Hi there,
I'm Robert.
Here you'll find documentation of my site-specific artistic practice, research, and teaching.
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About me
Robert Motum is a theatre creator, researcher, and teacher. With a background in site-specific and devised performance, Robert has staged work on an active city bus, in a dorm room, in a Queen West gallery, over Snapchat, in a vacant Target store, in augmented reality, and occasionally even in a theatre space. His work has been supported by the Stratford Festival Playwright's Retreat, Why Not Theatre, Quarantine Theatre (UK), and by $250,000 in grants and fellowships. He is the playwright of A Community Target (Outside the March / Convergence) - a verbatim look into Canada's precarious retail climate.
Based in Toronto, but working throughout the GTHA, Robert's recent directing credits include: Train Ballet (Theatre Gargantua), PLAY THIS (Tottering Biped), The Grass is Greenest at the Houston Astrodome (Toronto Fringe), and King Charles III* (Mirvish/Studio 180, *assistant). He is the series editor of the Guidebooks from Memory artbook series.
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Robert holds an MA in Performance from Aberystwyth University (Wales) and recently completed his SSHRC-funded PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto where his research examined intersections of site-specificity and notions of nationhood. His dissertation, Scripted Borders: Performing Nation and Community in Micronationhood, won the CDTPS Alumni Dissertation Award which recognizes the best dissertation produced in an academic year.
Robert's writing and research have appeared in The Drama Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, Digital Society, The Globe and Mail, and in edited collections from Palgrave MacMillan, Routledge, and Playwrights Canada Press. His co-edited collection, Subversive States: DIY Nationhood and the Staging of Sovereignty is under contract with Routledge.
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Robert currently holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, and serves as Faculty at the Rotman School of Management.
