Memory Keeping: An Embedded Writer on Abolitionist Theatre

Abolitionist world-making, like theatre and performance, requires imagination, collective action, and embodied engagement with the material world. The Stages of Transformation (SoT) project models how a symbiotic relationship between abolition and the theatre arts can generate liberatory and justice-oriented outcomes on Turtle Island. The author, highlighting their role as an embedded writer for SoT, shows how queer and trans theatre artists of colour have mobilized the abolitionist ethos—one that demands the destruction of borders, policing, and carceral logics in so-called Canada while building worlds that respect Indigenous sovereignty and deliver on a promise for collective safety, solidarity, justice, and joy. Embedding allowed the author to participate from within this world-making process—to witness, create, and iterate with theatre artists rather than document their finished work from an “outsider” or “objective” point of view. Moving beyond mere documentation and into creation with others demonstrates our understanding of abolition as an iterative, collective process of world-making. This article positions theatre and embedding as generative forms of thought-partnership, solidarity-making, and research-creation. It also situates the theatre practice of embedding in conversation with Black feminisms and the abolition feminist framework that were critical to SoT. Here, theatre and embedding become iterative practices of witnessing—where we persist in creating worlds of abundance, justice and liberation—or what Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson call “rehearsals for living.”