The Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (CDTPS) is proud to announce that Professor Kathleen Gallagher, Director of CDTPS, has been awarded a prestigious SSHRC Insight Grant in support of her Theatre, Youth, and Digital Media Lab. This grant will fund an ambitious international research project titled:
The Drama Workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises.
At the heart of this project lies a powerful question How does the drama workshop equip young artists for both the world we have and the better world-to-be-imagined?
This inquiry re-centres the drama workshop as a vital space for intergenerational theatre-making—one that fosters co-presence, creative energy, and the relational capacities needed to navigate today’s complex global challenges. Through a series of collaborative workshops, the project will explore how drama can serve as a laboratory for civic imagination and cooperation in an era marked by polarization, climate anxiety, and economic precarity.
The initiative will establish an international and intergenerational Community of Practice comprising artist-teachers and artist-students across Canada, Ireland, India, Nigeria, and Greece. Together, they will engage in experimental drama workshops featuring solo performance, devised theatre, site-specific theatre, and ensemble-building practices.
Collaborators
The project brings together a dynamic team of artists and scholars, including:
- CDTPS Faculty: Izuu Nwankwọ and Baņuta Rubess
- Toronto-based Artists: Andrew Kushnir, Zorana Sadiq, Liisa Repo-Martell, Amaka Umeh, and Alan Dilworth
- International Collaborators: Erika Piazzoli (Ireland), Myrto Pigkou Repousi (Greece), Munia Debleena Tripathi (India)
- Graduate Researchers from the Theatre, Youth, and Digital Media Lab: Meera Kanageswaran, Munia Tripathi, Nancy Cardwell, Celeste Kirsh, Amanda Buffalo, and Arianna Odlin
Together, this team will explore how the “craft” of cooperation can be nurtured in what Richard Sennett (2012) calls “the technician’s workshop,” a site that “has been since ancient times a model for sustained cooperation” and “the most important institution anchoring civic life” via the social rituals fostered through collectively undertaken acts of making and repairing.
We congratulate Professor Gallagher and her collaborators on this exciting new chapter of international research and creative inquiry.