Moderator: Jennifer Schacker
Location: Room 0028 – Pavilion de la Faculté de l’aménagement – 2940 ch. de la Côte Ste-Catherine – Université de Montréal
(Building 36 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Sponsored by Faculty of Fine Arts – University of Lethbridge
Listening as Justice: Finding Lost Voices in Theatre Passe Muraille’s Archives
In my study of Linda Griffiths’s career, I created an archival methodology that enacts an interaction between the researcher and archival artifacts which in turn facilitates an encounter with the archived individual’s voice (“Listening”). In this paper, I ask how this embodied research methodology can transition from a study of personal papers to larger institutional records without a central creator’s voice. Drawing on both my feminist methodology of archival listening as well as Caswell and Cifor’s “ethics of care,” proposed in “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” I discuss two productions held in the Theatre Passe Muraille collection which contains “40 metres of textual and other materials” (Caswell and Cifor 25; Theatre Passe Muraille). This archive holds a myriad of voices who have yet to take centre stage in Canadian theatre historiographies.
In Shakespeare for Fun and Profit (1977) and The Passe Muraille Hamlet (1983) artists self-consciously play with Shakespeare’s work to depict the theatre company’s alternative philosophies and identity as alternate to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Historiographies of the alternative theatre movement in Canada have been criticized for too narrowly focusing on “a story of young rebellious men, of heroic male playwrights and directors who banded together to buck the establishment” (Levin ix). Indeed, archival traces of these productions contain many voices which contributed to the self-reflective presentation of Theatre Passe Muraille. Therefore, this research provides an opportunity to understand how women can be found in large institutional records of Canadian theatre history. The persistent need to search for women in Theatre Passe Muraille’s archives demonstrates that while scholars have found the “blindspots” of the alternative theatre movement we have not yet adequately attended to the individuals found there (Levin ix).
Works Cited
Attrell, Amanda. “Listening to Linda Griffiths: Heeding to the Archives of an Emblematic Voice in Canadian Theatre.” Theatre Research in Canada, Advance Access 2023.
Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor. “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives.” Archivaria, vol. 81, Spring 2016, pp. 23–43.
Levin, Laura. “Introduction.” Theatre and Performance in Toronto, edited by Laura Levin, Playwrights Canada Press, 2011, pp. vii–xvi.
Theatre Passe Muraille. https://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/archives/our-collections/lw-conolly-theatre-archives/theatre-passe-muraille/.
Amanda Attrell, York University
Amanda Attrell is a sessional lecturer at Glendon College, York University. She completed her PhD in English at York University in 2021. Her work appears in Linda Griffiths and is forthcoming in Theatre Research in Canada. Her research weaves together Canadian theatre history, feminist historiographical revisioning, and archival research.
Justice and Jurisdiction in the 1940s and 50s: Tactical Recognitions
This paper is engaged with tactics used in the 1940s and 1950s by Indigenous and Black people to provisionally acknowledge the authority of Canadian federal committees and the United Nations to adjudicate cases of systemic injustices and demand remedy. In the aftermath of World War II, widespread reflection on human rights abuses resulted at the international level in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the UN in 1948) and in the Canadian context the Special Joint Committee on the Indian Act (1946-48) which resulted in the 1951 Indian Act revision lifting the ban on performance and the filing of land claims, (as well as other commissions that sought to articulate and legitimize Canadian culture).
Selena Couture, University of Alberta
Dr. Selena Couture is a white settler scholar and an associate professor at U of Alberta in Treaty 6 territory / Métis Region No.4. Publications include, Against the Current and Into the Light and On this Patch of Grass. She is a co-director of the Ecologies research cluster with Hemispheric Encounters.
Blackness, Performance, and Settler Colonialism on Vancouver Island, 1860-1871
This paper will explore the question of how the complex and intersectional position of Black settlers on Vancouver Island in the 1860s was navigated in and through theatrical and extra-theatrical performances. Drawing on Lowman and Barker’s work on intersectionality within settler colonialism, the paper will dig into the nuances of Black settlement on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, and the ways performances managed—or failed to manage–social anxieties and White supremacy in the emergent colony. The presentation will consider periodical records accounting for anti-Black theatre riots that occurred in 1860 and 1861 Victoria, which occurred when Black spectators attempted to take up seats in theatres reserved for White audiences. Following this, I will turn my attention to minstrel performance, analyzing how the specificities of Black settler experience and perceptions of Black settlers might have been addressed, worked through, or strategically “managed” through minstrel performances.
This presentation is part of a larger project considering how British Columbia transitioned from an Indigenous territory with a (retrospectively) minimal and transitory European presence to a settler-colony premised on the inter-related objectives of seizing lands from Indigenous peoples and permanent settlement. In order to understand how the transition to a settler-colonial society took place, we must consider how in becoming settlers, newcomers enacted, refined, and reiterated their understandings of themselves in relation to the lands on which they found themselves and to the Indigenous peoples who already lived on the lands. The nineteenth century, in western Europe and North America, has been described as the “performing century,” with theatre and performance cultures “intricately connected to abiding social and imaginative formations” (Davis and Holland 7). In this context, I am situating embodied and rhetorical performances by newcomers/settlers as complex cultural actions that were critical to the transformation of the territory into a settler-colony. Black settlers occupy a specific position within this paradigm, as both participants in settler colonialism and as systematically excluded from many of its privileges; this presentation seeks to discuss some of these nuances through analysis of two case studies.
Heather Davis-Fisch, University of Lethbridge
Heather Davis-Fisch is a Professor in the Drama department and the Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge.