Lara Aysal
Artist and Researcher
Country: Canada
Cohort: CCL Canada 2023 (Online)
"Building collaboration to rehearse adical utopias."
About
Lara is a climate justice and human rights activist, performance artist, facilitator of community-oriented projects from Anatolia/Turkey.
She has collaborated with a variety of communities in South Africa, South America, Turkey, Italy, Germany and so-called Canada and worked across borders with international theatre companies and facilitated research projects in development and conflict settings with refugees, prisoners, ethnic minorities and Indigenous communities. She is one of the co-founders of AA+A Contemporary Performance Research Project and Ray Performance Collective.
Before moving to Canada, she taught first- and second year acting classes at Beykent University and published individual and collaborative ideas on Conference of the Parties (COP20), civil disobedience, theatre in conflict zones and poems on possibilities of hope. She is interested in the role of theatre to address, organize and take action within climate justice context though decolonizing methodologies. She finds joy in experimenting with tools of theatre to disturb everyday life. Lara received her BA (Honours) from Bilkent University Acting Department (Ankara, Turkey) and her MA in Advanced Acting from Bahcesehir University (Istanbul, Turkey).
She completed an MA degree in Applied Theatre at University of Victoria and is doing her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC. She has been an artist in residence at Greenpeace Canada and International Center of Arts for Social Change and is currently the Core Artist/Communications Director at The Only Animal Theatre Society.
Project Highlights
Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing: Ways of Being and Seeing
The climate crisis paralyzes us, not knowing how to start taking action to imagine a future different from today. The Only Animal believes that stories are our compass to connect with the climate crisis. But what happens when the stories are lost? Where do we turn to understand what we value? What leads the way? How do we find the words in a language we do not speak? As Elder Albert Marshall from Mi’kmaw Nation mentions “The fundamental basis of any relationship is an exchange of stories.” We believe that knowledge is story and knowledge holders will guide the way to respond to the complexity of the Anthropocene. Find out more.
Project Gallery
