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FCCS Researcher of the Month
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VIRGINIE MAGNAT

V MagnatDr. Virginie Magnat is the Principal Investigator for the international research project “Meetings with Remarkable Women - Tu es la fille de quelqu'un” funded by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant and a SSHRC Research/Creation in Fine Arts Grant. As the first examination of women's contribution to Jerzy Grotowski's ground-breaking investigation of performance, this project examines the current creative work of women from different cultures and generations who share a direct connection to Grotowski's theatrical and post-theatrical experiments, thereby offering a timely re-assessment of the Polish director's legacy (UNESCO designated 2009 as the “Year of Grotowski”) and probing its enduring influence on contemporary performance practice and research.

Dr. Magnat discusses her interdisciplinary approach in “Conducting Embodied Research at the Intersection of Performance Studies, Experimental Ethnography, and Indigenous Methodologies,” featured in Anthropologica, the peer-reviewed journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society (“New Directions in Experimental and Engaged Ethnography” Vol. 53 N˚2, 2011), as well as in the book chapter “Performative Approaches to Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Research” in Research Beyond Borders: Multidisciplinary Reflections (Lexington, 2012).

Dr. Magnat is currently working on the monograph Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women, contracted for publication in the “Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies” series, and is editing a documentary film series featuring workshops, performances, and interviews exclusively produced for this project during her three-year multi-sited fieldwork. In December 2011, for example, Dr. Magnat traveled to Denmark to direct a film about master-performer/teacher Iben Nagel Rasmussen at the Odin Teatret, an internationally acclaimed experimental theatre company directed by Grotowski's close collaborator Eugenio Barba. The project's documentary film series will be accessible on the Routledge Digital Performance Archive, an unprecedented online video resource of world performance traditions and practices.

Virginie Magnat

Virginie Magnat (fourth from right) participating in workshop led by Ewa Benesz (seated left), Sardinia, 2010.
Photo by Celeste Taliani for Meetings with Remarkable Women - Tu es la fille de quelqu'un

In May 2012, Dr. Magnat will present her current research and co-chair a roundtable on acting training and diversity (as a follow-up to the 2011 Magnetic North Theatre Festival panel “Missing Links”) at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) annual conference during the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. This year, the theme of the Congress is “Crossroads: Scholarship for an Uncertain World,” and Dr. Magnat will discuss her article “Can Research Become Ceremony? Performance Ethnography and Indigenous Epistemologies” forthcoming in Canadian Theatre Review. Drawing from the work of Indigenous scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Manulani Aluli Meyer, Shawn Wilson, and Cree artist and writer Floyd Favel, she asks how performance ethnography informed by Indigenous epistemologies might become a relational research practice vital to the survival of all living species and of the natural world we co-inhabit.

Dr. Magnat's book review of Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance Between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present by Nicola Savarese (co-author with Eugenio Barba of A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology) appeared in 2011 in the international peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.21 (4). She has contributed a chapter titled “Productive Disorientation, or the Ups and Downs of Embodied Research” to Researching Amongst Elites: Challenges and Opportunities in Studying Up, a book co-edited by UBC Sociology professors Luis L.M. Aguiar and Christopher J. Schneider, forthcoming with Ashgate in 2012.


 

 

 

 

 

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Last reviewed 5/2/2012 9:08:19 AM

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