Studies (U of T) entitled: Activating Choreographies of Care: An Inclusive Approach to “Sidewalk Ballet.” When developing the performance, I took inspiration from the choreographies I observed in pedestrians, the natural environment, and the architectural characteristics of the street, all of which also appeared to mirror the structure of a “Möbius Strip.”
What is a Möbius Strip?
The Möbius Strip is an artistic structure developed by Dutch Surrealist artisan, M.C Escher (1898-1972). Just like my tour’s central dramaturg: the cycle of the seasons, Escher’s Möbius Strip takes the form of an infinite circle that has no beginning or end, but that continues to adapt and change through time. Escher integrated the structure of the Möbius Strip in many of his graphic designs and prints, including: “Möbius Strips I-II,” “Swans,” and “Horsemen.”
About Activating Choreographies of Care
When it comes to immersive, site-specific theatre, one of its most attractive characteristics is the way it aims to engage audiences in a fictional site by inviting them to play an active role in the performance. In order to perform this role and remain immersed in the fictional world, audiences are required to engage in specific physical activities (such as running, hiding, and so on), and adhere to one particular way of interacting with, or moving through the performance site. Although this approach is intended to plunge audiences into the fictional world of the performance, the fictional roles immersive companies create rarely accommodate a diverse range of movements or ways of processing. Similarly, in order to access and traverse the city sidewalk, pedestrians must adhere to a specific set of movements and spatial scripts that are established by both the physical characteristics of the street, and the bodies that traverse it. This becomes exclusionary for participants from the disabled community in both fictional and non-fictional contexts, as it is primarily non-disabled pedestrians that occupy the sidewalk, and consequently shape its dominant choreographies. To address these issues, this thesis uses a research-creation approach to develop a 40-minute immersive, site-specific tour that explores the daily choreographies of Queen Street West (QSW, a central thoroughfare in Tkaronto, Ontario), in relation to the fictional choreographies established in my performance. The first section of the paper will provide a brief overview of sidewalk choreography and how it is created. Building on Arseli Dokumaci’s theory of “microactivist affordances” and Bertie Ferdman’s notion of “off-sites,” the following section will examine the process of creating a place-based audio tour that invites participants to encounter, identify, and disrupt the choreographies of QSW through led engagements with a virtual representation of the street, and an alternate site of their choice. In so doing, I hope to address the following: How might shifting our focus to these moments of temporal and spatial tension, when elements from the non-fictional sites rupture, repeat, or fail to align with the virtual world of my tour, produce a more physically inclusive approach to structuring participation in immersive/site-specific performance? How might a dual awareness of the fictional and non-fictional elements of site enable participants to become better immersed? How might they support a broader range of ways to engage with, and traverse the city sidewalk?
Project Goals
- Identify how the current choreographies of QSW are inaccessible, while simultaneously facilitating a means of collectively disrupting and resisting these choreographies.
- Demonstrate how acknowledging the ways in which the real both informs and is informed by the fictional may produce a more inclusive approach to structuring participation in immersive/site-specific theatre, as well as enable audiences to envision a more inclusive form of urban choreography.
- Work with urban choreography as an entry point from which to explore accessibility as a site for creation.
Exploration Photos
