All the world's a stage
Photo: Natalie Alvarez has spent her career exploring immersive approaches to theatre. She joins Ryerson’s School of Performance this fall. Photo by Ryan Enn Hughes.
Theatre does not only live on a stage. Natalie Alvarez, a new professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at Ryerson’s School of Performance (external link) , has spent her career finding immersive approaches to performance, and locating the intersection of theatre and real-world activism.
“Immersive performance is certainly one of my research interests, and it also describes my teaching style,” says Alvarez, one of more than 60 new faculty members starting this fall. “I try to immerse students in a historical moment, or a moment of historical debate, and get them thinking from the point of view of the players in that particular moment of conflict.”
In her previous position at Brock University, she devised group assignments asking students to create performance pieces based on historical moments in theatre history: “Performance Studies as a discipline looks at performance as a method of analysis. You can think of it as a lens through which to look at culture and cultural practices,” she says. She also designed an entirely experience-based course where students teamed up with the Niagara Military Museum to design historical escape rooms, which are still in operation at the museum. “I’m always searching for opportunities like that to enliven history—make it immersive and experiential.”
In Alvarez’s philosophy, the theatre is not merely a passive entertainment with a strict audience/spectator dichotomy. “I have always been focused on how performance can be a way to speak back to various forms of political struggle, and how it’s served as a vehicle to intervene in those struggles historically,” she says. “It’s not some neutral form of entertainment—it’s a product of cultural conversations and conflict, and has played a key role in not only shaping ideology, but also mirroring it back to people to take a critical look at. I think that my classroom conversations are always charged with those issues.”
In her book Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance (external link) , published earlier this year, Alvarez explored many forms of immersion and simulation from around the world—from a simulated terrorist training camp in Utah for US Special Forces to a tour for settlers at a First Nations reserve in Manitoba. Her research considered how such immersions can be tools for fostering cross-cultural understanding, or xenophobic methods of Other-ization, or merely attractions in the capitalist “experience economy.”
Her SSHRC-funded research has led her to an ambitious project with the Durham Regional Police and collaborators from the Ontario Police College, the Atlantic Police Academy, Wilfrid Laurier, and Brock University. The four-year study will examine the impacts and efficacy of scenario-training to improve interactions between police and individuals in mental crisis. “We’re designing a training program that’s entirely scenario-based. It takes officers through a whole spectrum of different kinds of scenarios, and we’re measuring the pre- and post-training results. We have a multidisciplinary team—forensic psychologists, de-escalation experts, mental health clinicians, simulation experts, people with lived experience of mental health recovery, and theatre people engaged in the design and delivery of the program.”
Since 2012, Alvarez has also been a co-organizer of Panamerican ROUTES | RUTAS Panamericans Festival of Human Rights (external link) , a biennial theatre festival. An intercultural collaboration between Aluna Theatre and Native Earth Performing Arts, the festival brings together thinkers from many disciplines to perform and discuss work about human rights issues. (This year’s festival takes place October 3-14 at Artscape Daniels Spectrum).
“The festival was started to showcase artists working across the Americas, and make Canada part of that hemispheric conversation,” says Alvarez. “The festival invites us to think about artistic creation along a north-south axis, instead of looking to Europe, which tends to be the tradition in theatre history.”
“Since 2012, the focus has been on works that address rights emergencies in specific locales across the Americas. The mainstage festival performances and art installations have been an exciting opportunity to generate public conversations about human rights issues, and bringing people together who otherwise would not be at the table together—artists, activists, community leaders, students, scholars—to ask questions and build alliances.”