DART Performance Research Institute (DART PRI) is a performance research and development incubator housed in the Department of Dramatic Arts (DART) at Brock University.

The Institute supports performance research and research creation projects that align with DART’s commitments:

praxis: the generative integration of theory and practice
anti-supremacy: active interventions into identity-based and intersectional oppressions arising from the concept of superiority and related practices.

All projects also provide opportunities for DART students to participate.

Projects at the PRI are organized into three main channels of development: Research Explorations, Summer Institute Workshops and Summer Institute Residencies.  We welcome expressions of interest.

PRI Research Explorations are intended for projects in the developmental stage. A typical exploration offers 1 – 3 days in studio or in a lab space to develop early drafts of ideas and concepts which will help progress the project to a proof-of-concept stage. Recurring studio time may also be requested (eg. 2 days monthly). Explorations may result in a later Summer Institute Workshop.  

PRI Summer Institute Residencies are intended for projects at more advanced stages of development, normally with plans to produce a full scale production for public presentation within the next 2 years. A typical workshop offers 4-5 weeks in studio to rehearse and further develop scripts, designs, creative approaches and more through a collaborative process. Workshops will result in a public work-in-progress showing (not necessarily a performance) at the end of the workshop period.

PRI Summer Institute Workshops for 2026

From June 8 – August 26, 2026 the Performance Research Institute (PRI) welcomes six projects at the proof-of-concept stage. Ranging from Research Explorations through to a Summer Institute Residency, these projects will provide 1-5 weeks of in studio and online development to test or develop early drafts and ideas. Workshops will normally result in a work-in-progress sharing  to an invited audience.

Interested students should apply with the Department here or https://bit.ly/49QBGuF beginning late January. Applications are open until April 13, 2026.

Students with successful applications may be eligible to receive course credit. Once approved, students with successful applications register for these projects using the course codes DART 3P90/3F90.  Registration opens March 3, 2026.

Project information:

The Agony and The Ecstasy – June
Trevor Copp (Tottering Biped Theatre) & David Vivian
In this two-day workshop DART students will work with texts drawn a landmark study of heterosexism and Transphobia in Canadian Catholic Schools. Students will be invited to read from the redacted interviews of the research subjects to facilitate a creative investigation for dramaturgical and playmaking provocations as Trevor prepares to launch a province-wide research tour. Students will provide feedback on the draft texts, contribute to discussions about content, and engage in discussion about design choices for simple, low tech and in-the-field engagement.

‘subh kuch theek hai (everything’s fine) – A funny play about being depressed. – late July & August
Alison Wong, Waleed Ansari & team
subh kuch theek hai is a collective sensorial experience showing how much work it actually takes to do nothing, just to make it through the day. The play takes place immersed in MAN’s subconscious as his internal processes come to life through a multimedia environment.

Elsbeth – August
Mike Griffin & Jewels Krauss
Elsbeth uses physical theatre, masks, and puppetry to give insight into the inner experience, the internal word. The play explores tracing back the fabric of one’s family story through the lens of a granddaughter who is mourning the death of her grandma, a woman who suffered with OCD for most of her life amidst the confining structures and gender barriers of post-war Germany.

Secret Service of the Stars – June
David Fancy & David Vivian
Secret Service of the Stars is a historical-metaphysical espionage drama inspired by the extraordinary real-life story of Louis de Wohl, the queer Hungarian-German playwright, novelist and astrologer hired by British intelligence (MI5 and MI6) during the Second World War to produce horoscopes for psychological warfare against Hitler and the Nazi elite. The play reimagines De Wohl’s recruitment by Churchill’s Ministry of Information as part of a covert campaign to weaponize the stars—using astrology not only as propaganda but as a mirror of the cosmic anxieties of a world rife with fascism, political extremism, conspiracy, and war. This new play is planned for the Fall 2027 mainstage at DART.
In a combination of table and floor work the students will engage with new and historical texts (printed and digital) as they undertake dramaturgical explorations, creative devising, and world-building for the play. Students should bring digital tools to access the online resources as well as appropriate dress for studio work.

Letters from the Front – August
Shannon Hughes
Letters from the Front is a documentary theatre project in development that draws on hundreds of postcards and a wartime journal exchanged between my great-grandfather and grandmother during World War I. The materials—spanning themes of love, loss, resistance, and mental health—offer a deeply personal window into the human cost of war and its intergenerational reverberations. Combining archival preservation, historical research, and creative performance, the project aims to bring these forgotten voices to life through collaborative exploration with students and artists. Ultimately, Letters from the Front seeks to transform private family correspondence into a collective act of remembrance, education, and renewal.

Wife of Bath, 1998 – Late July & August
Independent Auntie Productions with Anna Chatterton, Evalyn Parry, U of Waterloo Feminist Think Tank, & Jennifer Roberts-Smith
This is an original, two-act play that explores the challenges of intergenerational feminism. As the1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal plays out in the background, a group of women-identified, trans-gendered, non-binary, and racially diverse theatre students wrestle with how to adapt Geoffrey Chaucer’s 600-year-old story about a protagonist (the Wife herself), who has been the focus of centuries of feminist and pre-feminist debate. Drawing on the Aunties trademark sensibilities and absurdist, clown-inspired style, this will be a subversive comedy about young, political artists attempting to make a “revolutionary” piece of theatre, while behind the scenes, interpersonal relationships and tensions simmer, threatening to explode. This residency will pilot a partnered, industry-academic approach to teaching theatre through a new play creation process that centres diversity, equity, and inclusion at all stages.

Student roles include:
Performer, Stage Manager, Assistant Stage Manager, Dramaturg, Puppet Designer, Sound Designer, Lighting Designer, Set Designer, Projections/Media Designer, Wardrobe Designer, Multi-media creators, Set/Props builder, Assistant director, Assistant production manager, producer, communications and digital content creator, videographer/digital archivist.

PRI Research Explorations for 2024-2025-2026

Dear Bear Multi-Arts: Why Don’t We Together, January and February, 2026
This collaboration between Dear Bear Multi-Arts Collective, the Museum in the Hallway / Boîte-en-valise of the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture and the Performance Research Institute, coordinated by DART faculty David Vivian, presented an exhibit about a developping immersive audio-visual storytelling experience by the Niagara-based Dear Bear Multi-Arts collective.

Dear Bear’s work often explores ideas of community, togetherness, and hope. Why Don’t We Together (WDWT) is a collection of original stories presented in an immersive sound and light experience. This project led by alumni of the MIWSFPA has toured Ontario since 2023 and was recently presented for public engagement at the MIWSFPA in September 2025.

The exhibit was situated on the 2nd floor by the Theatre entrance and included a section of The Hut revealing the design and build, a video (three loops) showing the build and immersive experience, and QR codes that linked to a selection of the WDWT programs in 360º video presented on their website (best viewed on the YouTube platform) and a selection of stories commissioned from local artists for the 2025 season. Viewers were encouraged to bring their smartphones, headphones and to come play with the lights.

The Dear Bear Team includes DART alumni Taylor Bogaert (Artistic Director, Co-Sound Designer, Writer (Procella), Alex Sykes (Production Manager, Lighting & Co-Sound Designer) and Josh Loewen (Hut & Co-Sound Designer).  Additional Sound Design for WDWT was provided by Zoe Daca (Sound Designer & Composer for: A Small Life, Credit Card & Discovering My Big Beautiful Bear). All credits for the 2025 season and the exhibition are available here.

Dear Bear Multi-arts returns to the MIWSFPA in May 2026 on the occasion of the Niagara Children’s Festival, a celebrated annual event produced by Carousel Players, with newly commisioned story experiences for children and youth.
You may follow the team on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/dearbearmultiarts/

Secret Service of the Stars, December 2025
Secret Service of the Stars is an ongoing performance research and research-creation project developed through the DART Performance Research Institute in the Department of Dramatic Arts. Led by DART Professors Fancy and Vivian and developed in collaboration with interdisciplinary feminist legal scholar and astrologer Beverly Orser, the project investigates the entanglement of theatre, astrology, geopolitics, and intelligence history during the Second World War.

The project is grounded in sustained engagement with declassified MI5 and MI6 archival materials, accessed as part of the research process, in order to establish historical fidelity to the figure of Louis de Wohl. This queer Hungarian Jewish emigré playwright, novelist, and astrologer served in the British intelligence effort to counter Nazi use of esoteric practices to legitimate and sustain the Third Reich. In addition to drawing on historical record, Secret Service of the Stars explicitly embraces speculative fabulation as a dramaturgical method by treating the archive not as a closed record but as a site of gaps, redactions, absences, and suppressed knowledges that invite imaginative and ethical intervention.

Rather than reconstructing history as a stable narrative, the project asks how performance might engage the archive as a field of forces: ideological, cosmological, affective, and institutional. Astrology is approached not as metaphor or aesthetic motif, but as a historically operative epistemology, a way of knowing that shaped decision-making, temporality, embodiment, belief, and governance within wartime intelligence cultures, while simultaneously being continuously pressed towards the margins of legitimacy.

In December 2025, Vivian and Fancy undertook a two-day Research Exploration with six DART students, situating them as active collaborators in the project’s conceptual and embodied inquiry. The exploration functioned as a laboratory for testing how historical research, marginalized knowledges, speculative dramaturgy, and somatic practice might co-produce theatrical knowledge. The work included:

• Dramaturgical and archival inquiry, introducing students to declassified intelligence documents, historical contexts, and contested narratives surrounding wartime astrology and intelligence operations.
• Flash dramaturgy and visual research, in which students assembled image constellations, textual fragments, and reference materials to articulate the aesthetic, political, and cosmological logics of the play.
• Embodied and movement-based research, offering performers opportunities to inhabit planetary forces, relational dynamics, and non-human agencies through physical action rather than representational psychology.
• Astrological collaboration, led by Beverly Orser, grounding dramaturgical and movement work in planetary configurations, exaltations, and temporal relations, and treating astrology as a compositional system with material and performative consequences.

Across these practices, the exploration foregrounded non-normative temporalities, distributed agency, and embodied epistemologies, aligning with the PRI’s commitments to praxis and anti-supremacy. The project explicitly engages queer and decolonial valences, attending to how occult, esoteric, and non-rational knowledges have been marginalized, pathologized, or instrumentalized within imperial, heteronormative, and colonial regimes of power. Rather than recuperating these knowledges uncritically, the work interrogates their ambivalent political histories while exploring their capacity to generate alternative modes of relation, perception, creativity and ultimately: resistance.

Secret Service of the Stars will continue development through the Performance Research Institute during Summer 2026, with expanded student participation in dramaturgical research, movement inquiry, and speculative world-building. The longer-term trajectory of the project is oriented toward a full MainStage production in Fall 2027, following additional workshop and residency phases.

As with all PRI initiatives, the project is structured to provide DART students with sustained exposure to interdisciplinary research-creation practices, collaborative authorship, and experimental methodologies that challenge conventional hierarchies of knowledge, centralized authorship, and theatrical production.

2021, July 2025
In early July 2025, alumna Cole Lewis (BA Dramatic Arts, 2004; MA Pop Culture, 2008; Associate Professor of Acting at Toronto Metropolitan University) and colleagues Patrick Blenkarn and Sam Ferguson brought their new production 2021 to our School for a week of creative and technical development. Co-produced by Guilty by Association and The Elbow Theatre, 2021 is a live performance where story, video games, and AI collide, blurring the boundaries between memory and simulation: under the glow of a flickering screen, a daughter weighs the worth of her father’s legacy.

While at the MIWSFPA the company workshopped Act Two of the show, a live video game performance with audience participation. Members of the community from Suitcase in Point (Natasha Pedros (BA Theatre, 2004), Dienye Waboso Amajor, and Edwin Conroy) collaborated on choreography and gestural sequences. Laura Maieron (BA Dramatic Arts, Production and Design 2024) introduced theatrical lighting concepts and the team at Falling Squirrels, a local independent video game studio associated with Niagara College and Brock University advanced the work to achieve accessibility goals. DART’s Theatre Technician Sandra Marcroft hosted these explorations in the Studio C and main theatres.

Along with the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock University, the project is supported by partners Playwrights Workshop Montreal, Precursor Lab, BMO Lab, Chrysalis Theatre, TMU’s Design & Technology Lab, and Theatre Mitu. The project is funded by National Creation Fund, Canada Council for the Arts.

The company recently presented their project at FOLDA 2025 (Festival of Live Digital Art) https://www.folda.ca/event/2021/ where it was presented in the Beta program, ready for public testing to refine the audience experience. Prior to that they published their report Dramaturgies of the Unreal in the Nightswimming Pure Research Project in November 2024. The company is looking forward to the world premiere in New York City in January 2026 and the show can be seen in Canada at the PuSh Festival in Vancouver from Jan 22 -Feb 8, 2026. For more information see https://www.guiltybyassociation.ca/2021dossier.

other recent research explorations include:

The Agony and the Ecstasy, June 2025
A collaboration between Tottering Biped Theatre (Burlington) and the Department of Dramatic Arts, Artistic Director Trevor Copp (TBT) and Scenographer David Vivian (DART) invited four students to launch a summer-long creative research project to support the development of The Agony and Ecstasy of the Ontario Catholic School Board. This was the initial phase of a multi-year process to create a new performance event of devised and possibly verbatim theatre exploring the history of human rights conflicts perpetrated by the Ontario Catholic School Board. This initial phase focused upon research (legal, social, creative, personal) and the exploration of innovative creative methods that will sustain the important story-telling about the ongoing harm experienced by 2SLGBTQIA+ students, educators and community leaders.

During these June meetings the participating students learned about the concept and story background as they launched the project for research and creative play. The work plan included:

1. Learn about the issue(s) and the experiences (social/political/emotional/trauma).
2. Undertake readings to be synthesized and reported to the team later in the summer (readings will be curated by TC, DV and guests).
3. Research related historical and contemporary experiences – non-fiction (focus on institutions legal and educational, policy) and fictionalized (ie. also other creative projects).
4. Participate in generative conversations about shifting perceptions, language and forms of engagement, to set some markers on proposed and desired outcomes, and how they will achieve them. We invited student participants to formulate possible frameworks and outcomes for method, creative process, and communications.
5. Participate in embodied expressive physical work in the studio to advance a multi-channel research engagement process and grow seeds of potential future performed and performative expressions.  This was an opportunity to explore some initial impulses and to improvise in the moment.

Across two days Bee, Simon, Skylar and Tim joined Trevor and David in Studio C for some thought-provoking knitting of their interconnected experiences and they collectively articulated the research trajectory for the summer projects. The team has launched a project blog to provide a forum for collaboration across the coming months and welcomes inquiries from interested or affected persons. Contact Trevor at [email protected] and David at [email protected].

AnthrApology, December 2024
AnthrApology is an ongoing performance research and durational practice developed in part through the DART Performance Research Institute in the Department of Dramatic Arts. Conceived and led by DART Professors Vivian and Fancy, the project investigates the entanglements of performance, ecology, cosmology, human folly, and posthuman ethics through extended-duration theatrical forms.

The work departs from the premise that the “Anthropocene” can be adequately addressed through representational critique alone. Instead, AnthrApology mobilizes performance as a site of ontological exposure and endurance, asking how bodies, be they human or more-than-human, register ecological crisis, historical responsibility, and planetary alterity over long arcs time. The project resists moralized accusation or redemptive narrative, favouring instead sustained attention, repetition, and co-presence as modes of inquiry.

In December 2024, AnthrApology was developed through a PRI Research Exploration culminating in an eight-hour durational public performance event, drawing extensively from selections of the AnthrApology text. The exploration brought together members of the 4THOT collective, a constellation of long-term collaborators whose practices span performance, scenography, banned knowledges, music, and performance research. Participants included:

• David Vivian (scenography, media and spatial composition)
• David Fancy (text and direction)
• Colin Anthes (performance)
• Beverly Orser (cosmological and temporal research)
• Marley Liepert (performance research collaborator)
• WL Altman (live music and sonic environment)
• Sondra Marcroft (lighting and stage management)
• Dylan Smith (DART student technician)

The eight-hour structure functioned not as spectacle but as creation method: a durational performance and scenographic ecology in which text, sound, movement, stillness, fatigue, attention, elation, and interruption were allowed to operate without narrative compression. Rather than staging the Anthropocene as catastrophe or warning, the performance cultivated a space of non-extractive witnessing, where audiences and performers alike encountered grief and complicity arising from a wide range of violences, and endurance without resolution.

Live music and sonic textures by WL Altman operated as environmental forces rather than accompaniment, while scenographic and spatial decisions emphasized exposure, restraint, and temporal dilation. Ritual frameworks contributed by Beverly Orser informed the temporal architecture of the event, aligning planetary and geoartistic cycles with shifts in intensity, pacing, and attention, and situating human performance within larger cosmological rhythms. Linguistic, performative, scenographic, and musical expression affirmed the role of the artistic as fabulatory world-making activity in the face of cosmologically nihilistic tendencies brought about by high capitalist ‘end-time’ predictions and messianism.

Conceptual and Political Stakes
AnthrApology engages explicitly with posthuman and decolonial orientations, resisting anthropocentric mastery and liberal humanist redemption. The project refuses to position the human as sole agent, witness, or victim, instead situating human bodies as permeable, contingent, and implicated within broader ecological and cosmological systems. The work also challenges extractive models of spectatorship and productivity by insisting on duration, fatigue, and partial attendance as valid modes of engagement. In doing so, AnthrApology aligns with the PRI’s anti-supremacy commitments by questioning hierarchies of attention, authorship, and value by seeking to foreground vulnerability, dependency, and relational endurance over virtuosity or consumption.

Ongoing Trajectory
The December 2024 exploration represents a key phase in the ongoing development of AnthrApology as a long-term research-creation project. Future iterations will continue to test durational formats, collaborative authorship, and cosmological frameworks through the Performance Research Institute and other fora, with opportunities for expanded student and community participation.

As with all PRI projects, AnthrApology functions as both artistic practice and research laboratory by advancing experimental performance methodologies all while cultivating forms of ethical and ecological attention that exceed the limits of conventional theatrical production.