Matt Jones
Matt Jones is Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto.
He is a scholar of Performance Studies with expertise in student-centred learning and equity-oriented teaching. His research draws on concepts from Performance Studies to develop strategies to help graduate students communicate more effectively.
He was the recipient of a 2022 UTSC Teaching Award from the University of Toronto Scarborough and his work is supported by a Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
His writing has appeared in SubStance, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada. His journalistic writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, This Magazine, Canadian Dimension, and on his blog, Chez le Piment Rouge. His plays include Dracula in a Time of Climate Change, The Mysterious Case of the Flying Anarchist, and the collective creation Death Clowns in Guantánamo Bay.
He is currently working on a book about performance in the deathscapes of the War on Terror. For more information, visit mattjones.space.
He is a scholar of Performance Studies with expertise in student-centred learning and equity-oriented teaching. His research draws on concepts from Performance Studies to develop strategies to help graduate students communicate more effectively.
He was the recipient of a 2022 UTSC Teaching Award from the University of Toronto Scarborough and his work is supported by a Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
His writing has appeared in SubStance, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada. His journalistic writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, This Magazine, Canadian Dimension, and on his blog, Chez le Piment Rouge. His plays include Dracula in a Time of Climate Change, The Mysterious Case of the Flying Anarchist, and the collective creation Death Clowns in Guantánamo Bay.
He is currently working on a book about performance in the deathscapes of the War on Terror. For more information, visit mattjones.space.
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authorities that required them to use performativity to suspend the law, depriving Khadr of his rights under American law, the Canadian Charter, and various protocols of international law. This use of performance to undermine law exposes a performative gap in the law: a space in the law
that allows it to be moved and shaped by performative acts. Through these acts, Khadr became effectively stateless for a period in time: a citizen-in-exception. Building from Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, this paper draws out the role played by performativity in the suspension of law by law. Importantly, the process that led to Khadr’s situation was racially charged from beginning to end. His situation is one manifestation of the way that Muslims have been “cast out” of Western law, as Sherene Razack puts it, since 9/11.
Dissertation by Matt Jones
Courses Taught by Matt Jones
authorities that required them to use performativity to suspend the law, depriving Khadr of his rights under American law, the Canadian Charter, and various protocols of international law. This use of performance to undermine law exposes a performative gap in the law: a space in the law
that allows it to be moved and shaped by performative acts. Through these acts, Khadr became effectively stateless for a period in time: a citizen-in-exception. Building from Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, this paper draws out the role played by performativity in the suspension of law by law. Importantly, the process that led to Khadr’s situation was racially charged from beginning to end. His situation is one manifestation of the way that Muslims have been “cast out” of Western law, as Sherene Razack puts it, since 9/11.
That's what Antonin Artaud thought theatre was for: a mystical and shocking confirmation of the limits of human freedom. For Bertolt Brecht, it was quite the opposite: theatre was there to remind us to use our freedom as we struggle to make sense of an unjust world.
This course offers a study of key ideas in theatre and performance theory with a focus on pertinent 20th/21st century critical paradigms such as postcolonialism, feminism, interculturalism, cognitive science, and others. Students will investigate theory in relation to selected dramatic texts, contemporary performances, and practical experiments.
Bell Angele has a simple quest: to fall asleep peacefully. But before she can, two fairies from ASMRland are here to reveal and repair the dark corners of her brain. ASMRtist uses Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response to bring audiences together to explore the stimuli that make our skin tingle and our minds race.
surrounding the deaths of three men in custody in the Guantanamo Bay camp facilities in 2006.
Influenced by Tadeusz Kantor’s memory plays, the play uses mannequin doubles, readymade objects
and morbid clowning to stage fragmented scenes that explore the problem in a non-narrative, non-
language-based way. But where Kantor built his plays from his own memories, this play can only use
documentary evidence of what happened. As a result, the play becomes a collage of other people’s
memories filtered through public discourses, not a reconstruction of memories but a commentary on the
obstacles to political remembering. See blacklistcommittee.wordpress.com for details."
From Bertolt Brecht’s ideal of spectator who watches theatre like a boxing match to Augusto Boal’s notion of the “spect-actor”, who is both spectator and actor, creators of political theatre have long sought to activate their audience. Fox’s piece pushes this idea further, bringing spectators into activity and throwing them off balance. Where spectators of representational theatre are asked to weigh ethical and political choices in a detached and calculated manner, in Surrender they must make their choices instantaneously, while the body is in turbulence.
In this talk, Matt Jones analyzes the ethical and political stakes involved in replicating war on stage. He shows that the empathetic link to soldiers that is fostered by standing in their shoes often comes at the expense of developing empathy with others. With their emphasis on experience rather than abstract knowledge, works like Surrender risk sidestepping the most complicated ethical questions involved in war, especially those surrounding violence, race, identity, and otherness.
This paper explores the performative dimensions of Khadr’s legal case. While his arrest in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2001 was improvisational, the plea deal he brokered with the US Military Commission involved careful dramaturgy by US authorities. Asked to choose between a guilty plea or a 40-year sentence, Khadr chose the former, reifying his identity as a “war criminal” in the process.
In the spirit of interdisciplinary excavation, I combine critical legal studies with performance studies to analyze Khadr’s case, both in court and in the press. For Judith Butler, law is fundamentally performative: it interpellates subjects, calls specific identities into being, creating norms and defining certain subjects as other to those norms. Once defined as a war criminal, Khadr was marked as abject from Canadian society, as evidenced in the theatre of public opinion, where the facts of his case blended deceptively with the dog-whistles, racism, and Islamophobia that circulate in North American media. My paper will bring claims from critical legal theorists into dialogue with performance theory to show how the politics of performativity participates in the construction of this peculiar legal regime.
In the performative hoaxes of Ian Alan Paul, the uncomfortable underworld of political injustice is made to intrude on the everyday circuits and flows of capital and people. In his 2012 piece “Drone Crash Incident,” Paul staged a crash of a drone aircraft on the campus of UC San Diego. After the damaged drone attracted interest, Paul and his colleagues issued press releases on behalf of the UC Center for Drone Policy and Ethics apologizing for the crash and calling a town hall meeting to inform citizens of basic drone safety techniques. This work “popped up” on the campus, temporarily transforming the space into a site of politics where those present were confronted with the thought of what it is like to be watched over by drones. The space of the hoax is necessarily ephemeral: it arrives by surprise and disappears when the hoax is exposed. Its politics consists in the way it poses the question: “What if the world were like this?”
This presentation will examine the relationship of the performative hoax to pop-up culture, exploring the way that a hoax mobilizes surprise, uncertainty and ambiguity to lead its viewers to certain conclusions. How might this be similar to the position of the uninformed consumer in consumer culture? What model of political agency does a hoax offer its audience?
Though it dates back to the 1970s, verbatim theatre has seen a resurgence in the last 15 years, which has helped to usher in a new era of documentary and political theatre. The technique involves importing snippets of unaltered language from everyday life and presenting them on stage with as little theatrical interference as possible. It is an interdisciplinary genre that imports into theatre techniques first developed in the fields of journalism, sociology, and law. The intertwining of these disciplines is contradictory on many levels. On the one hand, verbatim theatre defers to theatre as a strategy to fill a lack that social sciences seem to suffer from. On the other hand, it is an anti-theatrical genre that treats the techniques of traditional dramatic theatre as artifices that obstruct truths that can be found in daily life. The result is a form of theatrical minimalism that adopts the radical anti-theatricality of the historical avant-garde but nevertheless rests on mimesis borrowed from naturalistic drama. In this paper, I look at the work of Richard Norton-Taylor, a former editor of the foreign affairs section of The Guardian newspaper, who has become a playwright using strict verbatim techniques. What kind of truths does this theatre offer to excavate from everyday life? What model of politics emerges from these methods? What does the influence of the social sciences do to our understandings of what political theatre means now?
Since the fall of the Taliban, theatre is no longer illegal in Afghanistan. The Afghan National Theatre has been re-founded, an annual theatre festival – set up by the Goethe Institute – stages work by local playwrights, and a number of Western theatre companies perform in the country. But all of these projects take place in deeply contradictory terrain. While companies may imagine that their work helps to create democratic culture, they may also be playing into a larger Western project of what Foucault called “governmentality” for the region. By looking at work done by the Goethe Institue, France’s Théâtre du Soleil, and the U.S. government-sponsored Bond Street Theater, I analyze the contradictory role that theatre plays in fostering democratic spaces in occupied Afghanistan.
Such was the motivation for Jai Redman’s construction of a life-sized model of Guantánamo Bay in the middle of a working-class housing estate in Manchester. Nor was he content to have audiences watch a show in the model: he invited them to live in camp, subjected to the menacing will (though not the violence) of guards played by actors. But by protecting his audience, Redman risks undermining the very purpose of the piece as experiential and performative rather than representational. A different strategy was deployed by Ian Alan Paul in his alternative history project the “Guantánamo Museum,” which intruded only into the virtual space of the actual prison camp. Paul’s website is a convincing simulacrum of a prison-turned-museum that enacts a kind of utopian appropriation of the memorializing of the camp. In this paper I compare the two methodologies and consider the value of theatrical intrusion for movements for democracy.
In his work, Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal confronts his body with the larger forces of war and state violence. In his installation Shoot an Iraqi, Bilal sequestered himself in a room for 30 days in front of a moving paintball gun that was controlled by both live spectators and visitors to his web forum. Debilitating as it may have been to be shot at day and night, the violence enacted on Bilal’s body and mind remains linked to the Iraqi experience of warfare only by the way it transformed him into a material metaphor for the conflict. To gaze at Bilal’s battered body is to imagine an absent other. But the knowledge of the existence of an other who actually endures what Bilal only represents also re-inscribes Bilal’s body as one protected by Western law in contrast to those bodies overseas reduced to “bare life.” This paper analyzes the interplay of theatricality and performativity in political work by Bilal, Jai Redman and Mike Parr, asking what happens when representation theatricalizes performance art.
That may change in 2014 with the opening of several plays that explore aspects of race and alterity in the war. Christopher Morris and Jonathan Garfinkel travelled to Pakistan to develop Dust, a verbatim play built from interviews with Canadians, Afghans and Pakistanis involved in the conflict; Kawa Ada’s The Wanderers looks at the domestic politics of an Afghan-Canadian family; the MT Space’s Black Spring (a collaboration with Iraqi-Belgian playwright Hazim Kamaledin) explores a cross-cultural love affair during the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad; and Michael Greyeyes’s A Soldier’s Tale examines the experiences of First Nations soldiers in wars from World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Each of these plays participates in a re-writing of the dominant narratives of ethnicity on which the War on Terror is premised. I look at the theatrical strategies these artists have employed to stage the stories of marginalized communities not only as examples of diasporic self-representation but also as attempts at cross-cultural representation. What kind of theatrical methods have artists developed to stage problems of alterity, the politicization of identity during wartime, the surveillance of racialized communities in the West, and the misrepresentation of the artists’ homelands? What kind of ethics of representation are involved here and how are they complicated by the performance taking place within one of the belligerent states?
Leadley
Once upon a time in Guantanamo Bay, three men were found dead in their prison cells. How
did they die? A series of obstacles emerge that make it impossible to find out what happened.
Our own physical distance from the evidence, the difficulties of navigating military censorship,
the inexpressibility of trauma, the unreliability of translation, the challenge of understanding
experience across cultural difference and the sensitivity with which death must be approached
combine to make the task appear insurmountable. And yet, we are impelled to ‘know’.
Six years later, a group of graduate students get together to create a play. They try to piece
together the fragments left behind; the words of prisoners scratched into Styrofoam cups, the
debris of our collective cultural conscious, and memories long-forgotten and only partially
recalled as we wake. Now what?
Why do we turn to theatre/performance ‘now’? And how is performance a medium for (re)
presenting what happened ‘then’? While we were not physically present in the moment of the
event, we are always already present to our personal memory – as mediated as it may be – of that
event as ‘history’.
This praxis session is concerned with the representation of inaccessible memories. We are calling
for proposals in the form of performances, performative papers, and/or interactive presentations
that interrogate the challenges of representing the (im)possible and the (un)documented past.
This includes issues surrounding both the performance of memory and documenting memory in
performance; performances which address acts of collective memory; performing memories to
which we, as performers, do not have direct access.
Possible points of interrogation include but are not limited to: Who has authority to speak
about others’ experiences? How does language help and/or hinder this expression? How could
performance open up this expression to other modes of presentation (moving from semantics
to somatic perception)? What is the place of trauma? Are obstacles to perception in conflict to
the political and ethical imperative to see in order to act? What dramaturgical tools are useful in
negotiating the accessibility of memory?
No event more powerfully encapsulates the melodramatic kitsch of the DPRK’s national mythology than the impressive propaganda spectacle, the Arirang Games. Featuring between 80,000 and 100,000 performers, the Games offer a show that is part gymnastics, part dance, and part military parade and the effect resembles something between a militarized Cirque du Soleil and a dream sequence in a Disney film directed by Leni Riefenstahl. In this paper I look at the Arirang Games and the political organization of time in the DPRK. In particular, I focus on the way that the excess and simultaneity of activity in the games opposes theatrical time with historical time (the state’s foundational mythology), and utopian time (the dream of future unification) in a way that is intended to carry over as model for everyday living.
What secrets can clowns teach us? Part automaton, part grotesque human, the clown tempts us to return to the way we thought in early childhood, before maturity and civilization (in Freud’s sense) convinced us to abandon our belief in magic. Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay, a devised theatre production currently in production at the Drama Centre, uses a deathly version of clown as a means to explore political injustice in a manner that doesn’t claim to represent the experience of those who suffer through it as much as the difficulty of those attempting to see it. In this talk, the dramaturges of the nebulous “Politburo” of the production, discus the methodologies that went into creating the play.
With Matt Jones, Natalia Esling, Myrto Koumarianos, and Allison Leadley
While contemporary laptop performance is often criticized for its lack of showmanship, Merzbow’s non-performance was the apotheosis of this, putting aside the conventions of stage busyness (nob-turning, rummaging through records, listening through one headphone, or compensating for non-performance through visual effects). Since no attempt was made to persuade the audience that anything was happening “live,” what was the meaning of the live experience? Merzbow’s non-performance does for sight what Cage’s 4”33’ does for sound, by redirecting attention from the stage to what is happening among the audience in the room. Whereas Cage’s composition opens up the possibility of ambient sound in a room becoming part of the music, Merzbow’s onslaught of noise definitively closes off the possibility of any other sound being audible.
While noise in music is often thought of only in negative terms (especially in Jacques Attali’s formulation of noise as the ever-present Other of western music), this noise can neither be thought of as only a negation of music, as Merzbow’s earlier, more Dada-influenced work might be nor only as cathartic form of aggression like metal. While Merzbow’s earlier work was interested in a radical negation of melody, rhythm and the conventions of music production, his analogue noise still depended on a relation between a signifier (the noise-maker) and a signified (the sound of noise). In his digital work, this link is entirely broken: the digital noises have no referents and this is reflected in the non-performance of the sounds. During the performance, the audience mostly sat on the floor and people closed their eyes, suggesting their openness to receive noise as a pure, positive creation. This opens the possibility of moving beyond Attali’s Hegelian narrative of noise/music towards a Deleuzean understanding of noise as event. This turn away from aggressive negation sets the stage for tracking the influence of Cagean aesthetics in Merzbow’s late career.