Laura Levin sets the table with rich feasts for her graduate students on so many levels.
Sometimes it’s an actual dinner, a salon-style dinner, to bring grad students together and help them relax into their roles. Sometimes it’s a cross-cultural dinner that brings together researchers, activists and artists from across the Americas to dine and discuss – and likely laugh and play – and gain understanding. Sometimes it’s work that helps students understand the underlying issues of food insecurity.
“I co-organized (with Zoë Heyn-Jones and Tracy Tidgwell) a field school with students in Mexico City on art and food sovereignty where we spent a week working with and learning from artists, as well as local agricultural and food activists, to engage larger questions around how we are connected globally via food systems and the inequalities that are built into them,” says Levin, an associate professor of theatre and performance studies in York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design.
She is interested in how visual and performance artists can call attention to shared human rights and environmental justice issues, but also how artistic work can help to build communities – community being a recurring concept in her work.
“Internationalization” is another important theme which Levin expresses in the number of global experiences she has co-developed for her students in the Faculty of Graduate Studies. The list of these experiences is lengthy. A sampling: bringing students to an encuentro – a gathering – of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics in Montreal; co-designing with Professor Brandon Vickerd a new course on global artist residencies at York’s Las Nubes campus in Costa Rica; and supporting (with project leads Mary Bunch and John Greyson) a Queer Summer Institute at York which looked at how queer intermedial performance can respond to transnational politics.
Levin says her aim with the field schools and residencies is to educate her grad students about social justice issues that may seem remote from their lives, and to expose them to transnational arts pedagogies that bridge cultures. The experiences also model ways for students to form transborder coalitions in the face of rights emergencies that connect north and south, from the dramatic rise in anti-immigrant sentiment to expulsions of refugees from Central America and then from the U.S. to the displacement of Indigenous communities by resource extraction.
Levin supervises students on a wide range of topics beyond international relations. Recently supervised dissertations included work on critical drag performance, which involved tracing an alternate history of drag in the Americas (Stephen Lawson), Yiddish performance and knowledge transfer (Avia Moore), and critiques of Canadian militarism. The latter, an award-winning dissertation written by Helene Vosters, included a research-creation project in which Vosters sat with community members as they collectively unstitched military uniforms, thread by thread, while they discussed their relationship to militarism.
Jayna Mees is one of the eight grad students that Levin supervises. The PhD candidate says her work has evolved under Levin, shifting from her initial interest in site-specific theatre to her current focus on disability justice in digital and extended reality performance.
Mees points to Levin’s “ability to balance the practice-based side of things with the theoretical side of things. She's brilliant at both, but she doesn't view them as separate. They're two sides of the same coin, and that's how I view them as well.
“Laura empowers us to self-direct our own projects, giving us the space to develop the skills and self-discipline needed to do this work. But she’s always there to help and support us when we need it.”
Hurmat Ul Ain, another grad student, appreciates that aspect of Levin’s mentorship. She outlines the difference between the purpose of performance art and the writing of a dissertation about it. She says Levin, despite being part of a university structure for nearly 20 years, is still able to move freely and truthfully through the performance world.
“That's what the magic of Laura is all about,” Ul Ain says. “She embodies the performance spirit. She calls us disciplinary misfits. A lot of people are frightened by it. But some of us really thrive in it. And Laura is somebody who is able to see and capture that energy and still build the platforms and systems that allow space for those energies.”
Levin ponders the supervisory relationship. “I think my role is to respond to the kinds of things students are doing research on, but also to help inspire them through different frameworks.
“As a supervisor, I try to provide opportunities for students to think more deeply in relation to their artistic practices. Developing international partnerships and taking time to learn about other cultural contexts are critical parts of carrying out community-led research,” says Levin. “At the same time, this kind of work deepens students’ understandings of the complexity of the social justice issues they’re writing about.”
With files from Julie Carl