A photograph of a field of Daisies; each with a yellow centre and white petals. Overhead, the sky is a deep blue and is strewn with wispy white clouds.

Round Table:
Francophonie et diversité

(CHAIR: ART BABAYANTS & EURY COLIN CHANG) ÉMILIE MONNET, MARIE LOUIS BIBISH MUMBU, LARA ARABIAN & JULIE TAMIKO-MANNING

Friday, June 25, 2021 | 19:30 - 21:00

Live discussion on Zoom; spoken in French with live LSQ interpretation. There will also be live translation from French to English available in the chat.

Join Now in Room B

La Francophonie et la Diversité, organized by Art Babayants and Eury Colin Chang, reveals the multiple perspectives of pluri-lingual artists, including those working across English and French theatre contexts, and within the global Francophonie. This roundtable discussion features Montreal-based Émilie Monnet, Marie Louise Bibish Mumbu, Lara Araybian, and Julie Tamiko-Manning. The roundtable offers a space for BIPoC voices (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour), focusing on the lived experiences of artists whose creative work explores issues of racial, linguistic, and gender diversity.

Bios:

Author and playwright, activist through words and art, Marie Louise Bibish Mumbu is a resilient Afro-feminist Quebecer who regularly participates in theatre events in Montreal through popular education and the decolonization of mentalities. Her novel, Samantha à Kinshasa, republished in Montreal in February 2015 by éditions Recto Verso, was adapted for theatre by Philippe Ducros under the title Bibish of Kinshasa.

Since graduating from The Dome in 1991, Julie Tamiko Manning has performed across Canada from school gyms in Nunavik to the independent stage in Vancouver to the national stage in Ottawa. Selected theatre credits include: Doris Truscott in Innocence Lost (NAC/ Centaur), Clarence in Richard III (META nomination - Best Supporting, Metachroma Theatre), Nancy in Oliver! (National Arts Centre), and Jam in Greg MacArthur’s girls! girls! girls! (Teatro Comaneci). This summer she will reprise her role of Tokyo Rose in Marie Clements’ Burning Vision with Tant Per Tant in Barcelona, Spain. Her first play, Mixie and the Halfbreeds, (co-written with Adrienne Wong) was produced in 2009 (Neworld Theatre, Vancouver) and she is currently working to tour (with co-creator, Matt Miwa) their award winning The TASHME Project: The Living Archives, a verbatim play tracing the experience of the WW2 Japanese Canadian internment, through the memories of their community elders. She is an associate artistic producer of Metachroma Theatre, whose mandate is to address the under-representation of visible minority actors in Canadian theatre.

Lara Arabian is a trilingual Toronto-based artist by way of Beirut, Lebanon, upstate NY, and Paris, France. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Sorbonne (Paris IV) and has been nominated for a Dora award as both an actor and a writer.  As an actor, she has worked with companies across Canada. As a writer, she has been a member of the prestigious Banff Playwrights Lab and this past spring her radio play, Convictions (co-commissioned by Radio-Canada and Théâtre français de Toronto), was broadcast across Ontario on Radio-Canada. Lara teaches in both the Musical Theatre and Performing Arts Preparation departments at Sheridan College where she focuses her efforts on diversity and inclusion in the curriculum.

At the crossroads of theatre, performance and media arts, Émilie Monnet’s artistic practice addresses issues of identity, memory, history and transformation. Her performances draw on the symbolism of dreams and myths, both personal and collective, to tell stories that question our modern-day world. In 2011, she founded Onishka Productions, a Montreal-based interdisciplinary arts organization specializing in shows created by artists from different cultures and disciplines; and in 2016, she founded Scène contemporaine autochtone (SCA), an artistic and critical initiative foregrounding Indigenous performing arts projects. A scaled-down version of SCA was presented in Buenos Aires in March 2017, featuring Indigenous artists from Quebec and Argentina. The daughter of an Anishnaabe mother and a French father, Émilie lives in Montreal. Her artistic practice is informed by her many years of activism with Indigenous organizations in Canada and Latin America, and her participation in artistic projects involving women offenders and Indigenous.